Confessions of a Former Preacher

Overcoming Lingering Colonialism

2012-02-22T16:54:00.001-06:00

In Mary T. Lederleitner’s excellent book, Cross-Cultural Partnerships she includes the following question from an African colleague in her Ph.D. program.

Mary—why do you Americans act like because you are providing the money, you are bringing the most valuable thing and you should be able to call all the shots? Look at me! Say I am willing to take my family and endure the dangers and the hardships of living in a slum in Nairobi so people can come to Christ. My family is in danger. My health is in danger. Daily I work exceedingly long hours. But my body has a natural resistance to malaria so I am better equipped than you to serve in that place. I also know the language and the culture, so I can experience fruitful outcomes in ministry more quickly. Why, in light of all these contributions, is money viewed as the most valuable resource? I think the person putting their life and the lives of their family members on the line should be valued equally if not more!

The answer is crazy but rather obvious: Americans value money more than we value personal involvement. We come from a culture where “money talks,” “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and “He who has the gold makes the rules.” Our value system is warped. We have a cultural bias that says, “We know better.” We can prove we are wiser because have more money. So, if we enter into a project where others sacrifice their lives and we sacrifice our money, we think somehow we are making the greater sacrifice and should have more say. It reminds me of the old illustration about which animal contributes more to breakfast. The chicken made a contribution by giving an egg. The pig made a sacrifice by giving the bacon. For some reason, American believers often think their contribution merits greater weight when it costs them less. The only other option is to believe that somehow we are just inherently smarter. Either way, this is odd thinking indeed.

As the church grows stronger outside the USA, it is becoming more obvious to almost everyone that the role of the American church in global church planting and disciple making must adapt. We are not the parents of all churches around the world so we need to stop treating believers in other nations as children. We are not the best prepared people to go into most countries and do front-line evangelism. However, we do have many resources that we need to share. We have more money, educational institutions, experience in missions, and networks. But, unless we learn from Jesus and become the servants of all instead of act like the Gentile rulers who lord their power over others, we may end up being more of an obstacle than an aid to God’s global work.

It is time that we intentionally moved beyond the unconscious remnants of colonial thinking and gave the respect to our majority brothers and sisters and let them tell us the vision God has given them for the kingdom in their region of the world and then became their servant to help them achieve what God has called us to do together. We need to remember the parable of the widow in the temple. The person who gives everything, though little in monetary terms, has given more than those who gave large amounts of money but went home with an abundance still in the bank.

Too Big to Fail

2012-02-20T14:17:00.001-06:00

When AGI, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America, GM, and Chrysler all got government bailouts a few years back there was lots of talk about business that were “too big to fail,” e.g., so large that their bankruptcy would create a devastating wake that could topple the entire US and world economy. Therefore, we could not permit the normal market realities to apply. Regardless of how you feel toward these bailouts, I can’t help but see the same logic throughout US culture. We no longer believe in holding people or organizations responsible for their actions. We live in a no-failure-tolerated culture. Ironic that the theme of “epic fail” is so popular on the internet today.

It is not just large corporations. Our schools, with their no child left behind policies, are places where failure is not permitted as well. All the energy of our schools is now focused on getting the lowest performing students to pass a minimum skills test. The high performing students are being neglected because the entire system is oriented around preventing failure of any. It is good to raise the floor, but the future likely depends more on raising the ceiling. I don’t think this strategy bodes well for the future of the US in a competitive global economy.

I worry about how we can motivate people to high achievement when we give kids trophies for participation in little league and act like failure is not a possibility in life. Like jumping off a tall building, living in denial has a sudden and unwelcome end. I worry for children raised in a “no failure allowed” world being turned loose in the real one. Failure is part of life and has it’s own critical lessons. As one of my elder friends used to say, “If you want your kids to grow up and amount to anything, you have to sit back and let them get their nose bloodied occasionally.”

Now, for all I could say about this trend in the secular culture, I’m more concerned with the parallel trend I see in churches to be highly risk aversive. So many church leaders are afraid to embark on any kingdom venture that can’t offer reasonable guarantees of success. The spirit of innovation and experimentation is missing. Yet, in these times of great cultural shift, when traditional models of church are in steady decline, retreating into a timid “no failure permitted” mentality is guaranteeing what it seeks to prevent. Precisely what we need right now is many spiritual entrepreneurs who invest in diverse forms of disciple-making communities among the innumerable cultures and sub-cultures all around us. Many will not show quick success. Some will never succeed, as we count things. Yet, if they cannot fail they cannot begin. If all must succeed, none will be given permission or funding to begin. “No failure allowed” is a prerequisite for demise. We need to fail gloriously and regularly in the right direction and learn from our failures how to engage our world with the gospel in ways that will produce things that last.

I’m not sure what all living in a post-modern and post-Christian America (Western culture) means for the church, but one thing it certainly means is that the days of having one model are over. We cannot approach our mission from the position of experts who can predict results. We must humbly strike out with the Holy Spirit drawing us at frightening speed into places where we cannot predict what will happen and invest in what looks risky, believing God is there and some of it will thrive. No, not all the soil will bear a great harvest. There will always be the path, rocky, and thorny soil, and mission for Jesus will only likely produce 25% of the time. Yet, what does take root and produce can offer yields of up to 100 times what was sown, if we take the risk of sowing widely.

This is no time to listen to our culture and retreat into a fear-driven, risk-aversive mentality. After all, we follow a man who spent three years in a bold venture that ended on a cross. Jesus was not “too big to fail.” Yet, God raised him up and vindicated his “failure” as the model for all. If only churches would be willing to follow Jesus in such brave engagement in our world. It just might kill our churches. But do we trust God will raise us up and give us a future we cannot guarantee or manufacture?

I hope that what is too big to fail in our churches isn’t our egos. Do we really think we must be successful in everything to be faithful? Have we really become the one talent man? Do we not know our master any better than that? Have we not learned more from the way of the cross than that? I pray not.

Conscious Serendipities

2012-02-16T09:06:00.001-06:00

The way of Jesus is filled with paradoxes, conundrums, and oxymorons. You must lose your life to find it. You have to die to live. Only those who humble themselves will be lifted up. The path to greatness is to be the servant of all. The more fully grown up you are, the more you are like a child. Giving away power increases influence. We rejoice in trials and count suffering as a demonstration of our father’s loving discipline. We are to be suspicious when all speak well of us but not worry when we are called before kings, rulers, and judges.

Yes, Jesus is subversive of the current world order. When the true King’s right to reign is rejected and the creation pretends to be the creator, reality gets inverted and the only way to see right side up is by standing on your head. What comes naturally is probably wrong and what is difficult is likely the way things were intended.

Which brings me to my oxymoronic title. There are many things we do as believers of Jesus knowing significant benefits will come our way. Yet, if we do them for that reason they will evaporate in our hands. We know loving God will brings blessings, but if we only obey God for self-serving reasons we will find the desired blessings turn quickly into unfulfilled expectations, resentment, and bitterness. We know humbling ourselves is the path to greatness. But, if we desire to be great and play at humility to gain standing, we only become manipulative power brokers who will lose influence when we are found out. We know if we give, it will be given to us, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing. Still, if we treat giving as a get-rich scheme, we will find gold turn to ash that slips between our fingers.

It works everywhere. Being attentive and affectionate to you wife can dramatically improve your sex life. Do it for that reason alone and expect it eventually to backfire. The apostle Paul may not have worried about those who preached Christ from false motive harming him, but that doesn’t mean they did not harm themselves. You may actually bless others by doing the right thing for the wrong reason, for a time. Just don’t expect it to produce much life for yourself. Don’t expect poor motives to sustain you for the long-haul.

The same dynamic is true with churches. The desire to grow (if motivated by a need to validate ourselves) will almost guarantee we can’t grow or, if we do, it will be cancerous rather than healthy growth. Real kingdom growth is dependent on loving people enough to invest in them because we love them without expectation of return. Yet, that is the very spirit that draws people to the church and leads them to embrace the way of Jesus. Churches that view “missions” i.e., disciple making and church planting, outside their own institution (whether domestic or international) as a drain on their resources and chose to invest their money in ministries that bless themselves, will almost certainly experience scarcity and decline. The spirit behind that attitude is repulsive and won’t sustain life-giving ministry. Yet, churches who have captured God’s vision to reclaim the world for his reign and invest in forming new communities of disciples around the world will find their outwardly-centered vision unleashes pent up resources in their home community and draws more people to join them in their home campus.

My point is simple: just because we know there are many wonderful serendipities that follow in the wake of obeying Jesus doesn’t mean we should obey him for that reason. The promises of such were given us to protect us from unfounded fears which might otherwise keep us from following Jesus instructions. Jesus’ ways will enrich our lives unless we embrace them for that reason alone. Our motives matter. The right action done for the wrong reason can poison the action itself. It is one thing to be conscious of the blessings that flow back to those who imitate Jesus. It is another thing to follow Jesus for personal reward. Of course, that last sentence is really an oxymoron in itself, because obeying Jesus for selfish reasons is not really obeying Jesus at all, is it?

Why I Won’t Call Myself Preacher

2012-02-13T16:39:00.001-06:00

I started to call this post, “Get off my back Lynn Anderson” but that seemed unnecessarily abrasive, especially since I love Lynn dearly. Still, Lynn leads a small pack of people who regularly tell me I am not telling the truth by the name of my blog. How can I be a “former preacher” when I am so often preaching in churches? I suppose if you define a preacher as someone who regularly preaches, I am one (kind of like Donovan McNabb is a QB). But, when I call myself a former preacher I think that is more accurate because I know what I used to do and what I do now is vastly different.

For reasons I won’t go into here, Churches of Christ have never been comfortable calling their preachers “pastor” even if they have expected exactly the same things other churches do, albeit without the authority typical in other churches (but that is not an axe I want to grind). When I say I’m not a preacher any more, what I mean is that I’m not any church’s preacher. I’ve done that job and it is wicked hard and only people who have done it understand. I work hard now, but it’s not as hard on me. Preachers are on 24/7/365. I put in long hours now, but when I’m off, I’m really off. I’m not foolish enough to claim that what I do is on par with what I used to do and so many of my friends do now.

It is easy to deliver a few engaging sermons for many churches around the country. It is hard to preach engagingly and meaningfully to the same people every week for years. It is easy to fly in and sound like an expert for 30 minutes and fly out. It is hard to love people through their every-day journeys all week long for years. It is easy to give advice between plane rides and wash your hands. It is hard to actually lead a church through a massive transition in vision and character. It is easy to talk about discipleship to people who never see you outside of a church building. It is hard to be a disciple who makes disciples with people who see you at the grocery store, ballgames, and watch you drive on their streets.

I serve churches in many ways now. One way I do that is by filling their pulpits when they have a special need I can address or when they are between preachers, but I am not anyone’s preacher. No one calls my house in the middle of the night because someone is dying or their family is in crisis. I don’t hold people’s hands in the ER anymore. I don’t counsel people in trouble, marry’em, bury’em, or baptise’em anymore. I don’t lead hundred of volunteer members to do the near impossible anymore (AKA herding cats). The special relationships which make ministry so rich and so frustratingly difficult are no longer mine.

So, yeah I preach, but I’m not a preacher. I was that guy once and I know what it involves. I have the highest admiration for those who do this great work and I would not think of claiming to be one of them. I owe them more respect than that.

The Backside of Virtue

2012-02-09T14:56:00.001-06:00

In my last post, I described how playing to my strengths in ministry caused me to inadvertently activate the weaknesses on the flipside of my strengths. But, I’m not the only one who has experienced this. It works everywhere. While God's blessings and salvation come by grace, to a large extent, what you receive in this life is determined by you. The wise man said, "If a man digs a pit, he will fall into it; if a man rolls a stone, it will roll back on him" (Proverbs 26:27). It is still true. The wisdom literature in scripture is there to remind us our world is set to function in a rational order. Sin infected this system so that it malfunctions at times, but the basis of the creation is as rational as its creator.

While life cannot be reduced to simple cause and effect, God created a world where things proceed, if not interrupted by outside forces, logically from the foundations upon which we chose to build. Yes, at times good things happen to the wicked and bad things happen to the innocent. In large measure, however, the universe has a moral order. We say, “What goes around comes around.” Jesus said, “The measure you use will be measured unto you.” And Paul said, “You will reap what you sow.”

Now, when I say life has a “moral order,” I am not saying life is always fair to each person. Rather I am saying your choice of path will determine your destination. I’m saying your methods largely will determine your outcome. So, chose your life principles carefully. There is only so much they can deliver. Let me suggest some of what I mean. (This list is inspired by Carlyle Marney.)

If your highest goal is to be respected, don't expect to be approachable as well.
If you must be the expert, don’t expect those you lead to outgrow your limitations.
If you need everyone to like you, don’t take a job that requires you make decisions.
If you push your children to succeed in the world, you may find they rarely have time to come home.
If you need to control your environment, don't expect to have peaceful relationships.
If you must have your way, you better find comfort in your own company.
If you spend your life in material pursuits, don't expect immaterial rewards.
If you think marriage is merely about meeting negotiated needs, don’t expect your spouse to be selflessly committed to yours.
If you can't take criticism, don't demand accomplishment of yourself.
If your goal is conformity, you should not expect creativity also.
If loyalty is your highest virtue, you better hope the object of your loyalty stays in power.
If you seek to live by grace, you better come to terms with responsibility.
If your church is built on the American business model, don't expect God do anything.
If your religion is a matter of always being right, don’t expect your congregation to be gracious as well.
If your ministry can be captured in a budget, don’t bother with spiritual growth.
If getting things done is your highest priority, don’t expect to be invited to a lot of parties.
If you want to equip and release others, you better be willing to tolerate mistakes.

Your foundational principles will determine not only what you give, but what you receive. Now surely you have seen this same principle in action. What are the weaknesses you have seen growing on the backside of various virtues?

The Weakness of Strength

2012-02-07T14:26:00.001-06:00

“That right there is why I quit preaching.” I think this all the time. Strangely, this thought occurs to me during an astonishing variety of experiences. Turns out I may not really know why I do what I do. I’m pretty good at revising history to serve my current concerns. While I love my new job and I left a local preaching ministry because I was drawn to what I’m doing now, truth be told, I burned out in preaching and needed a change to revive me.

As I try to understand why that burnout occurred, I keep coming back to my style of leadership. I think it was good that I focused on my strengths. But, maximizing my strengths also caused me to inadvertently hit the trip-wire of my weakness. I should have seen this coming. Our greatest weaknesses are usually the backsides of our strengths. Let me explain what I mean.

For all of my local preaching years, the foundation for my leadership was expertise. I wanted to be the most knowledgeable person in the church. I have little charm. I don’t excel in diplomacy. Virtue often escapes me. Spirituality takes too long to develop. And, most notably, preachers in Churches of Christ have little positional power. So, how can you wield influence in a system where you have no overt authority and are not gifted relationally? Why would anyone listen to me? For me, the answer was expertise. I was committed to knowing the most, having the best skills, and being able to articulate what I knew well.

With this as my calling card, I piled up degrees, tried to stay current in all related areas of ministry, stayed close to the thought leaders in my network of churches, and positioned myself as the go-to person for my church. I cultivated, not entirely consciously but very intentionally, my reputation as a highly competent person. I didn’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but I did want to be the most knowledgeable and skilled in Biblical knowledge, theological reflection, vision setting, leadership and all things ministry. Much of this was driven by unhealthy emotional needs, but even as I outgrew many of those, I found I’d formed habits that were hard to shake.

Here is the ironic thing. If you were to have asked me what kind of leadership I believed was most appropriate for a follower of Jesus, I would have said servant leadership, i.e., an humble equipper of others. Yet, that is not how I functioned, not really. Over time, my less-than-conscious strategy worked. The leadership increasingly deferred to me. I was consulted in every area by the church. It seemed that everyone wanted to know what I thought or get my advice before they acted. At first this felt great. It was affirming. However, over time, I found I resented the degree to which the church had become dependent on me. I began to burn out. Yet, I was the one who created the system that was killing me.

I’ve always liked to preach about how Jesus modeled and taught a leadership style that contrasted with everyone before him. Jesus led by serving others rather than lording over others. He invested in a dozen disciples that he called and equipped to do “greater things” than he did (his own words). Jesus did not use power to overwhelm people, he used love, humility, service, hope, and other means of “weakness” to change others. Jesus’ weakness is greater than my strength.

All this is painfully obvious to me now that I have a job where everyone I work with is more knowledgeable than me about almost everything we do. I have always worked with great people, but typically I was the most experienced and/or educated person in my office. Now, I am surrounded by a team of true experts with terminal degrees and decades of experience from around the world. I can no longer lead by virtue of expertise. Rather, I am having to learn how to lead by serving and empowering others. I am learning to listen, ask good questions, facilitate discovery, foster synergy, leverage the expertise of others, and release people to excel as I seek resources to empower their work.

Here is the thing; I thought of myself as an equipper of others before. Now I can see better. Like so many other leaders, I was a lone ranger at heart. I could do things quicker and better alone. I did not really focus on equipping the ministers with whom I worked. I did not invest in my elders as I should have. I made myself more essential to the church every year rather than preparing the church to function without me.

Let me hasten to say I was doing the best I knew. I can’t go back and fix anything, but I can learn better as I move forward. Here are some questions I wish I asked myself while I was “the preacher” of a church. I recommend all leaders ask themselves these questions:

What is the foundation of my leadership? Why do I expect people to listen to me? How Christ-like is this foundation?
What am I doing to avoid the weaknesses of my strengths? What are the unintended consequences of the way I lead? What is being produced that I am not seeing and I will regret?
Am I enabling or empowering the rest of the leadership? Does my presence make other leaders stronger or weaker?
Who in my life can speak the truth to me about the way I function as a leader?
What am I doing to pass on the knowledge and skills that I have, so that I become increasingly less necessary over time?
Do I measure success by how much I am needed or how much others are learning to do without me because I have invested in them and passed on what I know and can do?
Do I function as a catalyst or a controller? Do I trust others to “get things right” without me?
Why am I in leadership? What emotional needs am I seeking to meet and are they healthy?
Am I really a servant leader? Do I seek to be as non-threatening and non-intimidating as a child, or do I want to be viewed as a powerful leader like the rulers of the Gentiles?

God’s Obsessive-Compulsive Order

2012-02-02T12:46:00.001-06:00

I’m with the Greek playwrights. I wish God would pull a deus ex machina when things get tough. At times, I secretly want a God more like Superman than Jesus—one that swoops in with power to rescue people just in time with a mighty display of power he is reluctant to use because of his modesty. But that is not the God we get, is it? While I don’t deny that God answers prayers, at times rather dramatically, God’s preferred way of working in the world doesn’t inspire Hollywood playwrights. He is determined to work through human beings. He’s downright compulsive about it. He is obsessed with us. While we like to be the target of his affections, we aren’t so keen on being his favorite instruments.

It all starts in the first chapter of the Bible when we are made in God’s image and given dominion over the rest of creation. God, the great creator king who rules from the heavens, has put us on the earth as his regent, to rule the earth for him. When humanity rebels against God’s reign and seeks to be gods in our own right, God curses the earth and causes it to rebel against us to show us how futile our efforts to be like gods are. Rebel against us it has. Suffering and frustration become the norm and the world spirals out of our control, and, it feels, out of God’s control. We are confronted with a series of rebellion stories which grow from a simple act of eating forbidden fruit to fratricide to every thought of humanity being only evil all the time. When it becomes clear, after the flood, that no amount of punishment can turn humanity around, God implements his salvation plan. We are on the edge of our seats. This should be great. In with the special effect. Strike up the band with some brass-heavy John Williams composition. God’s big moment is here. Now, finally, things will get set right. And . . . out walks a kitten and says “meow.” Well, more literally, God calls one man, and not that impressive of one, at least at first: Abram.

The story of salvation starts slowly with a faltering man who vacillates between grand displays of faith and equally stunning displays of fear. His largely dysfunctional family grows and is shaped by God as the only hope for humanity gone wrong. While God does, on occasion, perform amazing acts of power, even those are done through humans like Moses. It is clear that the salvation of the world will come through this people who are like their father, constantly vacillating between faith and fear. Somehow I expected something else. Something more . . . dramatic? Exclusively of God? Separate from humanity? I’m not sure, but this isn’t what I expect out of a salvation by God.

Finally, when the apex of the salvation story comes, it is in the form of another human being: Jesus. God comes down from his heavenly perch to walk the dirt roads with us as the first true human since the rebellion in the garden. He is the new Adam who will absorb our sin and its death force and reboot humanity for all who join him in the death waters and rise to experience spirit-powered life. After what appears to be a shocking defeat, we gets up from the grave and calls us to join his mission of bringing all creation back under the reign of God and humanity now merged in Jesus, our prototype.

The shocking fact that I missed for so long, and still struggle to accept, is that we are intended to reign with Jesus. What we grasped for in the garden is precisely what God wanted to give us and intended for us: to reign with God. We just wanted it in the wrong way at the wrong time and without submitting to God as the one who reigns over all. We didn’t want to share the reign with one supreme above us. We didn’t want to be the instrument of God’s reign, we wanted to be the musician. But God hasn’t given up on his original plan for us. Stunning!

I’ve been accused, probably correctly at times, of having a faith that is too human-centered and not God-centered enough. However, given the way God works—through humanity, the focus of his creation and redemption—it is hard to make a clean distinction. Trusting God is trusting his work in and through us, not trusting him apart from human partnership. It also means submitting ourselves to be his instruments rather than just leaving it to him. I get “Let go and let God.” Good advice well taken. However, I also recognize from the shape of the salvation story, modeled most completely in Jesus, that this does not excuse me from kicking in and stepping up. God is on mission and he wants to work through us. His work is bigger than me and includes way more people than me, but it includes me. Even when he works for my benefit, it will mostly be through other human beings. He doesn’t have to do it that way, but he has remarkable faith in humanity and is determined to redeem and restore us so we can reign with him. That is amazing news. It is also scary news. So I do have some fear, and I do tremble a bit as I take the salvation God has given me and work it out in my life.

So the next time you are tempted to ask God why he allows the world to be so cruel and unfair, don’t be surprised if he asks you the same question. You are part of the solution he is bringing to the world. It may not be “up to you,” but it includes you.

For Charlie

2012-01-31T10:57:00.001-06:00

Outside my family, no one has had a more powerful positive impact on my life than Dr. Charles Siburt. He has been my teacher, mentor, counselor, role-model, networker, pastor, and friend. From the first ministry class I took with him in 1989 until today, there is no one whose counsel I am quicker to seek. His wisdom and care have shaped a generation of ministers and his service to churches around the country is unparalleled in the past few decades. As Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at ACU’s Graduate School of Theology and in all his various other posts, he has become the church doctor for Churches of Christ and has helped us become a healthier, more gracious, more honest, and more truthful community of churches. He is known for his ability to speak the truth in bold and unflinching ways while making people feel loved and hopeful at the same time. There is no one else like him in my world.

For the last 23 years, whenever I got my ministry ox in a ditch and didn’t know what to do, I’d call Charlie and he’d help me get unstuck. I cannot begin to count all the ways Charlie has blessed my life and I am only one of legions of ministers who have been blessed the same way by Charlie.

Like the rest, I am deeply conflicted at the news that Charlie’s battle with cancer is drawing to a close and Charlie is in his final days with us on this side of Jesus’ appearing to set all things right. I’m thrilled Charlie will soon be with his Lord. I grieve over the hole his departure will leave behind. Thousands of us have been praying that God would deliver Charlie from this cancer and God has certainly been gracious to give Charlie many extra days. However, it appears now that the Lord is getting ready to take Charlie home.

On behalf of all of us who love Charlie, I invite you to join several of us who love the Siburts by setting aside this Friday, February 3, as a special day of prayer with fasting if you choose. Please lift up Charlie’s body, his spirit, and his family to the Father of all compassion. Judy and his sons have sacrificed time with Charlie for the sake of the church for many years. Pray that their final days with him in this age will be enriching. Pray that God will give Charlie courage for his final days and a peaceful trip home. Pray that he will be able to leave the hospital for his final days. Most of all, give thanks for all that God has given us all through Charlie. Pray that God will raise up an Elisha or twelve to pick up Charlie’s mantle. What will we do without him?

Below are a few of the many things Charlie taught me:

My need to correct the church is often little more than my own unresolved hostility. If I can be forgiven, so can the church. You cannot be a minister of grace if you can’t be gracious. The final work of grace is to make us gracious.
Grace is not a free pass from having to grow up.
It is essential to support emotionally the people with whom I disagree intellectually—especially those who oppose what I’m doing.
Telling people the truth is part of loving them.
There is nothing more powerful than expressing blessing and hope over another person if it is rooted in reality.
Most of my wounds are self-inflicted.
The church does not need me as badly as I want her too, but she can use me if I’ll love her.
There is a big difference between humility and self-loathing. An humble man can be confident if he has a servant heart.
The church will never take me more seriously than I take myself.
The greatest point of leverage I have to enhance my ministry is to become a healthier self.
Techniques and programs do not work. Only people work. There is no quick fix in ministry.
I carry most of my problems with me in my luggage. A change of location will not fix most of my challenges.
It is wiser to develop your strengthens to their optimum capacity than to spend your time shoring up all the areas where you are not gifted. Be who you are gifted to be to the glory of God and don’t try to be everything to everybody.
You cannot preach powerfully to people if they don’t trust you love them.

For more see www.godhungry.org later today.

My Bible is Crowded

2012-01-27T06:00:00.000-06:00

Every morning after tending to the dogs and getting my coffee, I sit down for some time alone with God and the Bible. I’ve done this more years than I can count. However, I’m finding the room increasingly crowded as the years go by. It seems not to matter what part of the Bible I’m in, I run into old friends waiting on me there. There are my old Bible professors and preachers I’ve heard through the years. My parents and grandparents are lurking about in most books with their repeated admonitions in hand. The faces of people I’ve counseled with specific texts pop up at times. The stories of joys or tragedies and the names of the people to whom they happened are there also. Then there are the elders and co-workers in ministry who show up when I come across a passage we lived through or argued about in some past day. I see pews full of faces from the congregations where I’ve preached as I read again scriptures that were texts for sermons delivered to them. As I said, my Bible is crowded.

Even more people fill the room as I open my Bible, many I’ve never even met. There are the composers and musicians who turned scriptures into aural art that got imbedded in me. There are authors of devotional books, theological tomes, commentaries, and special studies I’ve read through the years. Of course, the authors of the Biblical books show up along with the people to whom they were writing. And there are the great church leaders who raise their hands and demand to be heard when I come across passages which formed the foundation for their struggle with the church.

All these people are joined by the faces of people I’ve met in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe who see different things in my Bible. I want to ask them what they are hearing and I’m naïve enough to think I may hear them tell me.

Yes, my Bible is crowded, so crowded at times that I wonder if I can hear God’s voice in it at all. Is there any room for God to speak in this crowded room I meant to be just me and him? Do all of these people who join us and make so much racket that I can barely hear the text block out God’s voice completely? I wonder some times.

Most of all, looming above all these other voices and faces is the Nephilim known as my wishes rooted in my American consumer culture and willful nature. I want the Bible to say certain things to me. I want it to be the affirmation and vindication of my values. Any unoccupied words tend to get filled with my pre-conceived convictions. This voice often claims to be the voice of God and sometimes I believe it, God help me.

My Bible is crowded and if I’ve learned anything through the years it is that I can never read the Bible alone. Even when I am alone, I read my Bible in community. My Bible was preserved by others, translated by others, printed by others, interpreted and taught to me by others, and incarnated in the lives of still others. The attempt to have an exclusive encounter with God’s words is more than naïve, it is downright arrogant. Can I still hear God in all these other voices? Yes I think I can. In fact, that may be the only, or at least the best, way to hear God. It is all these voices that help me distinguish the Nephilim from Lord. If I can’t convince most of those voices to be at peace with a reading, I’m probably on shaky ground thinking it is from God. Where the voices chime in together with an “Amen” I am on fairly safe ground.

So, yes, my Bible is crowded, just as it should be. Lord thank you for all the people who join us when it is just you and me together in a room with the Bible.

Is Worship Just a Royal Waste of Time?

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000-06:00

It seems in vogue these days for churches to cancel the occasional main weekly worship service in order to do community service. While I am a huge fan of community service in the name of Jesus, this seems like an odd move to me. I’ve led major missional overhauls of churches designed to get them out of their building and into their cities, but I still don't quite understand this move.

It is as if churches are saying that worship is not a service to the community. Perhaps it is not everywhere, but I still think gathering in the name of Jesus and communing to seek God and give him glory is not only good for the church but for the surrounding neighborhood and city. It reorients us into a greater reality that doesn’t get told on the news or in the marketplace. The church, gathered and scattered, has many times they can serve the community and I wonder what is says that we are so busy that we have to make an either/or choice.

Then again, perhaps churches are using this time slot to make a statement. Perhaps this is warranted and even helpful. It just makes me ponder what is up when this comes across as a good idea. I suppose we could be making idols out of our events--hiding away from our neighbors and serving ourselves. While that is possible, it is not my typical experience with churches in recent years. I’m not seeking to criticize churches who make this move. It may be spot on the right decision. I’m just trying to understand why we need an either/or decision about our worship and community service. Whatever churches do in this regard, a church that does not worship often and well will not long be able to sustain the vision, passion, and virtues necessary to serve their community in the name of Jesus.

I guess part of my question goes back to what we think we are doing in worship. What purpose does it serve? Do we even have a theology of worship that guides what we do and why we do it? Toward that end, N.T. Wright’s new book Simply Jesus is a help. It is one of the best books I’ve read in the last couple of years. What he says about worship toward the end is instructive in this conversation.

All kingdom work is rooted in worship. Or, to put it the other way around, worshipping the God we see at work in Jesus is the most politically charged act we can ever perform. Christian worship declares that Jesus is Lord and that therefore, by strong implication, nobody else is. What’s more, it doesn’t just declare it as something to be believed, like the fact that the sun is hot or the sea wet. It commits the worshippers to allegiance, to following this Jesus, to being shaped and directed by him. Worshipping the God we see in Jesus orients our whole being, our imagination, our will, our hopes, and our fears away from the world where Mars, Mammon, and Aphrodite (violence, money, and sex) make absolute demands and punish anyone who resists. It orients us instead to a world in which love is stronger than death, the poor are promised the kingdom, and chastity (whether married or single) reflects the holiness and faithfulness of God himself. Acclaiming Jesus as Lord plants a flag that supersedes the flags of the nations, however, “free” or “democratic” they may be. It challenges both the tyrants who think they are in effect, divine and the “secular democracies” that have effectively become, if not divine, at least ecclesial, that is, communities that are trying to do and be what the church was supposed to do and be, but without recourse to the one who sustains the church’s life. Worship creates—or should create, if it is allowed to be truly itself—a community that marches to a different beat, that keeps in step with a different Lord (238-39).

I’m Not Pre-Millennial or Jehovah’s Witness, But I Know Why People Ask

2012-01-23T15:29:00.001-06:00

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been mistaken for advocating views that are very foreign to me. One man came up to me after a class I taught at a church in West Texas and said, “I see you are pre-millennial like me.” He was very surprised when I said, “Not at all. Not even close.” “Well, you just quoted all my favorite scriptures. It sure sounded like you were pre-millennial.” I had not talked about the millennium at all.

Then this weekend after a presentation at a conference, I had people asking me if I was advocating the Jehovah’s Witness view of the final heaven and earth. Again, my response was, “Wow, not at all.” That question was a surprise to me, initially, but upon quick reflection, I know why someone might think so.

I think what is happening is that I’ve been advocating a fresh reading of scripture that doesn’t nicely fit into the pre-arranged categories my listeners have. Because it is hard to listen deeply and then create a new thought category, it just makes it easier to assume what you are hearing is something familiar when it is really something different. A koala bear is not really a bear, but it shares a few superficial characteristics.

Because the churches of my network have not really talked about end times much, except to reject views we find in error, we struggle to articulate what we do believe. Whenever I talk about what scholars call eschatology, I get a lot of blank stares and confusion followed by mis-categorization. Part of this is caused by the long tradition for churches in the west to read the Bible through the lenses of a Platonic dualism. We cleanly separate spirit and body and assume God only cares about the former. Then we don’t know what to do with passages like Romans 8:18-25 where Paul tells us the whole creation will be redeemed and restored when God’s children are revealed. We don’t know what to do with the talk in the New Testament of a new earth along with a new heaven. We don’t know what to do with Revelation 21 where the new Jerusalem comes down and God comes to dwell with us as heaven and earth get remarried instead of beaming us up somewhere else. We talk about resurrection but we really don’t think about what that means very much. Most Christians claim to believe in resurrection, but when they talk about heaven they often sound like they expect to be pure spirit creatures in a non-material paradise.

My last sermon series before I left the full time preaching ministry (which you can find here by searching for “When He Appears”) was about what happens when Jesus returns and all things are brought to their God envisioned conclusion. It was disorienting to the church and I regularly heard people say things like, “I’m struggling with what you are saying but I can’t find what I’ve always believed in the Bible.” I get it. I couldn’t find what I believed in the Bible either. That is why I had to change what I believed.

I’m not sure what I find more fascinating, the fact that the Bible never uses the language of “going to heaven when we die” or that we find that shocking. I’m not sure when we lost a functional belief in a physical resurrection, but if you listen to what is said at most funerals, it is more likely to sound like some eastern non-Christian concepts of eternal life than the robust view of the Bible of God’s restoration of the earth and heaven. We’ve lost the Biblical teaching of humanity being restored to reign over all creation with Jesus.

I probably need to write more about this in my blog, but it is an extensive subject not well suited to the blog format. However, I can recommend a couple of resources for those who are interested. The first, and by far my favorite is N.T. Wright’s book Surprised by Hope. The other, less scholarly and less appealing to me is Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven.

For me this is not really a marginal or esoteric issue. I think it has massive implications for evangelism, discipleship, and church health. I think the spirit/body dualism encourages compartmentalization and makes it hard to understand the total lordship of Jesus. While I think you can “get to heaven” with an imprecise or even distorted understanding of heaven, I think truth matters far more than just getting our ideas right and I think this is another issue begging for a return to scripture and deep study. I think we need to talk about Biblical things with Biblical words because I think the concepts we bring to scripture are often more from the church tradition of Christendom, than from the inspired writers who left us the best description of what God is doing and will do in our world.

Fighting For Peace

2012-01-19T14:32:00.001-06:00

I have long wanted to be a pacifist, but didn’t have the courage. I couldn’t solve all the questions that a pacifist stance raised for me. It is hard to read the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ admonition to love our enemies and then justify violence. I have long been inspired by the words and lives of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and John Howard Yoder. Stanley Hauerwas’ writings have plagued me for years, but he was so provocative that he was easier to dismiss. Not so with my maternal grandfather. Though he would hardly talk of it, he was a conscientious objector in WWII. He rarely voted (and then only late in life) and never trusted the nation-state. He was a holdover from the Lipscomb peace tradition.

Then there is Jesus. When you follow a man who refused to grasp the sword and overcame the violence of the state by allowing himself to be killed, and then triumphed by resurrection and forgiveness of his oppressors, it is hard to justify violence. I’ve known for a long time that the followers of Jesus would not serve in the military or fight in war for three centuries until they were drawn into the core of power as part of the empire. Since I’ve always been committed to being a back to the Bible, restorationist follower of Jesus, the relationship to the state and peace has been an important issue to me.

Still, for all my desire to become a pacifist, I just couldn’t get there. I got hung up by my inability to imagine taking no action in the face of oppression. The non-action of the world’s armies in Rwanda’s genocide plagued me. I could not imagine standing by and doing nothing but praying and exhorting my neighbor if I saw him beating a helpless child with a ball bat in his front yard. I would use physical restraint and expect the state to do the same on behalf of the innocent victim of aggression. If that is justifiable, it seemed to me that the same principle worked its way up the chain of social complexity to the state. Theoretically, I could see a place for the just war tradition (JWT). The fact that I didn’t believe any of the American wars in my lifetime were justified did not rule out the possibility that war could be justified at times. What about WWII? That war seemed just.

Then, also, I was preaching for patriotic American churches who honored the military and would take a dim view of a pacifist position espoused by their most visible spokesman. It was not convenient to be pacifist and so I had motivation to avoid the issue. I also had dear friendships with many veterans whose Christian character was unassailable. They hated war more than anyone because they knew best what was involved. However, they believed that state sanctioned violence was a tragic necessity at times. I found them persuasive.

In recent years, the chief gadfly in my just war world has been my old friend Lee Camp. Lee and I studied theology together in graduate school and I’ve respected him for over two decades as a careful and reasonable scholar with a gentle loving spirit and deep faith. He is not prone to extremes or overstatement. He is the kind of man who looks both ways twice before crossing the street. He is not a trouble-maker and he does not seek attention. He currently teaches at Lipscomb University in Nashville and I enjoy getting to share a cup of coffee with him from time to time when I’m in the music city. His book from a few years back, Mere Discipleship, pushed me toward a pacifist position and even led to some long phone conversations about the issue. Still I was conflicted. I had no peace about the peace issue. However, his most recent book may push me over the edge yet.

If you have not read Lee’s Who Is My Enemy?, let me warn you it will mess you up. (You can find it here and here.) The stories he recounts about the legacy of Christian war will make you grieve and lose sleep. It is not for the faint of heart. His analysis of Islam and Christianity is insightful. His distinction between police actions within a state and war answered many of my questions. He deals with the wars of Israel well and explains why they do not justify the wars of the modern nation-state. Lee demonstrates well that choosing peace is not “doing nothing” or withdrawing from the struggle against evil. It calls for sacrificial engagement of a different kind. I strongly recommend Lee’s new book as a critical resource of the type all believers in the United States need to engage during our “War on Terror.”

Now that I work for an international church planting and networking ministry, I see more how critical these matters are to the global work of God. The greatest challenge before us is not the secular world but the Islamic world which is growing rapidly and is taking over Europe. This vast mass of humanity has hardly been touched by the Gospel. It is very hard to bring people to Jesus when they believe we want to kill them. That is how many Muslims see the west. I’ve been surprised by how many church leaders in other countries have expressed surprise and dismay at the militancy of the America church. Islam is the “enemy” we refuse to love. It is a significant problem for global missions.

You may not agree with Lee, but you can’t easily dismiss him. You can’t help but be challenged to rethink your view of justifiable violence after reading this book. It will also help you be more loving and sympathetic to Muslims in your world while not excusing or endorsing Islam in any way. Lee puts a calmer and more human face on the diversity within Islam, and, more importantly, he helps us love our “enemies,” as Jesus taught, while demonstrating the superiority of Jesus’ way over that of Muhammad.

Below, I’ve included a couple of quotes from Who is My Enemy to whet your appetite.

The mainstream of Christian tradition looks more like the Muhammad story than the Jesus story, and in some—alas, in many—cases, looks not nearly so noble. In fact, the mainstream of the Christian tradition has rejected the Jesus story as being relevant to the ethic of war and peacemaking and has employed other ethical systems for this purpose. (118)

And now two important subpoints. First, please note the deep irony of stereotypical American Christian critiques of Islam: The Christian who points to the differences between Jesus and Muhammad is often the very same Christian who has rejected the Jesus story as relevant to the question of war. The Christian may rightly claim that the Jesus story and the Muhammad story are different. But that American Christian often then advocates war against Islamic militants; and he employs not the logic of Jesus but the logic of Muhammad, who taught that it is legitimate to make war against those we judge aggressors. Or, it should be more carefully said, to the degree that the American Christian argues for a restricted employment of force for the purpose of making peace, to that degree does he employ the logic of Muhammad; but to the degree that he employs all too often the logic of Rambo and crusading for “infinite justice” and “a war against terror,” or that he will “drop the bomb on ‘em all and let God sort it out,” then his logic is not nearly so noble as that of Muhammad and indeed is barbaric in comparison. (119)

The High Price of God’s Glory (For Madison Knebusch)

2012-01-17T11:23:00.001-06:00

My 16 year old friend Madison passed from this life last Thursday. She battled cancer bravely for two years and gave everyone who knew her an example of how to fight disease with hope and die with faith for God’s glory. Her ability to face the reality of her situation with honesty and confidence in God’s power and faithfulness was an amazing inspiration to thousands of people in Amarillo and beyond. I give thanks to God and to Madison for the model she gave us all.

Nevertheless, when I got word she went to be with the Lord last Thursday, I found myself sitting alone in a Starbucks, out of town, waiting on a lunch appointment with a minister friend who also lost a child a few years earlier in a tragic accident. The tears rolled down my cheeks as I prayed for her family and thanked God Madison’s ordeal was over. I tried to pull myself together for my lunch, but I was still a mess when it rolled around. When my friend asked me how my day was going, I told him. He understood.

I shared Madison’s story. He shared his story. Then we spent a couple of hours talking about God’s story and the meaning of it all. He talked of his anger at God, his sense of powerlessness, his struggle to find peace, and his resolution that God had to be held accountable for what had happened. But, he did not say that with a snarl as if he rejected God’s goodness. Rather, he finds comfort in the thought that God is at work in all things and is sovereign over all things. He is even comfortable saying, “God took my son.”

I have never been comfortable with that language. I’ve written repeatedly on this blog (the first of a series you can find here) about my opposition to Calvinist conceptions of God’s sovereignty. I’m not sure I could ever accept the view of my friend. But, in the face of someone who has had his experience, I was open to listen. After all, one experience can sometimes trump a library of theological argument. While he did not turn me into a Calvinist, he did help me understand with greater sympathy my brothers and sisters who think that way. He also forced me to admit several things that I often neglect to affirm.

First, whatever your theological position, God does not get off the hook for the suffering in the world. Whether you think God foreordains everything and, therefore, causes what appear to us to be tragedies, or whether he creates room for free human action and the action of evil forces, ultimately it is God’s world and he must give some account for it. Perhaps he does not owe us an explanation, ala Job, but he must give an account to himself. He must demonstrate to himself, and perhaps the heavenly hosts before whom he is displaying his glory, that the world as he has made it comes to a just end and he has been righteous and merciful in all his ways. The suffering of the broken world is God’s problem and any attempt to exonerate him from making sense of it somehow is a copout that God never tries to take. We may try to give God a way out because we are nervous of the implications of God’s control, but God never avoids responsibility for our world. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. God never says, “I give but the devil takes away.” To say that would be to give the devil a power and a glory that belong to God alone.

Second, the need for clarity and certainty in these matters is a pointless quest. The Bible routinely affirms two sides of a paradox: God is in control and humans have free will. Like the positive and negative poles of our planet, the two poles of divine and human action in the world form a force field within which we live, move, and have our being. To let go of one pole in order to grasp the other destroys the field within which we live and will result in heresy and problems in the way we live out our faith. Both are true, but our limited understanding cannot see how these paradoxical truths work together. The key is to strengthen our hold on both poles simultaneously and live in the tension while trusting God in the mystery and taking responsibility for ourselves and our obedience in the conviction that God is working in, before, and around us.

Finally, and this is where Madison’s story comes back in, God has the right to do with us as he will. What if God created this world foreknowing, maybe even willing (though I don’t like this language) human rebellion, because there were aspects to his character that he wanted to display to the heavenly hosts that could only be expressed in relation to such a world? What if God’s mercy, grace, faithfulness, humility, servant heart, even love itself, could not be fully displayed in all their glory where there was no rebellion? What if the glory of God is so important that the massive expense of all human suffering, not to mention the suffering of God in Jesus, was not too great a price to pay for it to be displayed? What if our lives only have one purpose, to bring glory to God, and that means we must all suffer and die in one way or another? What if the brilliance of God’s greatness, power, beauty, and love can only be seen properly against the black velvet backdrop of the brokenness of our world? What if God’s suffering in Jesus so changed the meaning of suffering that it no longer means God’s abandonment of us but another way of God being with us? What if the submission we learn in suffering was not only necessary for Jesus but for us all? What if God’s solution to the problem of suffering and death is not to prevent it but to experience it with us and transform it? What if this is the meaning of the cross?

Since all of us suffer and die in this life, ultimately the measure of our life is not how long or comfortably we live, but what we do with the time we have. Madison’s life was not long by most measures, but it was a full life. She came from God. She glorified God while she was here. She went back to God. That is a full life. She came with a mission and she fulfilled it. In eternity, I am convinced she won’t feel cheated. I can only hope that my life, which is already much longer on earth (but only here) will bring as much glory to God and inspire as many people as her shorter earthly life did.

Madison is with God now. I hurt for her family but I thank God for what he did in her and with her even if I don’t understand it and I’m not always happy with him about it. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

How to Keep Camels Out of Our Tent

2012-01-12T11:06:00.001-06:00

“I’m afraid it’s just the nose of the camel under the tent.” That was one of the phrases I dreading hearing most from elders when I was preaching. Even though I loved the men who said it, it conveyed to me a fear of “what might happen” if they allowed the proposal before them, which they typically agreed was perfectly reasonable on it’s own, to go forward. The idea under discussion might be fine, but “what will it lead to?” Which reminds me of the old joke about why people in Churches of Christ oppose pre-marital sex: It could lead to dancing.

Now, let me hasten to say that I know some slopes are slippery and leaders who aren’t paying attention can be snookered by unprincipled people who try to gain control an inch at a time when no one is looking. However, treating every new initiative as a Trojan horse is just silly. The solution to this problem is simple: pay attention. What would make people so suspicious? There is something a little askew in the belief system or collective psychological make-up of a people who are this fear oriented.

The working assumption behind “what-it-might-lead-to” fears is that we must draw a hard line well before we get into a forbidden zone so we won’t accidently wander off the reservation and wind up in Hell because we lost track of our position. Behind this assumption is a larger assumption that there is a preset requirement, or pattern, for how we are supposed to do things like worship or organization in the church and we need to observe a sparse interpretation of texts related to church lest we step across some camouflaged line and anger a picky God just waiting to condemn us for careless observance of rules. Lord knows how he loves his rules. Then again, it may be less a fear of God and more a fear of angry members. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which or which is most important to us.

If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to get a few things dislodged from my craw about this kind of thinking:

It sounds a lot like the one-talent man who, as I recall, came to a gloomy end. There is no telling how many talents the church has buried fearing what would happen if we fully invested everything God put at our disposal. Then again, if God really is an unbending tyrant who reaps where he has not sown, what else can you do? But, what if the one-talent’s man’s understanding of his master was not accurate? Is this the God Jesus reveals to us? Still, many churches continually sabotage themselves because they fear God is ruthless. If they understood God’s passion for his mission and his enormous grace, we could launch out without such crippling fear of doing something wrong. If you aren’t allowed to make mistakes, you aren’t allowed to be creative. You are not allowed to work with total engagement. You take your eyes off the horizon and drive slowly with an eye on the stripe to ensure you are in the proper lane. Then you loose sight of where you are going and why. That kind of fear doesn’t make us or God look attractive. It reminds me a lot of those picky fellows who bird-dogged Jesus complaining he healed or let his disciples eat grain from the fields on the Sabbath.
It assumes facts not in evidence. The New Testament just does not give us detailed instructions for how to “do church” and the Old Testament was not as rigid as we often assume. After all, there is no provision for synagogues in the OT, but they were an integral part of the Judaism of Jesus day and he certainty participated in them. They formed the background for the gatherings of early Christians. There is just no book of Leviticus in the New Testament. The latitude God has given us when it comes to structures and forms scares us to death. We are so nervous about making a mistake that we scrounge around for rules we assume must be there and, sure enough, we find them even if we have to distort scripture to do so. I think, rather, God left the worship and work of the church very open with regard to methodology and focused on the character of the people he was forming and message of the Gospel so the church could easily cross cultures and eras. It is not just OK that the church in Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Mumbai, and Los Angelus are different. They have to be different to be faithful to God’s mission and message.
It does not make room for one of God’s greatest gifts to the church: Discernment. We instinctively fear responsibility. Creative, open-minded people can turn cautious when they are held accountable for how the church performs. We don’t want to make judgments. We would rather follow instructions. Therefore, the more freedom we are given in any area, the more fearful we become. The more we have to pray, think, plan, create, and act, the more we look around for a pattern or set of instructions lest we turn out to be clumsy artists. Isn’t there a paint by number set? I don’t want a palate and a blank canvas even if I know what I’m suppose to paint. I don’t want to depend on the hard-to-pin-down Spirit to inspire me. Give me a picture to copy. Make me a slave. Tell me what to do. Don’t make me be a son.

Here is the problem, God intends to make us his co-regents who rule the world with him. He has told us wherever we gather as a community in his name, he is with us, and what we bind on earth is bound in heaven and what we loose here he looses there. Well, if that doesn't scare Christians, I don’t know what will. Yep that may be scarier than the devil himself. Freedom and responsibility--we don’t really want either. We just like the idea. But God gave us spiritual overseers for a reason. He knew we needed wise, mature, spiritual disciples with a deep knowledge of God’s character and ways to discern his will, make judgments, and lead us. I think we need to let them do their work with creativity passion and support them when they do. We don’t put novices in this position for a reason. God raises up those who make themselves available to his work in them. Then they lead the church in a process of discernment and service. They are not perfect, but they are reliable. They are enough along with the Word and the Holy Spirit. There’s your Biblical pattern. Why, then, are we so afraid of those camels?

Why God Borrowed from Pagans

2012-01-09T15:57:00.001-06:00

Every year I hear someone trying to chip away at some of our Christmas traditions by pointing out that many of them had pagan origins. The Bible doesn’t tell us when Jesus was born but we celebrate it around the winter solstice because there was already a festival in the pagan world at that time and the church wanted to redeem it. The same thing is true of Christmas trees and many other traditions. The church took things from local cultures, replaced the meanings, and brought them into the practice of the Christian faith as a way of focusing existing habits on Jesus.

We could look at that as a corruption of the faith. Following the apostle Paul’s lead, when he dealt with cultural issues like ancient temples and their accompanying meat markets, it mostly comes down to the meaning people attach to what they are doing. However, I’d like to suggest that almost all the religious practices in the Old Testament and the New Testament have some pagan roots or at least cultural roots that precede being adopted by God. I further want to suggest that this shows God’s wisdom and is a model to us for how we do our work of proclaiming Christ in the world.

First, let me ask you what all of these things have in common: temples, priests, animal sacrifices, circumcision, clean and unclean designations, baptism and holy meals? The answer is that none of them originated with the Bible. All of them were common practices in the culture around Israel and the church. God’s revelation through Moses and the prophets or Jesus and the apostles took elements from local culture, cleaned up their application, gave them new meanings, and then used them to support the faith life of God’s people. Granted, what happened in the temple of God was very different from those of surrounding nations. In Israel there was no image of God, no buying off of God, and no sexuality or worship of the reproductive cycle. In fact, the priestly garments and the wall separating men and women in worship were designed to keep the pervasive sexuality and cult prostitution common in the ancient near east from happening in Yahweh’s temple. Still, temples and priests were a common thing.

Almost all nations along the eastern Mediterranean sea circumcised (the Philistines who immigrated from the West were an exception). However, most nations did this as a right of passage at the end of adolescence to indicate that someone had earned a place in the community as a man by going through an ordeal. In Israel, circumcision was performed on a baby as a sign of faith in God to grant Israel their life, identity and future. It was not something earned, but a gift and a promise. Still, for all its modification, circumcision was borrowed from the larger culture.

While I could go on with details on temple worship, priestly practices, Passover, and the NT practices of baptism and Lord’s supper (both rooted in cultural practices in Israel), you get the point. God did not generally create rituals of faith from whole cloth. Rather, being a good missionary, God took things from the cultures he wanted to reach that made sense to those people, changed the practice to remove elements that were offensive to him (like human sacrifice or prostitution), and gave them new meanings. In short, God is a good missionary. He knows how to incarnate a message in a culture.

We generally understand, to some extent, when believers in other countries do this same thing even if it makes us uncomfortable. But when churches in our neighborhood act like missionaries and work with elements from the existing cultures around us to communicate the truth of God’s love in Jesus, some of us act like they have denied the faith. We don’t realize that the way we worship or organize our life as church was largely borrowed from the dominant culture at the time our branch of the church rose into its dominant form. We just assume there is only one way to do church because we lost touch with the missional rationale behind the way we grew up doing things.

Think about it. In scripture there is no mention of church buildings, songbooks, written music, song leaders or praise teams, specially created Lord’s tables or utensils for the Lord’s supper, ushers, pews, podiums, sitting in rows, solo preaching ministers (or one sermon), hour long worship services, etc. All these things are our traditions built over time as the gospel took shape in western culture. They aren’t wrong, but they aren’t necessary either. They can disappear or change dramatically without anything essential being lost.

Here is my point: if we are going to carry the gospel to the world, we are going to have to copy God by putting the message and person of Jesus in a form that makes sense to the people we are trying to reach. There is no cultureless Christianity. Can we sell out to culture? Sure we can. But selling out to Jesus means that we take culture seriously and focus more on what will effectively and faithfully communicate Christ to our culture than clinging to what we like because it has become our comfortable church culture.

The Danger of Naming the Dangers of American Compassion

2012-01-04T11:32:00.001-06:00

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 John 3:16-18)
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. (James 5:1-3)

In my last blog post, I probably angered everyone in the compassionate missions arena by posting a link and excerpt from an article by Steve Saint about the dangers of exporting American standards of living to the third world. It is hard enough raising money to address global poverty without someone taking shots at you. I understand and I want to issue some disclaimers as well as offer some guidelines I seek to follow when it comes to compassionate relief work around the globe, which is close to my heart.

First let me tell you why I posted the link and quote. Steve Saint rightly describes how a well-meaning but naïve and culturally clumsy approach to compassion can actually exacerbate many of the problems it seeks to solve. It is just ignorant to assume people all over the world need what Americans “need” to avoid “poverty.” He argues for the primacy of self-sustaining, self-propagating, and self-governing mission works that don’t bring Western assumptions to the rest of the world. We don’t need to offer our help to the many voices seeking to seduce other people into the same striving for materialism that has gutted the spiritual health of the western culture. I agree with his overall perspective. However, there are some things I would like to say by response and critique.

Saint’s analysis is strong on critiquing problems but inadequate on offering positive alternatives. It would be easy for someone who has a hard heart that seeks to avoid responsibility in addressing world poverty to say, “See there, I don’t need to give money to charitable ministries. It doesn’t really help people. It is no different than global government aid. The money just gets wasted and the only benefit is guilt relief for the givers.” That is just not true. We cannot be followers of Jesus and stand by while the weak and vulnerable suffer from malnutrition, contaminated water, preventable disease, oppression, human trafficking, and sex slavery. There are positive ways we can make a major difference not only for individuals but for whole villages, neighborhoods, cities, and societies. If you doubt that, just read Matthew 25 again.
Saint paints with too broad a brush and ends up casting unnecessary shadows on the works of many great ministries who work on behalf of orphans and do relief work all over the world in culturally sensitive ways. I am on the board of trustees for one such ministry: the Christian Relief Fund. I have been involved in sponsoring children through this ministry for nearly 30 years and have visited the work on sight on multiple occasions. They work to alleviate poverty in ways that help children remain attached to their extended families rather than create false orphans for money. They carefully screen every candidate with an onsite assessment to ensure need. They provide every sponsored child not only adequate food and clean water but education and spiritual training as well. I personally know several ministers and indigenous church planters from Latin America who were CRF kids. CRF works in partnership with local missionaries who plant indigenous led churches and develop the infrastructure where they work so that societies trapped in poverty can move toward being self-sustaining. Every ministry is learning and growing in its approach and CRF is no different. CRF is one of many ministries that is doing relief work well and it would be a shame if they and others were harmed by the needed critique of ministries which are not as well run. You can make a huge difference in providing poverty relief around the world through this ministry which is close to my heart. The assistance that ministries like CRF provide not only alleviate hunger, disease, and hopelessness, they also can prevent families from selling children into some form of slavery because they cannot afford to feed them.
Saint rightly puts the emphasis on developing sustainable, indigenous-led works, but this can take a long time in some places. Too often missionaries have set themselves up as little popes or cardinals and set up systems that depend on Western support forever. The national people are not listened to or trusted and have to become like the Westerners to gain influence and position in the ministry. Western culture is exported as much as the gospel and all the western diseases are exported along with the gospel. However, making the move to planting indigenous-led, self-sustaining relief efforts takes a longer time in some places than others. While rightly done, churches can be planted that are indigenous-led almost from the beginning; many countries simply do not have the right kind of government, infrastructure, or resources to address the massive humanitarian needs that confront them. The goal should be to move toward sustainability as quickly as possible and there should be a plan for that in every ministry, but in parts of Africa with millions of AIDS orphans, it is ridiculous to think this is going to happen in a decade or two. Different parts of the world require different time tables but the long-term goals should be the same.
I posted Saint’s article because he is right about many issues. No brief article can cover the waterfront fairly and we should not expect it to do so. In addition to pointing out pitfalls compassion ministries need to avoid as they do their work, Saint rightly makes the case for the primacy of making disciples and planting churches. The most valuable thing the church has to offer is a relationship with God and a role in his kingdom mission. We cannot separate this from works of compassion which demonstrate the love of God and show the value God places on the lives and well-being of all people. However, it is currently in vogue to care about missions of mercy while the church seems to have lost sight of the primacy of evangelism and discipleship. These types of ministry should never be pitted against one another because God loves and seeks to save the whole person, body and spirit, but the spiritual relief offered through the gospel must retain it’s primacy.

The Danger of American Compassion

2012-01-02T12:56:00.001-06:00

I haven’t been writing much lately with all the holiday travel, but here is an excerpt from a great article about the dangers of American compassion in mission by Steve Saint, son of the famous Nate Saint who was killed on the mission field in the ‘50’s. You can find the entire article here. I’ll be back to writing in a day or two.

Often charity to help the poor attracts more people into poverty. One example I have noticed takes place when North Americans try to care for the needs of orphans in cultures different from our own. If you build really nice orphanages and provide good food and a great education, lots more children in those places become orphans. I see this happen all over. When we attempt to eradicate poverty through charity, we often attract more people into “needing” charity. It is possible to create need where it did not exist by projecting our standards, values and perception of need onto others.

So what is poverty? We in the “Wealthy West” have little understanding of “poverty.” As our standard of living has risen in developed countries, our perception of poverty has changed.

Consider how our definition of an orphan is different from most other cultures. In the U.S., you are an orphan if your mother and father have died. In South America (where I grew up), as in other contexts where extended family structures are intact, you are not really considered an orphan as long as you have a living grandparent, uncle, aunt or older brother or sister who is capable of helping take care of you. So when North Americans build an orphanage in South America, we “create” orphans by tempting family members to take advantage of our well-intentioned largess. This is seldom in the best interest of those children who are “orphaned” by our desire to meet what we perceive as their need.

In the same way, proximity and exposure to wealth can provoke a sense of poverty. A group of North Americans going on a short-term mission—with our international cell phones, iPads, fancy clothes and fat wallets to buy curios and spend on hotels and restaurants—can create more comparative poverty than most of us can imagine.

But, all of that is not the issue. Do we have a responsibility to care for the poor? Yes. 1 Cor 8:11–15 hits the nail on the head. Let me summarize—“No Christ follower should have too much while anyone else has too little.” So, should we all become poor so that we are no longer responsible? No. Paul also points out that this teaching is not intended to put the poor at ease and to burden the wealthy (2 Th 3:6-12).

Among people living simply amidst abundant resources, poverty is not measured in annual income or net worth, but in “what I have in comparison to what those around me have.” In such contexts poverty is more of an attitude and a mood than an actual state of having or not having something. In such contexts, contentment is the secret. Some people think 1 Timothy 6:6 says “Godliness is a means of gain,” but really it says “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” Where there is godliness with contentment there is no perceived “poverty” until discontentment has been stirred.

Our goal in planting Christ’s church where it doesn’t exist must be to produce churches that are self-propagating, self-governing and self-supporting; especially where the members come from a background of hopelessness, powerlessness and inadequate resources. The most important aspect of church planting is whatever that fledgling congregation needs most. In a growing number of cases, the greatest need new churches have is to become self-supporting.

Giving handouts creates more problems than it solves. It is like casting out demons with long leases. Break the lease or they will come back and bring more roommates (Lk 11:24–26). Where the Church is being established among people that perceive themselves as powerless, there is a great need for deep discipleship, wrestling with the roots of poverty at the community level rather than concentrating on the individual.

Financial help that does not develop sustainable, local, financial self-sufficiency is much more likely to create poverty than it is to meet real needs. Until we realize that we can’t overcome poverty with handouts, we will never be much help in completing Christ’s Great Commission.

As followers of Christ we must fight poverty through discipleship rather than covering it with spiritual frosting. Either we do God’s will God’s way or we aren’t doing His will at all. Discipleship means teaching others what we have learned so they can teach others to care for their community’s physical, economic, emotional and spiritual needs on a sustainable basis! (2 Tim 2:2, Mt 28:19–20)

The Lost Cosmic Christmas Story

2011-12-19T14:17:00.005-06:00

I grew up in a branch of the Christian family that did not celebrate Christmas at church. After all, it isn’t mentioned in the Bible. While the observance of December 25th is not mentioned in scripture, and Jesus was not born in winter, the celebration of Jesus’ birth is described in the Bible. While the word “Christmas” is not in the Bible, it is hard to read scripture and not feel the need to make a big deal out of Jesus’ coming to earth.

However, there is not one birth story in the Bible, there are four. We tend to combine Luke and Matthew and put wise men and shepherds together. It makes for a nice manager scene, but it is not historical. These two gospels tell different details of Jesus’ birth because they have different truths they wish to reveal. We occasionally hear the story from John’s Gospel of the Word who became flesh. But there is one Christmas story in the Bible we ignore. We just don’t tell the cosmic Christmas story of Revelation 12. This is the story of Jesus’ birth told as it appears in the heavenly realms. We get to peak behind the curtain and see Christmas from the viewpoint of the angles. In this story, Christmas was hardly a silent night when all was calm and bright. It was the beginning of the decisive battle in a cosmic war that determines the future of all the universe.
In this story, a celestial woman appears wearing the sun as a robe and standing on the moon with 12 stars around her head (the tribes of Israel). The woman represents the people of God through whom the savior is born. She is pregnant and crying out in the pains of labor. Suddenly a red dragon (Satan, the devil, the serpent of Eden) appears with 7 heads, 10 horns, and 7 crowns which signify a great power to be feared. The dragon is so enormous that one swipe of his tail flings a third of the stars to the earth. The dragon gets in front of the woman so he can eat the child at the moment of his birth. He is a symbol of King Herod, the scribes and Pharisees trying to trap Jesus, the crowds who cry "crucify him, and Pilate--all those Satan used to bring about Jesus’ death.

The woman gives birth to a son who will rule all nations with an iron scepter (a la Psalm 2). The dragon is foiled when the helpless baby is protected by God and taken up into heaven to sit on God's throne. Time is collapsed and we move instantly to the ascension of Christ. Satan pursues the child into heaven, is defeated and is cast out of heaven forever by the power of the blood of the Lamb resulting in a song of praise.

Satan, defeated but not yet disarmed, turns in frustration to destroy the woman (now the church). Yet God continues to protect the woman by providing the wings of an eagle to fly away to a safe place were he cares for her in the wilderness (like the Exodus). Then God opens the earth to swallow a flood of destruction Satan sends at the people of God. But the Serpent makes war on the woman and her children (the generations of disciples) until the return of Christ at the end.

This version of Christmas story is mysterious, but some things seem clear. The Christ child was not born to peace. He came to destroy the usurper who temporarily terrorizes God’s world. Satan does not easily give up but he will lose. This story is important because it reveals the meaning of Christmas: God defeats evil through Christ. We get the part about celebration, though not always for the right reason. How often do you think, when putting up decorations or at parties, I do this to celebrate God's coming in flesh to defeat the power of evil? We often fail to grasp that Jesus did not come merely to give us all a big hug and say God loves you. He came to do real battle with the powerful forces of evil that terrorize our world. No amount of decorations can hide the truth that our world is a POW camp. Jesus did not just come to be adored in manger. He came to liberate captives of a cruel tyrant. While Jesus defeated the powers in a decisive battle, they have not been totally disarmed and we still feel their effects.

For many, the effects of evil are most painful at Christmas. When everything is supposed to be calm and bright, it is particularly painful when your life isn’t like a Hallmark card. This is the time of year some feel least like rejoicing. For some, this is the first Christmas to be separated from a loved one. There is an empty chair at the table. There is a laugh you no longer hear. For others, Christmas brings painful family conflicts to the surface. It is an emotional mine field and we aren't sure we want to go through it again this year. For some, Christmas just signals another year of dashed hopes: still single, still no baby to wrap presents for, or still stuck in an old house with a dead end job and no future. For many, Christmas just makes us feel worse because this is a time we’re supposed to be happy but we are not.

For those who struggle to celebrate at Christmas, the cosmic Christmas story may have the most helpful message. It helps us see the hurts and evils that impact our lives are bigger than us. They’re part of a huge cosmic battle being waged in spiritual realms. Christmas is not just about sentimental cheeriness as if everything in our world is all right. There is much that is not right. That is why Christ came.

Christmas is about a God who loved us so much that he would enter our world full of evil and hurt and take on the dragon with us and for us. While that process is not finished, the dragon's days are numbered and he cannot defeat us if we cling to the blood of lamb and the word of his testimony. Like the woman in Rev. 12, if we will wait in trust on the Lord we will "mount up with wings like eagles," in the words of Isaiah 40:31. If you cling to the testimony of Jesus and if you claim the blood of the lamb, you can overcome whatever the dragon throws at you.

So in spite of the temporary pains and hurts of this life, Christmas is a time to rejoice and sing with the angles in heaven.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

“Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.
Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.” (Rev. 12:10-12a)

He Has a Dream

2011-12-16T10:15:00.001-06:00

On one of my recent trips, I visited with a young minister who is disenchanted with a church which he feels is off mission and preoccupied with the wrong things. While he loves the people in it, he does not believe it can be sufficiently altered from its current model into a true missional community. He was hoping I could help him discern what he should do to serve best in the Kingdom of God.

As part of the conversation, I asked him to write out his dream for the church, as he envisions it from scripture, for our cultural context. Below you will find what he sent me. He articulates many of the concerns I hear from the emerging generation of believers. Whether you like it, love it, fear it, or loath it, the dream below is representative of many in a generation raised in our churches who have stuck it out but are struggling to live out their faith in our current setting.

I dream of a church where…

· There is no building, but the foundation is the love of Christ

· There is no pulpit, but Scripture is opened and taught in living rooms, coffee shops, bars, and parks

· The tithes and offerings are used for the poor, hungry, and underprivileged

· Corporate worship is expressed in a variety of culturally relevant ways—music, literature, film, art, etc.

· The spiritual disciplines of prayer, silence, meditation, and fasting are practiced communally

· Confession is natural and sin is dealt with in loving ways

· Forgiveness is modeled and practiced

· Struggling marriages have a safe place to seek counsel, guidance, and help

· Divorced and/or remarried people are given equal status

· Single parents find support, love, and encouragement

· Depression, bipolar, and other mental illnesses are addressed lovingly and safely

· Women are empowered to pray, teach, lead, and use their spiritual gifts

· Members of the LGBT community are welcomed, embraced, and loved

· Ethnic diversity is the norm

· Neighborhoods, schools, and businesses are impacted positively

· People are involved in each others’ lives beyond appointed meeting times

· No topic off the table for discussion—a “safe place” for any issue

· Laughter is prevalent at every gathering

· The love of Jesus is embodied in the hearts of people sharing everyday life together

As One Who Wants Authority

2011-12-12T15:39:00.001-06:00

“We have the craziest form of church government imaginable.”

“If you tried to design the worst system of leadership possible, you couldn’t surpass what we have.”

“I will never preach for another Church of Christ because they simply will not let me use my leadership gifts.”

These are just a few comments I heard from my former preacher friends. Sentiments like these are common in my growing fraternity. I understand why. I also think I may understand why it has gotten worse in recent years. But, this was not my issue and did not play a part in my leaving the local preaching ministry—at least not to my awareness.

On behalf of preachers, I will say that it is just wrong and foolish to expect someone to perform a task and then not give that person the authority to succeed. Too many elderships expect preachers to produce church growth but then so limit the range of methods they are allowed to use that they cannot succeed. Preachers in Churches of Christ often feel like head coaches who are expected to win games but are told they are not allowed to use the forward pass and only have three downs instead of four.

Preachers rightly get frustrated by having to get elders’ approval for every little thing they want to do—especially when any influential member of the church can kill something with a critical comment to one of the elders. Elders can be bad about committing to a direction and then flip-flopping when they begin to catch flack. They often leave the preacher twisting in the wind and taking the blame. I know all that. I’ve experienced plenty of that kind of thing in my ministry (though not in a long time).

At the same time, plenty of preachers are arrogant, immature, power hungry, and career minded instead of kingdom minded. They are not trusted by elders for good reasons.

All that being said, and with the caveat that Churches of Christ have some serious work to do negotiating the roles of preachers/ministers/pastors/elders, I believe that the power struggles in most churches are only complicated by murky job descriptions and unclear lines of authority. There are some more fundamental problems that are the foundations of the problems we see. We can blast off the tip of the iceberg but the rest of it will rise up just as large above the surface. If you think these problems are significant in the American church, imagine what it is like when you have American churches overseeing mission projects in other countries!

Here are the larger issues I think are really causing most of the trouble.

A corporate mentality that wrongly gauges what constitutes success. Frankly put, we don’t know how to measure our work. We can count how many people show up at our events, but that tells us little about what has been accomplished. By that measure, Jesus’ ministry started strong and ended an abysmal failure. While numbers matter and we should not excuse ourselves from responsibility to present the good news to people and make disciples, we tend to measure success in terms of institutional growth rather than in kingdom impact. Many church leaders don’t seem as focused on seeing lives transformed as seeing their institution growing in bodies, budgets, and buildings. This is particularly problematic in an era of increased distrust for institutions. What if we thought a win was getting the gospel into existing communities of people rather than getting those people into our churches? The pressure to produce institutional growth while holding on to the people we have creates inevitable conflict. When conflict can’t easily be resolved, we turn to power games, and who gets to call the shots becomes an exaggerated problem.
Lack of sufficient spiritual formation of church leaders. I don’t know how to sugar coat this one and I’m not a good confectionary any way. We have too many people in leadership who are simply not Christ-like. Too many of us have been driven by our selfish ambition or need for attention. Too many people have been placed in positions of leadership because of our gifts and skills rather than our character. It takes the Spirit of Jesus to do the work of Jesus. We have church leaders acting in embarrassing ways when they get into positions of influence because they are inadequately formed for the job. Our churches, for the most part, have not been designed to produce transformed people but highly involved, knowledgeable people. That won’t cut it. Only people formed deeply by Christ can follow his example of shunning the temptation to use the powers of this world to usher in the Kingdom of the World to come.
Lack of a agreement regarding the church’s mission. At MRN we talk to churches about the importance of having a God directed ministry. We have a pyramid to demonstrate what we mean. Too often leadership conversations only deal with the top of the pyramid. We assume that our vision, values, understanding of mission, views of scripture and God are held in common and don’t need to be addressed. There may have been a time when that was true for most of our churches. That is rarely true today. We have conflicts precisely because we have not taken the time to develop a common understanding of God, scripture, the mission of the church, what values will dominate, and what our particular vision will be before we start setting goals and working out our strategies and practices. Because we don’t agree, church leadership degenerates into a battle over competing mindsets. Where these things are held in common, trust is strong, status matters little, and collaboration works smoothly. Roles can overlap without conflict.

I don’t have a magic wand or silver bullet, but I do think we need to stop treating symptoms like diseases. I think the shortage of preachers and the power struggles in churches are only symptoms of deeper issues. The good news is that if we focus on the real problems, they are solvable. We just have to invest the time to address core issues and drill all the way down to God before we try to move forward as a people on mission.

A Bloody Christmas

2011-12-05T14:36:00.001-06:00

Christmas is pretty. It is happy music, bright colors, and lights in the darkness outlining houses filled with nativities and cartoon characters from the mythical Toyland at the north pole. But, that is not Christmas for everyone. For some, it is an empty chair at the table where Dad sat last year. For some, it is the void of excitement because a child is gone. For some it is the first Christmas in two houses: mom’s and dad’s. For some, it is living far from family in a tent in a war zone. Is Christmas joyful only for those whose lives are already calm and bright? Does Christmas have anything to say to people who dread the Hallmark version because their life is not as pretty as a greeting card?

Matthew thinks so. Matthew’s Christmas has little about which to get sentimental. No carols come from Matthew and few decorations. We don’t like Matthew’s Christmas story in church. It doesn’t inspire children’s musicals. All that warm fuzzy stuff comes from Luke. Luke gives us the angles, stars, and shepherds we splash freely around our houses in December. What we don’t get in Luke is prevalent in Matthew: anger, plotting, violence, and weeping. In Matthew, no baby sleeps in heavenly peace. Rather, one baby is on the run from a two-faced King who slaughters all the other babies left behind. We see the flash of swords. We hear the cries of babies ripped from mother’s arms and shouts of confusion. We see lifeless babies in blood as soldiers ride back to the palace. We are left with bereaved mothers whose wombs have yet to shrink back to size. Except for a brief word in a dream to Joseph and the cry of a baby being whisked away to Egypt, God is silent through it all.

Matthew’s R-rated story is not sentimental. It is not displayed on coffee tables. Other than Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the only nativity characters from Matthew’s Gospel that make it into our displays are the wise men. They don't actually belong in the nativity. They came weeks or months later. They brought more than gifts with them. They brought tragedy.

Matthew’s tale is of a bloody conflict between rivals to a throne. Worshipers from the east come to the logical place to find a King of Israel, the palace of King Herod. This paranoid old war criminal is in poor health and political jeopardy. He may be old and sick, but he isn’t about to give up one day on his throne. When he hears of another king born (in Bethlehem if the prophecies are credible) he does what power hungry kings always do. He acts with shrewd, brutal efficiency. The Magi are sent to locate the child not realizing what they have done. Soon after, about a dozen mothers in this little village watch soldiers slaughter their newborn boys. Of course Jesus is safe in Egypt. Joseph has been dreaming again. While rejoicing that Jesus is safe in Egypt, I can't help but hear cries from the other mothers--Rachel refusing to be comforted.

Why does Matthew paint such a harsh picture to start his “good news?” Why not tell a more jubilant story like Luke? Why not skip the birth altogether like John or Mark? Why the story of worshippers bringing the slaughter of innocent children? What Matthew doesn't tell us is how much the women of Bethlehem hated the Magi for drawing attention to the Christ child. The Magi could say, "We only wanted to worship the Christ!!" The mothers of Bethlehem would respond, "Shut up about him! Your worship cost us dearly." Matthew reminds us that all you have to do to stir up trouble is start worshiping the Christ. Just treat Jesus as king and you'll make enemies. Matthew reminds us that, while the King came to free us from sin, the power of sin is firmly entrenched in the old Kingdom and will not give up without a bitter fight leaving many innocent casualties. This too is part of Christmas.

As unpleasant as these images are, I am glad Matthew told us this part of story. It keeps Christmas from being an exercise in group denial. It reminds us why God became man. It reminds us our world is caught in the clutches of great evil. We live under the dominion of a hate-filled usurper who has deceived our world and seeks to harm, kill, and destroy. Our world is the battle ground between a loving God who created it and evil forces who are leading a rebellion against God’s reign. Sometimes we feel the power of sin most at Christmas when everything is supposed to be calm and bright, joy and peace.

The Christmas story is about God entering a world that rejected him to conquer evil by absorbing it in death, burying it, and rising in triumph over it. Jesus did not come to be adored in a manger. He came to battle real forces of hate and evil that create misery in our world. Who was that baby in the manger? Not just God in the flesh. Not just “little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay... no crying he makes.” He is the one with nail prints in his hands and feet. He is the one who suffered and died because of us, with us, and for us. The cross casts a long shadow over the birth story in Matthew. It reminds us from the beginning that Jesus will be put to death. The pawns of the evil one start trying as soon as Jesus is born. That is part of Christmas. Without it, Christmas offers us no hope at all.

Matthew reminds us the Christmas story should not cause us to pretend everything is alright when it is not. It should give us courage to face reality with conviction that by Christ’s resurrection power life can be made right. Unless we listen to the whole Christmas story, we won’t likely rise above sentimentality to a profound joy that can survive in world where evil monsters slaughter innocent babies. Because in this story we encounter a baby born to conquer the evil we experience in our fallen world, we can rejoice knowing he will come again--not as vulnerable baby pursued by a mad King--but as conquering warrior who will finally throw down the pretend ruler and restore the joy God planned at creation

Understood rightly, Christ’s birth is a time for celebration, even for those who find the Christmas season depressing. It says to the hurting, lonely, and the depressed, Christ endured what you endure and more and has overcome. If you trust him you to can overcome all this to know the joy and blessing of God’s life in you. “The hopes and fear of all the years are met in thee tonight.” Indeed.

Is Understanding the Bible Like Playing Family Feud?

2011-11-30T14:08:00.001-06:00

“We must have more controls on how we read scripture,” said my Greek teacher. He was disturbed by all the “irresponsible interpretations” he encountered in the church. He was teaching us Greek so we could clean up the mess and give “responsible readings” of scripture to the church. He told us 90 percent of the work we did with our Greek skills would be used for correcting nonsense. I totally believed him and found he was pretty much on target.

But here is my problem: while it is fairly easy to take apart “irresponsible” readings of scripture with original languages, historical backgrounds, and other critical skills, constructing “responsible” readings is much more difficult. It is not hard to demonstrate the writer could not have been talking about Apache helicopters in the Book of Revelation, it is another thing to say what he did mean. You see, critical scholarship rarely settles things. It sets good boundaries, like the out of bounds markers on a football field. But often it will not help you spot the ball or let you know when you scored. It typically leaves a large playing field of inbounds interpretations with lots of room for discussion, discernment, and argument within each church.

I was reminded of this again when I read Mark Love's excellent blog post yesterday. Mark is exactly right about the difficulty of determining what the original authors meant or what the original readers of scripture understood. At best we can play a game of percentages. It is like playing Family Feud at times with Bible scholars. What does Paul mean by “women will be saved in childbirth” in 1 Timothy? Here are the top five answers in our poll of scholars. Survey says ______________! It is like watching a weather forecast. There is a sixty percent chance of this and a thirty percent chance of that.

The truth is that the “controls” of the historical critical method help narrow our choices, but they do not provide precise interpretations for all times and places. I have always been troubled that the writers of the New Testament do not use the methods I was taught when they interpret the Old Testaments. Also, before the 19th century, no one did or even could use the methods I was taught. Really, you have to get well into the 20th century to use the critical methods I was taught to “responsibly” read scripture. The historical knowledge these methods require was not really available before then. If we believe God left the church his written Word as a guide, why did he not leave us with the historical and cultural information we needed to rightly interpret it for most of the history of the church? What he did leave us was a collection of texts, the community of faith, and the Holy Spirit. Can we trust this is enough?

I have other questions as well that are critical in my work as part of an international church planting ministry. Do we have to teach people in all cultures, many of whom are only barely literate if they read at all, all about ancient cultures and languages to follow Jesus? Must they always be at the mercy of Western scholars to tell them what the Bible means when those same scholars probably don’t understand their cultural context? Can we trust God to work through his Word and his Spirit in a community seeking to follow him, or must we control the readings of new believers? Is it our role, as educated westerners, to tell people how to understand the Bible and obey it everywhere? If so, how do we “control” our tendency to export western culture along with western readings and communicate that other cultures are not as capable as we are? How can we do this when most of the church throughout history has not had these necessary controls? Is it sufficient for us to introduce people in other cultures to the Jesus story and let them read God’s Word in their language (not even getting into the complex issues of translation and culture) and let them decide how they should obey it? Are they not smart enough to obey scripture without us? Given that we cannot really give definitive (indisputable) readings to many passages even within our own traditions (as many as there are), what gives us the right to tell people in other cultures what it must mean for them?

Now, let’s not make this sound worse than it is. The core items of our faith are clear in scripture and rarely get disputed by those who trust the reliability of the Bible. Nevertheless, there is much in scripture we don’t understand and will never understand for sure . What if that is not an accident but intended? What if the genius of scripture is found in the way it leaves many things open for various understandings so that it can communicate with many peoples in many cultures across the ages and continents? What if the out of bounds markers are enough? What if God intended to leave many things open for discussion because there is something about the nature of conversation in community that is critical to what it means to be church? What if God did not give us a systematic theology because it would never have been flexible enough to serve the purpose he had for the mostly narrative Bible we have? What if stories communicate truth in a more profound and flexible way?

Sure, what we have has created lots of room for heresy to develop, but I’ve not seen any evidence that systematic theologies and creeds can prevent heresy from developing either. Plus they have to be redone constantly as cultures change. Top heavy authority structure like denominations or the papacy don’t prevent heresy either. Our efforts to control scripture’s meaning don’t work. Maybe the problems of interpretation are caused as much by our attempt to bring too much finality, too precise a meaning, too inflexible a reading to the Word God gave us?

I can’t really answer all these questions, but I think they deserve to be asked even if they can’t all be answered. At some point you would think we would make our peace with the kind of scriptures God has given us and learn to trust them along with God’s Spirit to do what God intended them to do without so much help from us. But, trusting what God has given us has never been the long suit of humans, has it? In fact, that itself may be most of the problem

How You Can Tell I was a Preacher

2011-11-28T14:00:00.001-06:00

You can’t change all your habits overnight. So, while I’ve been out of local preaching ministry for a year and a half, I still have many habits cultivated by growing up in a preacher’s home and being a preacher myself for over two decades. You can spot me and other’s of my ilk by the following baker's dozen tell-tale signs:

I own at least a dozen sweater vests . . . and I wear them.
I believe I can magically go from casual to professional merely by adding a blazer to anything (matching or not).
I know the performance specs. for all levels of hair gel.
I wait until late Wednesday night to make major decisions.
I think making jokes about deacons is funny and I know making jokes about youth ministers is funny.
I’m not stupid enough to tell elders jokes (except to other preachers off-line).
I’m not famous, but I have stalkers.
I am fluent in crazy, petty, and ridiculous.
If you ask me what time it is, I’ll tell you how to make a watch.
I comfort myself through every bad life experience with the thought, “this will make a great sermon illustration.”
I was trained to read Hebrew and Greek but I don’t ever actually do it. But, I can win an argument by sounding like I do.
I get cold chills and hear Darth Vader breathing at the mere mention of “elders’ meeting.” (Forget #6, I am that stupid.)
I have often day-dreamed about having Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” played at my funeral just to get back at all the people who complain about worship music.

Critical Shifts Required for Global Evangelism

2011-11-21T11:20:00.001-06:00

Earlier this fall, Bob Waldron and I attended the North American Mission Leaders Conference entitled “Reset.” The world has been changing so rapidly in the last few decades that everything about global church planting is in need of deep review. (See my last blog post to see the major global trends that are creating this massive shift.) On the opening night of the conference, T.J. Addington presented nine things that must change as we move forward. As I sat listening, I felt like he had bugged our office at MRN. I copied the list, sent it via e-mail on my iPhone back to everyone in our office and asked, “Does this look familiar?” It was reassuring to hear others saying the same things we are regarding what North Americans in global missions need to be focusing upon in the coming years.

Here are the 9 shifts Addington said we must make (with a little amplification from me):

From being primarily doers who take the lead in church planting to being equippers of nationals. This does not mean teaching nationals how we do it back in the good ol’ USA. We’ve done that for decades. This means coming alongside as supporters of visions and approaches we do not originate and will not lead. It means becoming servants and giving up control.
From being in charge to being equal partners who trust and respect foreign nationals. This will require that we demonstrate confidence in the spiritual depth and wisdom of our family in Jesus around the world. The Holy Spirit works within others as he does within us.
From owning and controlling the mission to owning controlling and counting nothing as ours. American churches and missions organizations use money to control what happens in other countries because we believe the mission belongs to us. This is a serious problem methodologically as well as being rooted in heresy. While we must be good stewards and show wisdom in all partnerships, we must demonstrate faith that the Kingdom belongs to God and stop trying to be everybody's daddy.
From western missionaries to global missionaries. The days of missions going one direction (west to the rest) are over. It is now anywhere to everywhere. The United States is now one of the world’s leading missionary receiving nations. That trend will only increase as North America continues to experience massive immigration and globalization.
From fostering dependency to establishing self-sufficiency. If it is not sustainable without ongoing leadership and money from North America, it is a bad model. All foreign led mission efforts should have exit strategies from the beginning.
From growth through addition to exponential growth through multiplication. The world population is growing too fast for us to think in terms of planting one church at a time. We have to focus on starting movements that will outgrow our ability to count and control. This means we must trust the Word and the Spirit in ways that we have not in the past. Our need to control chokes the ability of churches to become movements.
From competition to cooperation. Missions organizations and different traditions of believers must learn to cooperate or die. We cannot afford the luxury of seeing other followers of Jesus as competitors in a marketplace.
From an emphasis on my brand to His brand. It is time we stopped making disciples of western theologians and the denominations they created and simply make disciples of Jesus who can self-theologize under the authority of the Word in their own context. Instead of telling people in other nations what the Bible means and how to obey it, we need to show the humility and restraint to ask them how they can obey the Word in their context and expect them decide for themselves. The authority is the Lord’s and is mediated through his Word. We need to foster obedience to Jesus not ourselves.
From agency based missions to church/agency synergy. Churches need to stop outsourcing their responsibility to para-church organizations and discern a God given vision for their role in God’s global mission and then partner in appropriate ways with those having special expertise and a network of relationships to accomplish the vision God has called them to embrace.

7 Global Currents of the Future Church

2011-11-18T16:03:00.001-06:00

For the past year, I have travelled around the United States and made forays to other countries to visit with church leaders talking about what God is doing in the world and how we can join him. One of the resources I have frequently cited is a book by Fritz Kling entitled The Meeting of the Waters: 7 Global Currents that will Propel the Future Church. Kling spent a decade traveling the cities and villages of the world with a research team trying to discern what God was doing in the world and what the global trends mean for international church planting and kingdom service. His conclusions were published in 2010. While Kling’s insights are not unique and are confirmed by many others (which is good), his descriptions are in the most accessible form I’ve seen. I highly recommend the book and encourage all church leaders and planters to get the book and wrestle with the implications of these trends for their work. Below are his list of seven, with my take on each one.

Mercy – For the last 500 years the big question the Christian faith had to answer was, “Is the Christian message true.” All our strategies were designed to support our truth claims directly or indirectly. While this question is not irrelevant, it is not the question people are asking today in the post-modern world where people have given up the search for a single unifying worldview. Today people are asking, “Is Christianity good?” They want to know if embracing the Christian story makes better people. Does it really give people abundant life and rectify what is broken in the world? Has Christianity improved the world or is it a threat to the peace and well- being of societies? In this age of religiously driven violence, 24-hour new channels, worldwide knowledge of every human disaster, and church scandals, followers of Jesus need to earn the right to tell our story by demonstrating the love of God in practical acts of mercy that bring healing to people and society like Jesus did. We cannot love part of a person. We cannot love their souls and not care about their bodies, emotional health, access to food, water, shelter, or justice. Messages that only prepare people for the afterlife are not likely be viewed as credible or relevant. The separation of missions of mercy and evangelism needs to end.
Mutuality – The era of western dominance is over. The strength of the church is in Asia and the global south. This is not the age of “from the west to the rest” but “from anywhere to everywhere.” China now sends out more Christian missionaries than the Unites States. It is time America and other western nations respected the wisdom, vision, initiative, and spiritual depth of churches and church leaders from the rest of the world and became servants who partner in mutually respectful global networks, the vision of which and leadership for which arises in other parts of the globe. In the US, the church must reimagine our role in God’s global mission and reposition ourselves. We don’t have the answers and can’t dominate the conversation any longer. We are no longer in the driver’s seat and our financial recourses do not give us great spiritual depth or insight.
Migration – The forces of a global economy, the ease of travel, and the waves of immigration around the world mean that we can no longer prepare to reach a single people group in any location. All the world is now global and connected in ways that transcend our ability to map and control. No one strategy will work. No one expression of kingdom will work. What worked ten years ago will likely not work today because the makeup of all populations is constantly shifting. People are living in closer proximity to more diverse populations than ever. Rather than become a melting pot, the world is becoming a mosaic. One big church that reaches all people groups is not likely to work much of anywhere.
Monoculture – Every part of the world is becoming like the rest as technology and the global economy are making the western-based techno-culture the dominant force everywhere. This is creating a backlash toward the west, esp. the USA, in some places and is creating tension between the generations many places. The church cannot be faithful and be like Hollywood or McDonalds and try to franchise the world with western models and practices. While there is increasing receptivity to the west among many, and aspects of monoculture help western churches work with the rest of the world, the genius of the gospel is its ability to take root in each culture. While the monoculture makes many things easier, it is also deceptive because it creates the false sense that all of the world thinks increasingly alike and this is not true. Over time, the monoculture will increasingly become dominated by non-western ideas and technologies that we must take into account. After all, there are more honors students in India alone, not to mention China, than there are students in the United States. The future of the global culture is not with the west.
Machines – The internet, computer technology and software advancements, affordable air service to formerly remote places, smart phones, etc. have radically changed the dynamics. Things can be done remotely through Skype and teleconferences that were unthinkable only a few years ago. It is no longer necessary to be physically present to be accessible to people on a regular basis. No one can be the exclusive source of information any longer. People everywhere have access to information of all types and influential leaders, ideas, and practices from every part of the world. The recent political upheaval in the Islamic world is being mirrored in many ways in religious organizations as well. Leadership by control is becoming problematic (and it is un-Christ-like anyway).
Mediation – Because of migration, monoculture, and machines, there is more tension everywhere as people live in closer proximity to more diverse people than ever before and traditional models of leadership are breaking down. Never has there been a time when the world needed the church to model and teach the way of reconciliation. It is time for the followers of the Prince of Peace to model the way of peace. This is not how Christians are viewed in the world currently.
Memory – In the United States (the new world) we have short memories and like to start from scratch and build new. Most of the world is populated with people who have long memories. For example, do you know why Al Qaeda chose 9-11 for the attacks on the US? If not, Google The Battle of Vienna. The rest of the world has not forgotten centuries-old conflicts between tribes and nations. The rest has not forgotten the imperialism of the west. When Americans act like colonial powers or subscribe to the golden rule of power (the one with the gold rules), we only confirm the expectations of leaders in foreign nations. Partnering with Americans is a risky proposition for most people of other nations. They don’t trust us to play well with others. We must take great care to learn the histories of the people where we work and build meaningful relationships. That means we must be willing to go slow to go fast.

Penn. State, Church Scandals, and Principalities & Powers

2011-11-16T11:09:00.001-06:00

If you are like me, you would be happy never to hear the name Sandusky again. But this appears to be a story that will be with us for years to come. Because of the way it has brought down one of the most legendary figures in all of sport--one with a reputation for unusual integrity--and because it could destroy one of the best traditions in college football, it will likely take on Watergate-like status in our culture. For years we will be hearing about the Penn. State scandal. My need to vomit when I think about this story won’t make it go away. We are just going to have to muddle through and face the implications as a nation that has allowed a climate to develop among us where this is not only possible but almost inevitable at somewhere like Penn. State and elsewhere.

Until these things happen at places with sterling reputations and bring down people of Joe Paterno’s gravitas, we are able to live in denial about the prevalence of sexual deviancy and the abuse of power around us. The surprising thing to me is that everyone seems so surprised. Given the amount of pornography and the over-sexualization of our society, the way we worship success and power, the way we give people at the top a pass on accountability, and the constant problem of sexual abuse in every known society, we should expect this kind of thing to happen periodically. If you are surprised, you may need to learn a little more about just how common sexual exploitation is in America and around the world. The numbers are beyond disturbing. The sad fact is that human beings are deeply corrupt creatures and abuse power for their own demented purposes regularly in every society and always have. The places where it is most likely to go on in silence the longest are precisely where we think the people involved are above it and therefore we don’t have safeguards in place. The church and sex abuse scandals of recent decades come to mind.

What seems most bothersome to the masses is that the alleged abuses were known within the program and to the local police. Again, while this is evil and inexcusable, it is not surprising either. This is how humans habitually behave when they are confronted with the abuse of power by those who are worshipped as demi-gods. In the wake of the PSU scandal, and sex abuse cases in the church (not to mention Herman Cain, Bill Clinton, Anthony Wiener, et. al.) I suggest the following observations:

There should be no such thing as “above accountability” or “above safeguards” for any person in a position of power. The person you cannot question is dangerous. The person who does not seek accountability is vulnerable. Power and fame are fertile ground for the manifold weeds of corruption to sprout and grow in the shade of glory.
Our obsession with sports, success, and the money they generate are largely to blame here. Wherever money and power accumulate, people will be abused eventually. No one and no institution is immune. Where our priorities are not in line with reality, evil will grow.
More evil is done to “protect the institution” than almost any other reason. Every institution early on becomes inhabited by spiritual principalities and powers (like Legion in the Gospels) that seek to make self-preservation goal numero uno. These spiritual forces will make it appear justifiable to sacrifice the good of the vulnerable “little ones” for the perceived greater good of the institution and it’s “irreplaceable” icons. This is one of the most commonly believed lies in the world—even when it is the church in question. I can still hear the High Priest saying as he sentenced Jesus to death, “…it is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to perish.”
Institutions will do evil that the individuals who comprise them would never consider doing personally. Don’t trust them. This is why churches often behave like cruel taskmasters that abuse those who serve them and those they should serve.
We are witnessing a perfect illustration of the reason the emerging generation of adults has no faith in any institutions from national government, to the local church, nuclear family, and marriage. The religious right needs to face some harsh realities here. The big boogeroo here isn’t “those evil people out there” but “this evil inside of us.”
There is not more evil or abuse in the world today, there is simply more media and willingness to disperse the knowledge of abuse. This is not driven, in large measure, by moral indignation but by the exploitation of the abused and abusers for the prurient titillation of the masses and the ability to sell advertising. The institution of the media, driven by its own principalities and powers, is feeding off the rotting corpses of other institutions. Sometimes we do need to blame the messenger to some degree. Focusing on the evil done in dark places brings its own dangers. Enough is enough.
There is no hope for restraining the evil humans do through the mere exercise of power (i.e., oversight and punishment) because those put in charge of the hen house eventually turn out to be foxes themselves. Rather, the only hope is for the intervention of God through the gospel and Holy Spirit and the restoration of human character in authentic communities of faith. This restoration must undermine the propaganda, power structures, and idolatry that make the abuse of power possible and the hiding of it seem justifiable. Unfortunately this needs to happen in the institutional church as well. Where is the church who will speak truth to power?
If your hope is in anything or anyone save Jesus and his coming reign, you are setting yourself up for great disillusionment.

Reasons Blogging is Better than Preaching

2011-11-14T10:52:00.001-06:00

For the past sixteen months I’ve been out of preaching as a profession. I still dabble in it, but not in the same way. After a couple of decades of cranking out multiple sermons and classes a week, it was hard for me to completely shut down a regular outlet for thoughts that bubbled up inside me expecting expression. So, I started to blog thinking it could potentially help someone and could indirectly get the word out about my new ministry with MRN. I’ve been at this long enough to see many advantages to blogging compared with preaching. Here are the top 12 (a more biblical number than 10, don’t you think?):

The worship minister doesn't have to find songs that go with my blog subject.
I can blog when I have something to say instead of on a seven-day schedule (which feels like a three-day schedule).
I don’t worry about having to defend my blog in an elder’s meeting.
People who don’t like my blog can stop reading it without having to change churches and make their friends mad at me.
People can read my blog when they have time instead of at the “appointed hour.”
People who like my blog can recommend it to others via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail rather than trying to repeat what they thought I said and likely changing what I meant.
My blog entries are shorter than my sermons (but not short enough, I know).
You can stop reading when you’ve had enough but I don’t necessarily stop talking when you have had enough.
I don’t have to find a way to end every blog with a transition toward an invitation to “come forward.”
I can pontificate on any subject without having to worry about the demanding needs of real people.
No one measures a blog by how many people got baptized after reading it.
I don’t have to explain my blog to the youth minister.

The Arrogance of Boredom

2011-11-10T15:08:00.001-06:00

I get bored easily. It’s one of my biggest problems in life. Call it attention deficit disorder or impatience or immaturity or whatever, I just quickly lose interest in things and am always looking for something new, exciting, creative, funny, or interesting. Twitter and Facebook are like crack-cocaine to me. Because I get bored quickly I have several major weaknesses. I don’t listen well. I rush ahead of people while they are talking and assume I know where they are going and begin to formulate a response. If they pause, I tend to finish their sentence for them. In meetings, which drive me batty when they bog down, I lose focus and starting cleaning my nails with my pocket knife or check e-mail or, even worse, start playing a video game on my iPhone. If a meeting starts getting too boring and I can’t get out of it, I tend to start cracking jokes to amuse myself so I can endure it. I use to doodle but now that seem so low-tech.

I try to convince myself that I can multi-task, but it is not really true. As Randy Harris says, “We use to call multi-tasking being rude.” He also points out that the greatest threat to spiritual life in American today is distraction. I turned him down when he asked me to be the poster child for his sermon on distraction but not because I’m un-qualified. It’s not just that distraction finds me, I go looking for it. For years I’ve read with music on and watched television while playing on the internet. Before reading The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, I used to think I was capable of doing all this well, but now I know better. Yet, I find it hard to concentrate on just one thing anymore. Reading and thinking deeply are skills I find slipping away from me.

Here is the painful part of all this. I used to secretly congratulate myself on being so easily bored. I saw it as a product of my intelligence. That doesn’t make you like me, I know, but this blog is about confessions so there you have it. I’m an arrogant jerk. What else is new? But, I have recently become aware of the fact that my boredom is not a product of my intelligence but of my arrogance. I simply have not respected others enough to give them my full attention. If they can’t teach me something new, don’t entertain me, won’t let me share what I think, or aren’t willing to get to the point as quickly as I like, I feel I have the right to disengage in part or in whole. I want the world to move at my pace and I don’t share my attention generously. I’m not hospitable with my mind. How incredibly arrogant! If you don’t earn my attention and do it quickly, I check out. Forgive me Lord!

What if I learned to value people for more than their knowledge or entertainment value? What if I so desired to love them that I gave them my full attention regardless of what it was doing for me? After all, God listens to me when I can teach him nothing. I certainly don’t impress him with my insight or make him chuckle with my cleverness. What if I treated others as more than a source of learning or entertainment? What if I saw them as beings to love for their own sake and attended to them for their needs instead of just my own? What if my relationships were not bounded by my agendas but by the desire to be fully present with others without any other objective? What if I didn’t reduce others to tasks but saw relationships as ends in themselves instead of means to an end outside the relationship?

One thing is sure, to move in this direction will force me to calm my inner anxiety about “wasting time” or “not being productive.” It will require some deeper spiritual discipline and emotional maturity. But, it should produce greater capacity to love and be loved and that would be its own reward.

Yes, my inclination toward quick boredom is not a complement of my giftedness but a rebuke of my shallowness. So I’m learning to keep my iPhone in my pocket with my pocket-knife and learning to focus more and listen better. It drives me crazy at times but that is like hunger pains to an out-of-shape person getting on a diet and beginning to exercise.

Now why did I have to bring that up?

From Critic to Encourager

2011-11-08T15:24:00.001-06:00

I have several maxims of life that I have developed over the years. They include “Never underestimate the capacity of any human being to live in denial,” and “You can’t honor anyone without offending someone.” I’ve recently added one from Mitch Wilborn, “Expectations are premeditated resentment.” However, one of my maxims that is constantly on my brain lately is, “Nearly everyone has an inferiority complex.”

This applies not only to individuals but to businesses, churches, schools, etc. We try to draw attention to our successes in what appears to be pride or boasting, but more often than not it is really merely an attempt to overcome our self-doubt. But it never works for long. Our inner self-recrimination tends to return soon. I loved living in Oklahoma and still root for OU, but I also observed the deep fear in Okies that they may not measure up. The “Grapes of Wrath” story weighs heavy on the state self-image. It’s silly and it’s fed by Texas’ maniacal state pride, but it is real and explains the passion for college football. State self-esteem is on the line. They tell themselves, “We are just at good as . . .” As long as you are making comparisons to others, you are still fighting insecurity.

I used to think I was the only one who constantly beat myself up with negative self-talk. I didn’t know that most people obsess over their weaknesses and fear that other people secretly think about them with the same critical spirit. Turns out, most people are extremely hard on themselves and other people rarely think of us often enough to evaluate us.

Some of what this means is that educating, training, or equipping people to achieve their potential is as much of an emotional process as it is an intellectual or skills-development process. The fear of failure and shame prevents most of us from even attempting great things. Churches are often the worst. We bury our single talents constantly because we at least want to be able to tell the Lord we haven’t lost it. When we do muster up the courage to attempt something meaningful, we tend to over-critique our performance and focus on what was not good enough rather than what worked well. We expect to fail and then we set ourselves up to meet expectations

What all this means, for me at least, is that genuine encouragement is a vital necessity for everyone. It is our human inclination to try to help others by focusing on what they have done wrong and then telling them what they need to do differently. While rebuke or reproach are tools mentioned in scripture, have their rightful place, and can’t be abandoned by a teacher or trainer, they are vastly over-rated in producing healthy productive people. Most of us are painfully aware of our shortcomings and do plenty of self-reproach. What we need help with is seeing our potential for good and believing in what we are capable of doing. We need help recognizing what we do well and developing the courage to push ourselves in the areas where we are gifted. Any fool can be a critic but it takes a wise and discerning person to help another person find their strengths and help them develop them into powerful skills.

Unfortunately in the church, we often confuse the virtue of humility with the disease of insecurity. We hold back encouraging our elders or ministers for fear we will give them the big head or distract them from fixing their weaknesses. We use humor and teasing to keep people in their place because we feel obligated to help others stay humble. Hogwash! Humility is not self-loathing. Jesus had total confidence and very high self-esteem. He said to this disciples, “You call me teacher and Lord and rightly so for that is what I am” right after he modeled humility by washing their feet and commanding his disciples to do the same for each other. Their failure to become servants before was a product of their fear of losing face, which is a mark of insecurity that we often falsely call pride. Jesus had no sense of inferiority, yet he was the model of humility. Humility is not thinking you are worthless, it is not thinking about yourself at all. To do that, you have to get over yourself which is hard if you are insecure and constantly wondering how others are perceiving you.

I’ve been blessed to have some great teachers and mentors in life to whom I owe more than I can count. When I think about these people who have helped me the most in life, they all shared several traits in common. 1) They told me the truth about myself in clear, unexaggerated ways regardless of how I performed. If people won’t tell you when you mess up, you can’t trust their encouragement. It just becomes flattery and is easily dismissed. 2) They never beat me up emotionally even when they needed to help me make a change. That doesn’t mean they were not firm or direct. It just means they never attacked my character or my desire to do what is right. They never said in essence, “You are just bad.” 3) They regularly communicated to me the strengths they saw in me and helped me believe in my God-given potential. They told me specifically what I did well or what strengths they saw in me and prophesied a positive future for me. 4) They made me believe I was not only loveable but that I am likeable. You can be loved because another person is a loving person. But being liked says something about who you are. We all love people we don’t like very much. But to like people, to enjoy being around them, to be glad to see them coming, that is different. I want to be loved and liked.

So, as the beneficiary of the encouragement of others, I want to do the same for others. Being critical comes natural to me. Being an encourager takes focus, humility, and intentionality. I want to see the good in others and I want to give them confidence that they matter to God and are people who matter in the world. I want them to believe not only in the good that is currently in them, but of the undeveloped good that is planted in them that can grow and bloom into great beauty. I’m tired of being a critic, though I fall into it at times. I want to be an encourager. I want to be God’s instrument of grace to build faith and hope in others so they can be agents of God’s love in the world.

Things Christians in Other Countries Wish American Christians Understood

2011-11-04T14:50:00.001-05:00

This year has been wild for me. I’ve had the opportunity to visit churches in eight countries on four continents and visit with church leaders from perhaps a dozen more countries visiting the US. Since my cross-cultural resume is still thin for someone in my position, I’m trying to learn as much as I can in every setting. So, I have asked leaders from every country I’ve met what they wish they could communicate to American Christians. Their answers have been remarkably similar. Here is a summary of what I’ve heard repeatedly from around the world.

We are just as Christian as you and we are not looking for you to parent us. Many churches around the world are 50 years old or older and their people are just as mature in the Lord as anyone in our country. Just because believers in other countries don’t have our money does not mean they are not our equals or superiors in spiritual depth, leadership skills, passion for the mission, or any other strengths we think we possess. We need to be careful to listen to them and seek their wisdom and not assume we have the answers and they just need to listen to us.
The Bible and the Gospel did not come from America. Yes, the American church has been committed to world evangelism and believers in other countries are thankful—genuinely thankful. However, though they may be afraid to say so, believers in other countries often bristle against the ways we unknowingly export American culture and traditions along with the Gospel. Instead of telling people in other countries how to do church stuff, we need to ask them “How do you obey this scripture in your culture?” Believers in every country are in a better position than we are to know what church needs to look like among their people.
It is time you trusted us to reach the people in our part of the world. The past work Americans have done all over the world has been successful. It is now time for Americans to change our role from vision setters, strategy developers, and front line evangelists to servants who equip national churches and leaders in the ways they request. We can share with them what we have learned from our experience. We can share stories about what God is doing and how he is doing it in other parts of the world in order to stimulate the imagination and discernment of national leaders, but we need to turn the leadership of the mission over to nationals and their people and help them take their part of the world for Jesus.
When we ask for partnership we are not just asking for money. One church leader told me they wanted to partner with us because they don’t want to have to make every mistake themselves. He said, “You have made so many mistakes we would like to learn from you.” While he was half joking, he really meant that. National leaders recognize we have more experience in cross cultural missions and they want the benefit of our experience. They value our contribution and at times will want help with funding, but they want relationships that are spiritual and reciprocal but not patriarchal. They want to bless us and be blessed by us. When they come around, they aren’t just looking for money and when they ask for money they are not looking for bosses. I’ve heard very clearly, “We want your partnership but we don’t need you to rescue us.”
We have a unique and valid way of reading scripture in our culture that you won’t always understand. One of the great things about scripture is that it has the power to make connections with every culture that yield rich and powerful meanings that can be missed in others. It is one thing to share principles for a healthy reading of scripture, but it is another to limit scripture to what makes sense to westerners. The Bible was written in a middle-eastern culture that is much more like the less developed parts of our world than it is like the highly developed, individualistic, secular west. Just because we have not seen things in our Bibles does not mean those meanings are not there. This is one area where the western church needs the Christians of the rest of the world to help us overcome our blind spots. We stand to gain as much from international partnerships as do our brothers and sisters around the world.

The Dangerous Myth of Unconditional Love

2011-10-27T14:28:00.001-05:00

I’ve seen it over and over. Engaged couples come in for pre-marital counseling with Bambi eyes glistening with warmth as they look at each other like children before Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. They are sure the love they feel is so strong nothing could take it down. Every warning you give them about the importance of nurturing love or marriage coming in a box marked “assembly required” washes over them leaving no trace. They don’t hear it or feel it. They are convinced their love is unconditional. Nothing can change it.

Give it a couple of years and they begin to know better. But that doesn’t keep people from getting mad about it and feeling duped and resentful that love is failing them. Many of us have the attitude that other people, especially our church and family, should love us unconditionally. Regardless of how we behave, if they really love us they will always forgive us and take us back despite the hurt we have caused them. Christians are bad about beating each other up with the “you are supposed to forgive me” defense. “I said I’m sorry so you have to forgive me and take me back.” Whoa there big fella, you may be writing checks on an overdrawn account. There is “should” and there is “is.” It may not be as simple as you are making things.

I think Lyle Lovett captured this harsh reality best in his song “God Will.” You can hear it live on YouTube here. I recommend it for deep contemplation for everyone in a marriage, all considering marriage, or just anyone in any family relationship.

Who keeps on trusting you
When you've been cheating
And spending your nights on the town
And who keeps on saying that he still wants you
When you're through running around
And who keeps on loving you
When you've been lying
Saying things ain't what they seem
God does
But I don't
God will
But I won't
And that's the difference
Between God and me

So who says he'll forgive you
And says that he'll miss you
And dream of your sweet memory
God does
But I don't
God will
But I won't
And that's the difference
Between God and me

Here is a hard truth to hear that you need to know: God is the only one who is truly capable of unconditional love. All human love is much less robust. Human love, even from the best of us, requires nourishment and care. It is breakable and exhaustible. It should not be that way, but it is. The love of a parent for a child is often stronger and wears longer than romantic love, but all human love has an end point if pushed far enough. Some people, particularly those who know the Lord well and have been transformed deeply by him, have a more elastic love that can endure great abuse and remain. Other people’s love is like the morning dew in West Texas—in an hour it will be gone. We approximate God’s love to varying degrees, but none of us really replicates it fully. When we speak of unconditional human love it is a more or less, not a yes or no.

Even with God, unconditional love is very costly and painful. Read God’s breaking and vacillating heart in Hosea to get a picture of how hard it is for God to love us at times. Yet, he does and never gives up on us even when he would like to and his reason tells him he should. God may love us without condition, but he doesn’t love us without pain and without struggle. Isn’t that the message of the cross. The Rock band Nazareth was right, “love hurts.” If you aren’t willing to be hurt, don’t bother looking for love. It comes with the territory.

As hard as it is for us to accept, even for deeply mature followers of Jesus, there is an end point beyond which love simply escapes us. We may wish it was still there, but we fail love even if love itself does not fail. Love is too strong a trait for humans to fully embody it. It is divine and we are not. The good news is that God can raise the dead and recreate lost or failed love if we trust him and give him room to act. We can will ourselves to remain in a place where God can raise a dead love, but we can’t command love in ourselves or demand it from others. It is an act of God’s grace.

As unwelcome as this may be to some, I think it critical to understand. You must take care of your love relationships. You must invest in them and not feel that you are going above and beyond the expected to do so. You cannot take love for granted and then act surprised when it dissipates. You are not being mistreated when expected to invest in your marriage and do the things that build love. The same is true of all love relationships. Your children may never stop wanting your love, but your ability to convince them of your love has a decaying shelf life.

Here is the point: you cannot relax and be the worst version of your jerky self at home and expect your family to be glad to see you. You need to give your best self to the people who matter most. If the people you work with think more highly of you than the people you live with, you probably don’t get this. Minister, if your church thinks you are wonderful and your family thinks they are deluded, you probably don’t get this. But you will. Give it time. You will. It won’t be pretty. Better still, invest in your primary relationships and don’t presume on the frailty of human love always to be there when you finally being attending to it. “Someday” is a myth also.

Is God an Engineer or a Chess Master? Why I Don’t….Part 4

2011-10-25T11:17:00.001-05:00

Can we over estimate God’s greatness? In one way, that would be impossible. The Bible clearly affirms God has all power at his disposal. He can do anything he choses at any time. Also, as the creator of all that is, he is ultimately responsible for this world and all that happens in it. He may not owe us an accounting, but he has to account to himself and he seems concerned to display his character to the heavenly hosts as well.

However, I think we can we over-estimate God in some respects. As I was preparing to write this post, I ran across a blog by Richard Beck which captured much of what I wanted to say much better than I can say it. You can read it here. It is interesting that this comes from a psychologist, because I think there is a relationship between the popularity of Calvinistic views of God’s sovereignty and psychological needs of the masses. When the world goes through periods of rapid discontinuous change that shake the foundations of society and create a sense of great disequilibrium, there seems to be a tendency to turn to a high view of God’s control of the world. It’s OK, we reassure ourselves. God’s in control. The same thing often happens when people go through tragedy. We may not understand this, we say, but God is in control and has a purpose he will explain one day. This works for many on an emotional and psychological level, at least temporarily.

Calvin and his early disciples, who lacked his depth and subtlety, lived during the transition from the medieval feudalistic world to the modern world. It was a time of great anxiety and unprecedented rapid transition. We are living through a similar shift that is rocking our world and creating the same need to reaffirm God is in control. If we start with that premise, we can follow the logic of God’s control into places that begin to conflict with other things God says about his relationship to us.

The biblical writers affirm two sides of a paradox that cannot be ultimately resolved in our limited minds: God is the sovereign ruler of the universe and God has given human beings free will to act in his world. All bad theologies related to this issue come from letting go of one of these poles and clinging to the other. I believe we have to cling tenaciously to both and learn to live with mystery. This requires humility, but that is also a virtue.

However, in the effort to make God’s greatness the controlling issue, Christians have at times ended up denying any meaningful definition of human free will. They end up with a God who is an engineer. He designs and builds the world and controls everything in it down to the last detail. Everything runs like a machine as he designed it. That would make God great but it might keep him from being good. But I think the Biblical view of God makes him even greater. In this perspective, God is more like a chess master who knows the game and opponent so well that he can predict how the game will go. It matters not what moves his opponent make, he can accurately predict and counter anything thrown at him. He can also describe how the game will go ahead of time and he knows he will ultimately win and can even tell us how he will win. But he is not forcing his opponent to act in a certain way. This, to me at least, is a greater God. A great playwright or novelist may compose a captivating story. However, entering the story, giving the characters the freedom to speak and act as they choose, and getting the story to turn out as you plan takes a bigger God.

Where most Calvinistic views of God break down, to me, is by failing to account for the amazing respect God has for those made in his image. Let me illustrate. In a response to my second post in this series, someone wrote the following:

Then there is Bayle’s famous analogy:
“There is no good mother who, having given her daughters permission to go to a dance, would not revoke that permission if she were assured that they would succumb to temptations and lose their virginity there. And any mother who, knowing for sure that this would come to pass, allowed them to go to the dance … would at the very least, bring upon herself the just charge that she loved neither her daughters nor chastity.”

Here is my problem with this analogy. What if the daughter is an adult rather than an adolescent under her parents direct supervision? What if the daughter is a thirty-two year old professional living on her own? Is the mother’s response then appropriate? Will it produce a positive result? Hardly. God treats us like adults and shows the proper restraint parents of adult children show. He teaches us his ways. He tells us the consequences of the potential choices before us. Then he allows us to make our choices and live with the natural results. However, he is ready to rescue us and redeem us at the moment we repent and ask for his help and he has all the power he needs to do it. According to this analogy, the father of the prodigal should have followed him to the far country and kept him out of the casinos and whore houses. But that isn’t how Jesus’ story goes is it?

So, here is the deal. God’s greatness is ultimate and unchallenged. However, as followers of Jesus we know something else. God chooses to restrain his power to create room for us to act in freedom. Not only does that make love possible, it makes real relationships possible. Yet, God loses nothing in the end because he knows how he is going to redeem and restore all things. We may not understand how God will do all this, but he does and that is all that matters.

Peter Pan Christians: Why I Don’t Pray…Part 3

2011-10-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

I know too many followers of Jesus who just don’t want to grow up. They are spiritual Peter Pans who want to enjoy the early stages of the spiritual life forever so they don’t have to face adult accountability. I understand. I can even give you a set of proof-texts for this mentality. After all, how many times did Jesus tell us we need to be like children to enter the Kingdom of God? But then, Paul has to go and tell us that he is in strenuous labor until we all become mature in Christ. He urges us to grow beyond infancy so we can digest something beside milk.

So, when I hear people blaming everything they do on God, I get nervous. If God talks to you as often as your rice crispies, I envy you but I also doubt you. Through the centuries, devout followers of Jesus have spent countless years cultivating the ability to listen to God, yet some people get constant mental text messages from him from the point of conversion. Maybe they have a spiritual gift I didn’t get, but pardon me if I take pause.

To hear some Christians talk about what “God said” or “a God thing” you might conclude that a faithful disciple of Jesus never has to make a decision. He or she only has to ask God what to do and then do the God thing. Next thing you know, God get’s blamed for everything and no one can hold us accountable for anything. After all, who can argue with God? God has a specific will for every situation, so it would seem. Our only job is to listen to his constant communications, which I don’t seem to get, and do what he says. God turns lights green and opens up parking places at Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, he is deaf in the horn of Africa right now. But, fortunately for us, he is very attentive to the petty needs of suburban American Christians. (Lord please forgive my sarcasm, but I’m weak and frustrated).

Maybe my slip is showing, but what I hear in all these glib claims to be following God’s leading is an intentional effort to remain immature and avoid accountability. I know I’m painting with a broad brush and I don’t mean to beat up on anyone. However, this way of talking is harmful both to those intimidated believers who accept it as valid but don’t get such constant communication and to unbelievers who see through it and roll their eyes. In addition, people who talk like this often rebuke those who don’t follow their model with an attitude of spiritual superiority which is as petty as the ubiquitous childhood one-upmanship seen on every playground. The very arrogance and insensitivity this mentality fosters should give away its origin.

It sounds very pious to talk like this. It is anything but. It is in reality little more than rejecting God’s desire for us to grow up and develop the mind and character of Christ. If I understand God’s purpose, it is to re-create us in the image of Christ who is the perfected human we all were designed to be. Jesus came to restore our lost humanity by teaching us the way of submission to God and harmony with all creation. We grow up in Christ as we learn to think, feel, and act more like him, which happens by the Spirit’s power as we create access for God’s work in our life through the various avenues we often call spiritual disciplines.

God helps us to accomplish this maturation by forcing us to make decisions with real options in front of us. We are accountable for those decisions because they are freely chosen. It is the very process of making such decisions that helps us mature. We engage in the process of spiritual discernment to filter through our mixed motives and foolishness and listen to God’s wisdom through his word (including his statements and actions), his community, and our experience and reason (tempered by the former). However, God rarely gives us a clear “do this” answer because the process of make decisions is as essential to our development as is the butterfly’s breaking its own way out of a cocoon. The struggle is what strengthens us. This is how we become children of the free woman instead of children of the slave woman—to borrow language from Paul again.

Of course, all power ultimately comes from God and spiritual growth is really a process of learning to float rather than swim. We are developing the ability to hear God’s will and submit rather than merely do our own will. But God’s will is often not a railroad track so much as a buffet of good options we must sift among given principles rooted in God’s character. We need not fear making choices lest we get out of God’s will so badly that we can’t get back in. God is so great, that regardless of what choices we make, he can work through them and bring all things toward his intended end.

In my heritage, we have been so cautious to speak about God’s direction in our lives that some, hungry for a more active God, have over-reacted with a God who constantly tells us what to do. Oddly enough, God’s voice ends up sounding a lot like our own inner desires much of the time. I am not seeking to encourage a more human centered life. To the contrary, I am seeking to develop people who submit fully to God’s will and take full responsibility for their role in God’s economy. If God told us everything to do like a micro-managing parent, we would not grow up any more than an over-indulged child with a hovering parent.

Next installment: Is God an Engineer or a Chess Master?

Is God a Cruel Monster or Does He Just Look Like it? Why I Don’t…Part 2

2011-10-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

My concern about how we view God’s sovereignty and human free will is not driven by an academic concern, despite how it may have sounded in my previous blog post. Rather, it comes out of pastoral sensitivity I developed over more than two decades in local preaching ministry. I’ve just seen too many people’s pain amplified by bad theology masquerading as comfort. The comment from Deana on my last post captures it perfectly. When we assume that God’s sovereignty means everything that happens is his intentional will then we unwittingly make God look like a murdering monster to many people. We can try to hide this behind scriptures which remind us God’s ways are higher than our ways and we cannot understand his greatness or his plan. We can remind everyone that the pot can’t question the potter. I get that. I trust that, believe me. But here is my question, is the character of God which he has revealed to us commensurate with what we cannot understand? Does God reveal himself as love in Jesus and then act like the devil in ways we can’t understand? Does God reveal himself as just only to punish the innocent?

That is harsh language I know. But hear me out before writing me off. I might be able to accept that the death of a particular child (someone else’s that is) somehow fits into God’s grand scheme, though it makes me twist in revulsion. I accept that what looks like an evil to us can turn out to serve a greater good—though I cannot see how that justifies it. But, when you look at the totality of the evil and suffering in the world, it begins to strain all reason (which is God’s gift to us) to accept this as an explanation. People who say these things must be spending too much time in sanitized suburban America where death is rare and antiseptic. Believe me, it gets harder if you travel the world and see the suffering of the masses in person.

How do you look at the evils of the Rwandan genocide or the suffering of the civil war in Sudan in the last few decades and say, “This is God’s will?” I’ve been reading What Is The What by Dave Eggers in the last week or two. This first hand account of the Lost Boys of Sudan rips my heart out. Is this God’s will? If so, he is cruel beyond description, not love. He may not owe us anything and we have no claim on him, but how can we trust him to be loving? If God planned for this to happen, wanted this to happen, then he is not the person Jesus describes as his father.

How do we make sense of the great evil in the world? I like Paul’s language in Romans 8:18ff where he describes how an entire suffering universe trembles, waiting to be liberated from the bondage of decade and frustration that have been placed on it by the rejection of the reign (or control) of God. Paul describes an entire universe shaking with joyful anticipation of being liberated from horror when God’s redeeming work is done and his children are revealed with him in glory.

The message of the gospel is rooted in the understanding that the rightful king who has the power to force everyone to bow the knee and confess he is Lord has exercised restraint and created room for the creatures made in his image to act freely according to their will. The brokenness and suffering of the world are the result of the rejection of God’s will and reign, not expressions of them. We created this evil world, under the influence of the prince of darkness, not God. He has permitted it for a time, but he is fighting it now and has promised to redeem and restore it. When he does, the apostle says the suffering we experience now will not compare with the glory that will be revealed. I don’t understand exactly how God can do this, but I trust it. It’s the only thing that gives me hope in the face of the great evil in the world. This is hard enough to accept when we can’t fully understand it, but at least it makes sense in light of the way Jesus explains God to us. It makes the gospel meaningful. We work for the re-establishment of the reign of God. We appeal to people to recognize who truly is reigning on high even if he is restraining his power at this time to allow them to make real choses for which they will be held accountable

In the meantime, don’t tell me that the child dying of cancer, or the tsunami that hit Japan, or the famine in the horn of Africa are what God wants for his world. He may tolerate these things and even experience them with us, as in the cross, because of his respect for human free will and dignity—which blows my mind. He may work good through them, in spite of them, and triumph over them. But, don’t tell me that this is what God wanted for our world or God is doing it. That is not the God we meet in Jesus. He wants to remove, roll back, and redeem these evils. That is why everywhere Jesus went, the impact of sin and evil fled and wholeness was restored.

This has great implications for how we think about God and how we pray. It also has great implications for how we evangelize and disciple people. It shapes the way we try to comfort people in their pain. I understand the appeal of retreating into a thought of “This is all part of God’s mysterious will and one day will make sense to us” and on one level that may be true—but not the way it sounds on the surface. A poor understanding of God’s sovereignty has created untold faith crises for people, which were unnecessary and caused countless people to turn their back on a God who would intentionally torment them for his mysterious purposes. God is not the monster some make him out to be in their effort to make him look all-powerful. Jesus reveals to us that God’s power is displayed in weakness, in his willingness to hold back his power at times for a time.

So, with all respect to those who find comfort in wrapping all the world’s suffering in the blanket of God’s will, count me out. Don’t turn the God we meet in Jesus into a monster.

Next installment: Peter Pan Christians

Why I Don’t Pray for God to Reveal to Me What He Has Already Chosen, Part 1

2011-10-17T16:40:00.001-05:00

All my life I have been a prayer taster. I listen with a critical ear for good and bad theology. It’s really not helpful for my spiritual life, but it’s a habit I can’t break. I wish I wasn’t like this, but I don’t seem to be able to stop it. I try to understand the thinking behind the prayers I hear because the way we conceive of God shapes what we ask for and how we ask it, not to mention what we expect in return. This then shapes our expectations from God and action in the world. If you want to know what people really believe, listen to their prayers not their sermons or Bible classes.

It started when I was growing up and heard odd phrases in prayers that didn’t make sense to me. What was a “ready recollection” and why did we want the preacher to have one? Why not just ask God to speak through the preacher? Why would we ask God to “forgive us for the sins we committed since we last asked?” Is prayer like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch, removing all past mistakes but unable to impact mistakes in the future? If so, what happens if I get hit by a bus and die suddenly without asking for forgiveness for previously un-confessed sin? Will I go straight to Hell for un-forgiven sin? Also, why pray this at the beginning and end of the worship service? How much sinning have we been doing in worship? I could go on, but you understand. Ironically, I concluded that asking God to give the preacher a “ready recollection” was the way we asked God to help the preacher without sounding like we believed God actually spoke to people or through people. But, we are still asking for God to intervene and perform a miracle on the preacher’s brain even if it is a small one.

Today, I hear new prayer phrases that bother me. They come in various forms, but they always boil down to asking God to reveal to us something he has already decided for us. For example, “Lord help us find the man you’ve already chosen to be our next preacher.” Behind that request is a massive assumption that God has chosen one person to be the preacher and our only role is to recognized God’s will and give into it. We don’t have to make a decision or exercise our judgment, much less our preferences, we just have to discern God’s choice. This sounds very pious, but is it accurate? Is it an embrace of God’s will or an abandonment of responsibility?

This prayer assumes God predetermines some things but not others. For example, God predetermines who our preacher should be but does not predetermine who he will be. Only one choice is in God’s will, but we can get it wrong. I find that to be an odd set of beliefs about God. Why would he decide everything for us but then give us a role in the choice since he knows 99 times out of 100 we will get it wrong? If he has made the choice, how is he going to tell us? If he is going to use our wisdom and discernment, why does he bother to make the choice? If God so orders the future and we regularly mess it up, how can we ever get back on track once we are off? Do we spend most of life on God’s 2nd, 3rd, or 400th plan for us since we have missed so many decisions in the past? What is the point in God predetermining every decision for us when there is no way we will stay on it? Isn’t that an exercise in futility? Once we are off God’s will, how do we get back on since every decision changes the options in front of us and there is no going back to a previous decision?

What it really comes down to is the question of do we really have free will? Does God’s sovereignty mean that he controls everything in the universe and, therefore, everything that happens is his will? That seems to turn God into a monster and rob humanity of any real dignity or freedom. Or does God’s sovereignty really give us freedom to make choices? Does God leave some things up to our choice—meaning he hasn’t decided them? If so, how wide-spread are those choices? If God decides and controls everything, then why are we held responsible?

Since this is a really big subject, I’m going to take it in pieces and not be comprehensive. But I will say from the outset that, while I understand the appeal of the neo-Calvinism that is creeping its way into the churches of my heritage and is experiencing a revival throughout the evangelical world, I find it to be dangerous and not in keeping with the understanding of God of the Biblical writers. I believe in the Lordship of Jesus and sovereignty of God, but I don’t think this requires that God control everything that happens on earth right now. In fact, I think this is what the gospel is about: bringing all of creation back under the will of God so that it can be what God intended. The problem of sin is exactly the rejection of the rightful reign of God. What is the point of praying, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” if everything that happens is God’s will? Why invite people to accept Jesus as Lord if he is already controlling everything?

More in the coming days. In the meantime, I’m interested to hear examples of the kind of neo-Calvinism you hear in churches and how it strike you.

The Problem of Expertise Expanded

2011-10-14T14:49:00.001-05:00

In my last post, I described how expertise can harm the church. However, the implications are much wider and impact us at every level of our lives from the family to the nation. Let me explain some of what I mean.

If you really want to handicap your children, do everything for them and teach them “anything worth doing is worth doing right.” Teach them to believe “if you want to get anything done, you have to do it yourself.” Then teach them there is only one right way to do anything and make them do it your way. This will ensure they grow up feeling intimidated and afraid of failure. They will either rebel and break your heart or have their creativity and inner capacity crushed by your power. Either way, one day they will be forced to live without your overly-competent hovering presence. They will fear they can’t live up to your expectations and feel inadequate their whole life and probably underperform.

I’m guessing this is not what any of us want for our children, but too often we do it anyway. We can’t help ourselves. Many of us are perfectionists who can’t stand to turn a job over to others because they can’t measure up to our standards. Plus, we just don’t trust others. We also likely have an unhealthy need to feel needed. If we aren’t careful, we will cut off our children’s legs and then complain they can’t run.

Here are some key insights on leadership that impact people in all organizations from families to nations and have great implications for churches, church planting, and disciple-making.

The only way to learn to do something is to do it poorly first. If you don’t have permission to fail, you don’t have permission to try. Not everything worth doing is worth doing right, if by right you mean flawless or the way you like it. Some things just need to be done period. Requiring they be done “right” every time will only keep people from trying because they fear failure. It will also make them so preoccupied with “rightness” that they give minor things major time and attention and lose all sense of perspective. How many churches do you know like this?
The only way to learn to be a problem solver is to solve your own problems. When you are teaching other people, if you don’t let them use their own creativity to work out solutions to their challenges they will remain dependent on you forever and end up being just a poor copy of you. It is one thing to help someone you are training process options and evaluate likely outcomes. It is another thing to give them the “right answer” to every question. It is even worse if you only give your blessing when they come up with the “right answer” you prefer.
What we are told we easily forget, but what we discover we own for life. The human brain does not retain well what it does not learn by experience. Leading others through a process of discovery is more time consuming and requires more patience and humility from the teacher/parent/mentor, but is much more powerful in the long run. Do you want to teach quickly or well? One of my favorite elders reminded me all the time, “you are just going to have to let your children get their nose bloodied once in a while.” He is right.
If we don’t hand over leadership until someone is fully prepared, we never will. Why? Because no one is ever fully prepared - including you. Failure to entrust others with responsibility says more about us--our arrogance, anxiety, and perfectionism--than it does about how ready are our children or people we are training.
Setting a good example is worthless if you don’t build the confidence of those you teach. It is fairly easy to show someone how to do something. It is more difficult to convince them that they can do it well without you. It is even more difficult to convince them that they can develop it into something better. But, if Jesus could tell his disciples that they would do even greater things than he did, can’t we inspire confidence in the people we train in God’s ability to use them in profound ways?
Good leaders work themselves out of a job. Your job as a parent/leader is to replicate yourself in others who will out-perform you. The measure of how good you are at your job is based on how little others need you not how much they need you.
Don't do anything you can turn over to those you are training. If your children can make their own lunch, why aren’t they? If they can clean their own rooms, why aren’t they? There may be a good reason, but it should not be because they “aren’t ready” or “shouldn’t have to do this yet.” It is not love to do for others what they can do for themselves. It is fostering dependency. If those you are leading to Christ can share what they are learning with others, why ask them to bring others to hear it from you? Why not have them sharing what they are learning as they learn? It will reinforce their learning and develop their teaching skills. It will train them to be trainers. The quicker you can turn responsibility over to others and shift from modeling to coaching, the better. David Watson says the role of the leader is to model, equip, watch, and leave, with leave being the most critical element. Most of us want to believe we are more essential than we are. Let’s get over ourselves and get out of other people’s way.

While, these principles have important applications for raising children, they are just as valid for passing on faith and planting sustainable indigenous-led faith communities. If Paul could leave things unfinished and expect Titus to complete them, can’t we? Leadership and parenting are not about having a permanent position but about passing on ability to others. We need leaders to practice more humility, restraint, and trust in others if we want to pass on the legacy of faith and meaningful life we have received from those who went before us.

How Expertise Can Hurt the Church

2011-10-11T16:48:00.001-05:00

“It’s about time we treated preachers like professionals. They have the education for it now and we need to trust them and let them provide the leadership they are capable of delivering.” These words, or something similar, came from the mouth of one of my elders in recent years and they were music to my ears. Like most preachers in Churches of Christ, I had struggled with elders who wanted to keep the preacher in his place and remind me that they, not me, were in charge. Like many preachers, I chaffed at this when I worked hard to get multiple graduate degrees and a lifetime of experience in ministry, and was still treated like I was no more knowledgeable than any one else. When the church is your life day in and day out and you’ve spent ridiculous amounts of money and time preparing to serve well, it is hard to take an “awe-shucks, what do I know?” attitude into an elder’s meeting and sit on your better judgment while people with none of that training, who spent most of their time in secular pursuits (not that this is wrong, mind you) act like you don’t have good sense and they know better. I wondered at times how they would feel if I showed up at their place of employment and in short order began telling them how to do their job.

I’m not saying these feelings are entirely justified. There is plenty of pride and power-hunger on display in the above paragraph, but there is truth as well. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to do ministry with excellence. I got four college degrees and attended almost every professional development event I could. I tried to stay current in my field and never get comfortable with my past methods. I pushed our church to be all it could be and tried to bring all of my knowledge and skills to bear on every situation to the best of my ability. With apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, I was the very model of a modern major minister. I was the kind of preacher that many elders resisted. I felt called not just to preach but to lead. I wanted the elders to empower me to lead the church (with appropriate accountability and collaboration on vision, of course) while they focused on shepherding. I was blessed to have elders who granted me the ability to do just that most of the time. There was much about this model which was good and should be accepted and endorsed in my view.

Then again, there is the flip side. It turns out that most of your greatest weaknesses are the backsides of your strengths. This is true for individuals, families, organizations, and nations. It is certainly true of churches. If we are going to have strong leaders then we have to be aware of the weaknesses that come hard-wired with those strengths. Below is a list of ways having an “expert” in your church can be harmful if not taken into account and addressed with great intensity.

Leadership Atrophy – When the vision for the congregation is generated by one person, regardless of how well he sells it, the ability of the rest of the leadership and the church as a whole to engage in spiritual discernment and collective decision-making begins to dissipate. Everyone begins to over-rely on the preacher and he becomes a bottleneck. Everyone becomes afraid to make decisions without hearing his opinion. It does not require that the preacher seek to control everything. It is just that the confidence of others to understand what they need to do and make good decisions ebbs away and the preacher finds himself being pulled into everything in an increasingly helpless organization. Good leaders must intentionally push decisions as close to the ground as possible and facilitate discernment, vision development, and decision making in others while making themselves increasingly unnecessary. This is counter intuitive and won’t happen by human nature which seeks to control and expand personal territory. The church will rarely help with this. While there will always be some who seek power and challenge the “person in charge,” those people are rarely healthy. The people who can help the church the most rarely assert themselves and tend to retreat before the professional preacher.

Intimidation Retardation –- When you have a highly skilled and knowledgeable leader in an organization, he or she tends to intimidate others and retard their development. This is a huge problem in the mission field and new church plants, but it applies in long established churches as well. The members of the congregation look at the preacher and think, “I could never be like him/her.” Everyone wants the best spokesman and most credible person in the church to be the advocate of their cause or ministry. Before long, the members of the church lose confidence in their ability even to read scripture for themselves without a word from Brother _________ who becomes the voice of God to them. You can hear it in the comments people make about sermons. Instead of commenting on what they heard from the Lord in the Word, they comment on how excellent their preacher is or what a great sermon that was. They attach their sense of the divine encounter to the visible leader through whom they heard it. The more skilled the preacher is, the more dangerous he can be to his church because he unwittingly prevents them from growing up and becoming self-feeders. They crawl up into the high-chair every week and open their mouths waiting for him to dish in tasty and nourishing food. That is arrested development. Preachers should be measured by how well they equip people not to need them, instead of by how much devotion they create to their weekly ministry.

Celebrity Culture – While I could wax an elephant on this, I can refer you to a better resource mentioned in a previous blog found here. Suffice it to say, churches should not be known for their preacher but for their Lord and his work in their community.

Boast or Bust – The “professional preacher,” as it has developed in most churches, tends to lead to two conclusions. It can lead to growth and glory or decline and disenchantment. If it doesn’t boom it usually busts. Either end presents a massive challenge to the key leader. Like sports coaches, the preacher gets too much credit when the team wins and too much blame when the team loses. Without realizing it, churches actively undermine the character of their preacher by feeding his ego and tempting him to be a megalomaniac when things are going well or a self-loathing neurotic when they are not. The pressure to produce a “winner” is intense and not just because people care about the mission of God or the lost. Americans want to be part of something successful because it feeds their insatiable appetite for success. Preachers are constantly crashing because they’ve lost their souls in their own press clippings or they are crushed under the weight of organizations they cannot turn around by themselves. The price of this toll road should make us think twice before taking it. What measures are in place to provide appropriate checks on the minister’s spiritual life and help the church perform some sort of realistic assessment that isn’t all tied to the preacher or the bottom line? How do you define a win? Who gets the glory? You better think these through well.

Burnout Track – Without meaning too, the over-professionalization of ministry has contributed greatly to burn-out. It isn’t hard to understand how, after reading the list above is it? I’m convinced that one of the reasons that 75% of people in ministry say they would get out if they had a good option is because we have focused too much on what the experts have to offer and have not empowered the church to be the church. What if the preacher’s job description was the same as everyone else in the church: to be a disciple who makes disciples with the gifts he has been given? What if preachers were measured not by the attendance of their churches but by the number of disciple-makers they were creating? What if the preacher’s job was to make himself as unnecessary as possible as soon as possible so that if he was removed tomorrow it would not harm the mission of the church much?

Don’t hear me calling for a return to a model of churches run by a board of elders who have no real training and lord their power over the preacher. Far from it. However, the current model of most churches is not working well and it needs to be assessed honestly and where we are breaking down, we need to make systemic adjustments. I believe God raises up strong leaders to serve his people. He always has and I expect he always will. But we need to look at what our model of leadership produces in the congregation and for the leader. If it is facilitating health, great. If it is constantly breaking down and fostering sickness, well, we might better face that honestly. Remember, your system is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting.

Giving a Little Love to the TSA

2011-10-06T15:53:00.001-05:00

I hate dealing with the TSA. I fly a lot these days and I’m a little worried about the love affair the TSA has with me. They are always pulling me out of line to touch me in intimate ways. I’ve tweeted about it too often I suppose. My favorite tweets about the TSA were “The TSA has given a whole new meaning to ‘turn the other cheek.’” and “There are 13 countries in which a TSA agent and I would now be married.”

My problem isn’t just with the pat downs, it is with the silly application of rules. You can’t take a tube of toothpaste in a carry-on bag unless it originally held three ounces or less—regardless of how many ounces are in it now. Carry a nearly empty four ounce tube through and it will be confiscated and thrown away. I have had the TSA take away multiple pocket knives I accidently had on my person even though none of them had a blade long enough to be a danger to anyone. They have taken away not only toothpaste but also shaving cream and hair gel for dubious reasons—sometimes just because I couldn’t get my baggy fully closed with all my liquid items inside. Now, I can go without shaving. That’s no big deal. But taking way my hair gel is like kicking a cane out of a crippled man’s hand. Do you know how hard it is to find hair gel in London? It is harder than finding a British orthodontist and that’s saying something.

I have to admit, I don’t take all this in stride. A few weeks ago, when I had my shaving cream taken and thrown away because it was busting my baggy, I waited until the agent’s head was turned, reached in the trash can, retrieved my Edge and put it back in my bag. I know I took the chance of getting shot on sight, but sometimes you have to stand up to Big Brother. I’ll be telling that story to my grandchildren for years to come. I’m sure they will pass on the story to their grandchildren after them. Did you ever hear about the time GrandDan stuck it to the man . . . ?

But, after my most recent intimate moment with my favorite government bureaucracy, I was convicted that I need to stop looking at the people in the blue uniforms as government bureaucrats and look at them as people. Inside that uniform is a single mom who had to get up early, get a child or two ready for school, and then get to work at some ridiculous hour where she will be treated at best like a machine or piece of landscape and at worst like a Nazi. No one wants to see him all day. Everyone hates dealing with her. He gets griped out, yelled at, and insulted all day long. Most of the eyes she sees are rolling or glaring. He doesn’t want to make my life harder, he just wants to earn a living. She just wants to take care of that child, keep her bills paid, and keep someone from blowing up a plane and killing hundreds of people. If the rules are stupid, it’s not his fault. She didn’t make the the rules, she just has to follow them or get fired.

What if I thought about my mission in life while I was on my way to talk to some church about God’s mission? What if the person in that uniform saw on my face warm eyes and a smile? Perhaps the TSA workers enjoy being talked to like a human being with a story. Maybe they like to called by name and treated with some sympathy. What if I chose to be a blessing and a surprise moment of encouragement? What if I prayed for the TSA worker before I spoke to her? What if I tried to encourage him? That isn’t evangelism exactly. There isn’t time for that. But should that keep me from being a demonstration of God’s love to another person made in his image?

What if many followers of Jesus made a decision to be a blessing to the hated TSA? What if the TSA workers noticed this difference and began to inquire why the difference was there? What if the TSA workers became attracted to Christians, like the tax-collectors were attracted to Jesus, because we treated them differently from everyone else? It could happen, but I’m not helping it happen as long as I’m out there feeding TSA disdain. So, I guess I better stop it. I still don’t like be fondled by the blue man group, but if I reframe that experience from a Kingdom perspective, I think I’ll tolerate it much better and I might just help someone else.

Is Preaching the Most Dangerous Profession?

2011-10-04T08:40:00.001-05:00

I just read a frighteningly accurate and painful description of the spiritual dangers that go with being a preacher/pastor in America today. I felt like Mark Galli of Christianity Today had been stalking my mind for years. He puts into words what I have been feeling but didn’t know how to describe with precision. He explains what I found so difficult about the preaching life and why I now feel liberated. I confess to getting caught up in the forces he describes. I battled them with valor, at least in my own mind, but in time they broke me down into someone I did not like very much and I just wanted out. I felt less like a real person each year and more like an actor on a stage playing a part demanded of me. Retaining your integrity in the contemporary church is a massive challenge and I respect the guys who do it. However, there is something wrong with the model and I don’t mean the mega-church. I mean the church which relies so much on one person. Here is a key passage and a link to the full article.

What makes the pastor's job even more spiritually vulnerable is the expectation that he also be the cathartic head of the church—someone with whom members can identify and live through vicariously. Someone who articulates their fears and hopes, someone to whom they can relate—at a distance. This is key, because the pastor has time to relate to very, very few members. Thus it is all the more important that he be able to communicate in public settings the personable, humble, vulnerable, and likable human being he is.

Thus, preaching in the modern church has devolved into the pastor telling stories from his own life. The sermon is still grounded in some biblical text, and there is an attempt to articulate what that text means today. But more and more, pastors begin their sermons and illustrate their points repeatedly from their own lives. Next time you listen to your pastor, count the number of illustrations that come from his life, and you'll see what I mean. The idea is to show how this biblical truth meets daily life, and that the pastor has a daily life. All well and good. But when personal illustrations become as ubiquitous as they have, and when they are crafted with pathos and humor as they so often are, they naturally become the emotional cornerstone of the sermon. The pastor's life, and not the biblical teaching, is what becomes memorable week after week.

Again, this is not because the pastor is egotistical. It's because, again, we demand this of our preachers. Preachers who don't reveal their personal lives are considered, well, impersonal and aloof. Share a couple of cute stories about your family, or a time in college when you acted less than Christian, and people will come up to you weeks and months later to thank you for your "wonderful, vulnerable sermons." Preachers are not dummies, and they want approval like everyone else. You soon learn that if you want those affirmative comments—and if you want people to listen to you!—you need to include a few personal and, if possible, humorous stories in your sermon.

The inadvertent effect of all this is that most pastors have become heads of personality cults. Churches become identified more with the pastor—this is Such-and-Such's church—than with anything larger. When that pastor leaves, or is forced to leave, it's devastating. It feels a like a divorce, or a death in the family, so symbiotic is today's relationship between pastor and people.

No wonder pastors complain about how lonely and isolated they feel. The success and health of a very demanding institution have been put squarely on their shoulders. They love the adrenaline rush of success—who doesn't? But they also live in dread that they may fail. Wise pastors recognize that unique temptations will assault them, and some set up accountability structures to guard their moral and spiritual lives. They try to have people around them who can speak truth to their power. But in reality, since this is an accountability structure that they have set up and whose membership they determine, in the end it can only have limited effectiveness.

For more click here.

The God Who Lowers His Head

2011-09-26T12:51:00.001-05:00

I was in a meeting with the head of World Vision and some colleagues in Savannakhet, Laos a month or so back when I saw something foreign to my world. A young woman carried in a tray with cups of hot tea. As she carried it in, she was stooped over in a very awkward way. I don’t know how she was able to carry the tea tray while walking in that manner. She walked all around the coffee table and placed a cup of tea in front of each of us while keeping her head very low to the ground at all times. It looked so painful my neck started hurting with sympathy pain. After serving each of us, she slipped from the room without a sound as if she had never been present. It was like pulling your finger out of a bucket of water. It left no impression. No one had acknowledged her in any way. Her boss, a very dignified and formal man from India, never stopped talking to notice she had been there, which is exactly how she seemed to prefer it.

After the meeting was over, my co-worker Mark Hooper, who is our Asia expert at MRN, asked me if I noticed the servant girl. “Yeah, what was up with that?” I asked. “Notice that her head never got higher than her boss’s?” he pointed out. “That is how she shows proper respect in this culture. He is her superior and that is expected here.”

Fascinating. I come from a culture where no one is expected to show such deference to anyone. We shake hands (to show we have no weapons so I’m told) but in Asia people greet each other by bowing. That wouldn’t fly in Texas were no man bows to anyone. In fact, the whole idea of bowing is insulting to Americans. “I’m just as good as anybody else,” We say. We find caste systems that rank people’s value in such obvious ways to be blatantly offensive. Most of the world is not that way. The world Jesus entered was certainly not that way. There was a clear ranking of social importance and Jesus did not enter one of the upper castes. He was born into a poor carpenter’s home. Carpenters were only slightly ahead of dirty shepherds in social rank. Yet, when Jesus came into our world, it was as a blue collar worker void of status.

All through his life, Jesus was one who lowered his head before others until it was figuratively cut off. In the words of Philippians 2, he “emptied himself” and “took on the form of a servant” in a world where being a servant meant more than working for wages. In doing so, he showed us something about God that we could never see otherwise: God is humble. The awesome creator of the universe is not a megalomaniac. He is not a narcissist. He is not self-absorbed. He is a humble servant who seeks to lift others up not force them to their faces in obeisance. God does not require worship to satisfy his flagging ego. We need to worship him to get our heads straight with reality.

Not only did Jesus reveal something stunning about God’s nature, he also blew up the justification for all caste systems. Jesus gave dignity to all humanity by coming as a low class human. Jesus raised up the lowly and brought down the proud, just as his mother prophesied he would do in her song (Luke 1). Because Jesus lowered his head to the grave, he taught us that no human should have to lower their head by force to any one but God. Yet, all who follow him freely lower our heads to all people in spirit just as he did by habit. Jesus made being a servant the highest position there is. After all, if God lowers his head, who dares keep a stiff neck except those who just don’t understand?

Miserable in Paradise

2011-09-22T17:29:00.001-05:00

My sweet wife and I got to check an item off our bucket list last week. We went to Hawaii for our 24th anniversary. We saved up air miles and money for a few years and then went on a cruise around the islands that we had dreamed about for a long time. It was spectacular and we were deeply grateful for the opportunity. We were both keenly aware of how blessed we were to have the opportunity to live a week that the vast majority of people living today or ever in the history of humanity could never dream of experiencing. It is hard not to feel guilty at times when the reality of my wealth vis-à-vis most of the world is so obvious. I manage to avoid feeling rich much of the time, but going on a cruise around the Hawaiian Islands made me feel as dirty rich as visiting impoverished countries. Amazingly, I tolerated the burden of my blessings with remarkable aplomb.

Yet, there was one feature of our trip that bothered me constantly and which I didn’t expect: the constant complaining of people on the ship. It didn’t come from the majority of the floating folks around us, who were in a great mood, but it was a constant feature from some. The food wasn’t good enough (I know?!). The excursions were too crowded. The rooms were too small. The restaurants were too busy. And, worst of all, the cruise line confiscated all the alcohol from the luggage for the duration of the trip so they could have a monopoly on the party market. People were incensed and actually shouted threats and accusations of “communist!!” at the poor crew who had to take the wine and liquor. I started to tell one guy who was fuming that I had been in a communist country last month and it didn’t resemble the cruise ship in the least, but I decided better of it.

I’m not sure why I was surprised at all the complaining because I’ve lived long enough and worked with the public enough to know how ungrateful people can be, especially when they are privileged. Maybe it was the recent trips I had made to Africa and Laos that got to me, but I kept wanting to say to people, “Really?! You are complaining?! Do you know where you are? You are on a cruise ship! In Hawaii! You are being pampered, entertained, and fed some of the worlds best food constantly. You will all probably gain ten pounds this week. You are among the .00000001% most privileged people on the planet, for goodness sake!

I was also struck by the two words everyone learned to speak in the Hawaiian language: aloha (hello, goodbye) and mahalo (thank you). It dawned on me that these are always the first two things we learn to say when we visit any other country. Next to learning how to meet and greet others, the most important words we need to learn are gracias, danke, obrigado, arigato, much obliged, or just plain thank you.

“Get some perspective,” I wanted to shout at the constant complainers. But I didn’t. I just felt judgmental and superior. Then I remembered how often I complain about my life when I don’t get what I want or my inflated expectations are not met. I thought about how often I complain about traffic when I own two cars. I was convicted about how much I complain about road construction when I live in a country where the government constantly upgrades the roads. I complain about the heat or cold when I have central heat and air conditioning and a sprinkler system. I complain about the airlines when I get to sit in a chair in the air while someone brings me a nice cold beverage as I work with my laptop, play games on my iPhone, listen to music on my iPod, or read my e-reader as I jet around the planet at speeds that would boggle the minds of my great grandparents. I complain about how fat I’m getting because I eat so much.

“Really? “I had to ask myself. “You are judging these people when you are so spoiled yourself?” “Well at least I’m not complaining about the cruise around Hawaii not being good enough,” I replied to myself (rather put out with myself for being so hard on me when I was feeling so virtuous). But I just looked at myself with that look I’ve come to hate so much until I just couldn’t face myself any more and admitted I was unjustly throwing the first stone.

So here is my new pledge. I’m going to cultivate gratitude. For reasons I’ll never understand, God has blessed me wildly and I don’t deserve anything from him. I don’t have to feel guilty about that, but I am responsible for what I do with it and that starts by acknowledging the truth about my status, being thankful, and putting a stop to all whining and complaining.

So, if you catch me feeling sorry for myself or grumbling, don’t cut me any slack. Just ask me why I’m so miserable in my riches. If that doesn’t shut me up, you have the permission to just smack me a good one.

Will Our Faith Have Children?

2011-09-08T09:49:00.001-05:00

Most studies indicate the percentage of Americans who claim to go to church each week has hung around 40-43% for the last 30 years. The problem is that the numbers are generated by telephone polls where people vastly over-estimate (or just lie) about their church attendance. According to one 2003 actual hard count, only 18% of adults attend weekly worship in the US and that number is dropping precipitously. Each generation has a lower percentage attending church. According to some projections, by 2025 local church attendance will be cut in half reaching European levels of 9-10%.

Here are some other facts that should get our attention. 80% of the money given to churches comes from people 55 and older. The number of Americans with “no religious preference” doubled in the last decade. Thom Rainer’s research shows a declining percentage of people who identify as “born again’ by generation: 65% Builders (born before 1946), 35% Boomers (1946-1964), 15% Busters (1965-1976), 4% Bridgers (1976-1994).

Dawson McAlister, a national youth ministry specialist, says that 90% of kids active in HS youth groups do not go to church by the 2nd year of college. Several sources are predicting that only 4% of today’s youth will be in church as adults. Increasingly, younger generations fail to see the point of church. In his very important book, Unchristian, Gabe Lyons says that his research reveals that emerging adults typically view church as hypocritical, insensitive, homophobic, sheltered, overly political, and judgmental. It isn’t that the young among us don’t believe in God or even in Jesus. Jesus is very popular. Young adults are interested in spirituality. They just don’t see the connection between Jesus and what happens in most churches. Add to this that Christian colleges are struggling to get preaching majors. The majority of people studying for ministry now say they do not want to work for established churches. They are looking for alternative expressions of Christian community, evangelism, and ministry.

Yet, at the same time, the emerging generation is more interested in transforming the world than any in recent memory. They are sacrificially minded and globally focused. Gabe Lyons calls them “Restorers” in his latest book, The Next Christians. They are rejecting a fearful Christian ghetto culture that retreats and hides from the world. They also reject the angry cultural crusader mentality that declares war on the forces of secularism and tries to “take back America for God” by way of the path of power politics. Instead, young believers are opting for a discipleship that engages the world in redemptive ways. This is not what the emerging generation sees in most churches and they are voting with their feet.

The decline of church attendance has been obscured by the emergence of mega-churches. The explosion of a few massive multi-site, multi-thousand member organizations only masks a deeper reality. Americans may be moving from one kind of church to another, but overall our numbers are in decline. Some churches have adjusted well to the religious market and they have grown. But, with a few exceptions, their gains have largely come from losses of other churches. This is growth by cannibalism. While it is hard to know how to view such churches (you can make a case both ways and they are hardly monolithic), the reality is that in the grand scheme, the mega-church alone is not the sole answer.

Perhaps even more disturbing are studies (e.g., from the Barna organization) which indicate people who attend church show little or no measurable difference in behavior from the rest of the world in morals or lifestyle. American church attenders have a greater awareness of sin, but don’t live noticeably better. This raises the question, does church as we experience it really produce much that is meaningful?

Unfortunately, in the face of these trends, most churches seem to be preoccupied with the wrong question: i.e., how can we do church so people will come join us? How can we do ______ without running off the members we already have? How can we change the church into something that will attract unbelievers without running off all the people we have who will pay for it? We want a quick fix with a new program or better event. We’ve tried to update the worship and make it relevant. We’ve tried to find out the “felt needs” of the un-churched and offer to meet those needs in some religious form with a program so they will come to us. We have tried endless big events to draw in outsiders and then tried the bait and switch gambit. We keep thinking if we can figure out how do church events better, the un-churched will want to come join us. We are looking for an institutional fix. We have had no end of big ideas and programs designed to “reach out.” We’ve created endless time-consuming, expensive programs that have worn out our people.

What is the result of all of this tinkering and the tension it has created in churches? George Barna reports that over the last decade, we’ve had zero gain in the percentage of Christians in America. In fact, we are in serious decline. This is despite the fact that churches have spent $500 billion on domestic ministry during that same ten year period. Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results. ” Does anyone seriously think that more of the same is going to finally create a breakthrough? Really?

While this all sounds depressing, I am of the opinion that we are in a time of great opportunity and the future of the Kingdom of God is actually going to be very good in North America after a period of shake up. I’m optimistic that American Christians will eventually start asking the right questions. In fact is has already started. Already there is evidence that churches are beginning to think bigger and reexamine our models and approaches. Most of what our churches are doing isn’t working. Now is the time for us to rethink what we mean by church, look at the places in the world where Christian faith is exploding with growth, and learn from what God is doing there about how we can join him here. That means the church in the US needs to learn from the churches outside historic Christendom. We need to study the underground church in China. We need to learn from Africa, and Latin America. We need to learn from the fast-growing movements of simple churches outside our culture. This is, in fact, going on even if it is not visible everywhere.

As we review our models of church inherited from Christendom and reimagine church as people rather than place, I believe we need to think in terms of both/and instead of either/or. Most churches probably cannot change deep enough and fast enough to recapture the disenchanted emerging adults, but they can be the best version of what they are and minister to those who are attracted to that model while simultaneously investing in alternative models of discipleship communities that can outgrow and outlive them. This means that churches need multi-tier approaches to making disciples and need to define success by kingdom impact rather than institutional growth. We need to plant new churches with new definitions of what we mean by church.

If we will stop forcing what isn’t working and think bigger and less selfishly, if we will redefine success outside of institutional terms, then more churches can have a serious impact on the world for the sake of the Kingdom of God. The time has come. The facts are in. It is time to stop fighting our churches to make them something they are not and can’t be and think bigger, more creatively, and join what God is doing instead of asking God to bless what we are doing.

What If Churches Had to Take the Hippocratic Oath?

2011-09-06T16:18:00.001-05:00

This morning, several of us at MRN were privileged to spend time with an impressive church leader from a country in Asia. He comes from a prominent family with long ties in politics and was studying law in preparation for a career in government when he became a follower of Jesus. Now he is working as a bi-vocational church planter and is looking into ways to further his knowledge and skills by spending some time studying in the US. He has made huge sacrifices for the kingdom of God.

However, in talking to him, we learned about some of the disasters in his home country that have been caused by American missionaries who came over with arrogant and divisive attitudes and have split churches and wrecked havoc among the people of God. It only takes one or two unhealthy people to turn a whole fellowship of churches inward and pull them off mission by going on some doctrinal witch hunt or getting caught up in some power play.

In addition, he told us of missionaries who get huge amounts of money from American churches for work they aren’t really doing. They take pictures of ministries they have nothing to do with and then shop them around in promotional packets to churches in the States asking for support. These charlatans bilk churches out of hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years and give the church a black-eye over-seas. It’s a racket. People like this make the truly great works of legitimate church leaders all that much more difficult. American money is a source of great blessing around the world, but it may also be the biggest problem in the international church when it creates dependency, funds unhealthy power barons and heretic hunters, or when it feathers the nest of crooks. The home church of this Asian church planter has a policy of not working with American missionaries because of the abuses of the past. Fortunately we have been able to earn his trust and the trust of his church despite their fears about Americans.

These stories are just too common to treat as occasional aberrations. They are systemic and chronic. With both of these situations, the core problem starts with the churches who provide the financial support. Well meaning but naïve churches underwrite people with a good story and an urgent plea without really developing a relationship of depth and performing due diligence. I wish every church had to take an oath first to do no harm before they worked internationally and then could be held accountable this side of the day of judgment. If churches would just investigate what they support and make sure they get feedback from people who are not on their payroll, all international missions would be much better off.

Churches need to be more proactive in their global ministries. Leaders are just as responsible to steward their international work as they are the local work. Instead of being passive and acting like venture capitalists who finance people who come along with good stories, they should engage in serious spiritual discernment to discover where in the world God is calling them to invest for the Kingdom and then decide on the best strategy to accomplish their mission. They need to check out the people they support to make sure they are healthy and honest and worthy of trust. They need to listen to the nationals on the ground and respond to their needs rather than assume every would-be-missionary knows what he is doing. Churches need to check references and partner wisely. The work is just too important to do it in a lazy or detached manner.

At MRN we exist to help churches with these kinds of issues, but whether you work with MRN or not, no church can be excused from performing due diligence in any work it supports locally or globally. If we aren’t careful, we could find ourselves spending hundreds of thousands of the Lord’s dollars only to harm the Lord’s mission.

You Can’t “Obey the Gospel” by Yourself

2011-08-31T10:47:00.001-05:00

When I was growing up in church, I used to hear people speak often of someone who either had or had not “obeyed the gospel.” It was a euphemism in the churches of my heritage for baptism. Because we believed strongly that the right response of faith for every believer was to be baptized by immersion, we put great emphasis on obeying the command to be baptized. While I don’t think I ever heard anyone preach a doctrine of baptismal regeneration (i.e., the idea that there is something “magical” about the act of baptism that actually saves the believer), we came close at times by putting so much emphasis on our human response instead of on the work of God that saves us by the cross. I didn’t think much about the language of “obeying the gospel” growing up. I just took it for granted.

But, when I got older and began to think about it, I found this to be a very strange expression. Since “gospel” is an old expression for good news, I wasn’t sure what it meant to obey good news. The news is an event usually told in a story—a news story. In this case, God entered our world through his son Jesus and acted decisively to redeem and restore the world by a definitive series of events: the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. That event speaks good news in a myriad of ways which in part depend on where you are and how you have experienced the impact of human rebellion personally. (See my last blog.) But how do you obey an event? I got all worked up by the idea and got on an argumentative warpath to eradicate this human centered way of speaking until I noticed it actually found it’s way into the Bible. How inconvenient!

Yes, right there in 2 Thess. 1:8 and 1 Peter 4:17, Paul and Peter both speak of “obeying the gospel.” They don’t specify what they mean by that expression, e.g., some ritual of response, but it clearly refers to people who either have or have not submitted to Jesus’ lordship and follow him as disciples. But, what does it mean to obey good news? How do you obey an event or series of events? Can you obey the evening news? What would that look like?

In this case, the only way I can make sense of out obeying the good news of the Kingdom is to reenact those events in your life. You must experience the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus in your life. All of the sudden, baptism does then make sense as an act of obedience to the gospel. It is a symbolic burial and resurrection of one who has died to self and chosen to enter the story of God by joining Jesus in the water and following him on the way of life that transcends death. But, it means far more than that. It means conforming one’s entire life to the way of Jesus.

But, one startling aspect of this understanding of obedience is that you cannot do it alone--despite the picture above. To obey Jesus’ model is to abandon a self-focused life and embrace a life of faithful submission to God and loving service to others. It is to dethrone the self as Lord and embrace the lordship of Jesus. It is to become part of the people or family of God. It is to learn the way of loving God and neighbor. It is being immersed into the one body of Jesus comprised of all those everywhere who belong to him. You cannot do any of those things alone. Just as you can’t baptize yourself, you can’t obey the gospel alone. You can’t love God without having a relationship with God and that means there is another in your life who shapes and controls it: God, You can’t love your neighbor without having a relationship with your neighbor. You can’t be added to the church or become part of Jesus’ body alone—it is all about relationships. There is no private Christianity.

So while repentance requires a personal decision, everything that leads up to repentance requires others to lead you to trust Jesus and everything that follows it requires others to assist you in your faith walk and/or become a focal point of your love walk. You cannot obey the gospel by yourself because you aren’t the only one on this road and obeying the good news of the Jesus way will put you in a different kind of relationship with everyone and everything in all creation. We can only obey the gospel together, which I find remarkably comforting and challenging. My obedience is personally demanding but it is hardly limited to my person. It could not be more public. It is personal but it demands I become part of a community. It pulls me out of myself. I may have been baptized alone one day, but I was baptized into a community. I may have chosen to obey Jesus in the privacy of my bedroom one night, but the initial act of obedience and all those that followed were very public and very communal. You can’t obey the gospel by yourself.

Does the Good News Have to Start with Bad News?

2011-08-29T12:08:00.001-05:00

“How many of your non-Christian friends struggle with feeling guilty?” I was speaking to a group of young professionals in Singapore about how to take their faith into the work place. No hands were raised. This was no surprise because most people in Asia do not live in a guilt based culture. They have a shame based culture. People do not generally feel a sense of personal guilty before personal God there. They feel a sense of shame if they have embarrassed their family or community by behavior which is not acceptable if it is known. The differences are important even if hard for westerners to grasp.

Here is the problem for these young professionals who want to share their faith; given the way that these young believers had been taught the gospel, they have to start all conversations about the gospel with bad news instead of good news. Before you can supply the remedy to condemnation, you have to convince people they are guilty sinners deserving condemnation. The good news doesn’t sound good if you are not hungering for it. But it is hard to get people who don’t feel guilty to get excited about a message that begins by insulting them. This problem doesn’t exist just in Asia. It is very common in the western nations also.

This is a problem of our own making. While the gospel does offer hope for guilt, it speaks directly to the full range of human needs as well. While guilt is real and has to be addressed, it doesn’t have to be the first issue we address as we share the good news with people who don’t know God. We can begin with whatever effect of human brokenness or sin they do feel and speak good news about the work of God in Jesus’ cross and resurrection for the problems people already experience.

In his book Theological Worlds, W. Paul Jones identifies five different ways human beings all over the world experience the impact of sin’s curse. Perhaps the most pervasive is the sense of alienation. It is the feeling that we don’t belong. We are unworthy of love and should be cast out. It is the feeling all humans know because we have all experience failures of love from those we wanted to embrace us. Those who feel this impact of sin most pointedly feel all alone in the world. They feel left out, abandoned, disconnected, unlovable, or rejected. The gospel brings the good news that God not only knows you by name and loves you, but he also wants to make you part of his life and his people who live out his love. Jesus was rejected too and the world tried to get rid of him by killing him. But he rose again and came back to tell us that he loves us anyway. We can’t keep him from loving us. The cross tells us that God misses you, came after you in Jesus, and wants you to come home with him and experience the love of his huge family reunion.

Other people experience the brokenness of the world as a big foot on their neck. They are under the power of the principalities and powers of this world or the spiritual world. They are victims of injustice. They see no hope for change. The gospel says that God refuses to accept the injustice of the world, that in Jesus he identified with the poor and oppressed, and he conquered the powers of this world and the spiritual world in his resurrection. The church is a community that works for justice and peace, welcomes all, and speaks truth to power about the coming vindication when God will set all things right. The good news is that God has acted and will act. Every person matters and God will raise up and vindicate those held captive by the powers of darkness.

Still others feel a sense of meaninglessness to life. They resonate with the preacher in Ecclesiastes who says all of life is meaningless. They are caught in a nihilistic cul-de-sac and see no way to find meaning in life since death is going to swallow up everything they do and they will be forgotten in a few decades or centuries. What is the point? The gospel says that this life is not all. There is life beyond this and God’s eternal kingdom has already begun and can be entered now. Everything we do now matters into eternity. Our petty lives can be drawn up into the grand narrative of God’s salvation story because God is on the march. The definitive chapter happened on the cross, but the ripples from the giant splash are still working outward through the world and give our lives robust significance.

Finally, many people experience the impact of human rebellion against God’s reign through physical, mental, or emotional suffering. They just hurt all the time and they don’t see any purpose in it. Yet the cross says that suffering does not mean God has abandoned us or hates us or that we are experiencing bad karma for mistakes in our past lives. Rather, God draws near to the suffering person and works in suffering, through suffering, and beyond it. If God joined us in our suffering in Jesus and saved the world by suffering with us, suffering takes on a new meaning. While we don’t embrace it as a good and seek to remove it as God does, we also see that God can redeem suffering and does some of his best work in the midst of it. This gives the suffering person the ability to endure knowing that suffering is not permanent nor pointless.

My point in mentioning all this is to say that we need to listen to people’s stories before we tell them the Jesus story so we can know how the gospel speaks good news to the ways they already feel the brokenness of our world. Yes, their guilt will have to come up at some point, but we don’t have to begin a conversation about the the gospel by punching people in the face. Whatever hurt people feel, the gospel speaks a word of good news directly to that need without us having to drag people to the place they feel guilty before we can tell them about Jesus.

If we understood this, maybe the large part of the world that does not feel guilty would not think Christians hate them because we keep making them feel judged by shouting about how guilty they are. In a post-Christian world, this kind of matters.

What is Great About Churches of Christ

2011-08-24T17:09:00.006-05:00

I’ve been in conversation recently with some fellow leaders within my tribe of Christian believers about our network of churches, colleges, and related ministries and organizations. The collective opinion of this little group is that if our network were a single person, that person could be diagnosed as depressed and/or having an inferiority complex. Much of this seems to be caused by an unhealthy self talk. We are just extremely hard on ourselves. We talk often among ourselves about our deficiencies, historic blind spots, and past mistakes. We are often critical of one another. There are lots of doom and gloom prophets who are forecasting a bleak future on the near horizon. My group is also in agreement that this negative self talk is overdone, unfair, and potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy. We need to correct this negative self talk by focusing more on what is good, right, healthy, and God-ordained among us. We need to read Philippians 4:8 again:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

I realize there is a place for collective repentance and confession, but perpetual self-flagellation is not a good way forward. So, I have been thinking about what is good about the network of churches of which I’m apart. Other than rich relationships, why do I stay and what do I want to pass on from the heritage I’ve been given? Below are a few of the things I love about “my people” where I see God at work. This list is not exhaustive and I’m not even saying these are the five best things about my church network, but these are things for which I am particularly thankful right now given what I’m doing and what is important to me. I’d be curious to see what others would list. (BTW, I will take down anything negative about the Churches of Christ or any other particular fellowship so don’t bother writing it.)

Freedom from denominational bureaucracy that enables any congregation to make decisions about what is best for their congregation and the gospel in their setting and act directly to address it without having to get permission from some authority above the local church. Any need that crops up can be addressed by a church or person with a vision and passion to address it without having to get permission from a regional bishop or play the political game in the diocese or conference. That can lead to inefficiency and redundancy at times, but in a world that is rejecting large institutions and having to learn to network and collaborate, we are ahead of the game. We have excellent Universities, missions organization, and global ministries of compassion that are networked and fleet of foot without having a national or global headquarters and bureaucracy that consumes tons of money and slows everything down. We are standing where much of the world is headed in terms of how we network and collaborate.
A passionate commitment to global ministry that touches every church and every member. Since missionaries and ministries of mercy are supported out of local churches instead of regional or national offices, people in every church have global connections and feel a greater sense of global responsibility. Believers in many fellowships are far removed from anything outside their local church and feel no ownership for global mission other than the money in the church budget that goes to their denominational office. Almost every congregation in our network is involved in various ministries around the world and sends their people on short term mission trips to visit, work alongside, and support the long term workers. Our people love the world and think globally fairly well.
A high view of scripture as the final word and Word of God. If you can’t show where you get your convictions in scripture, you won’t get far in our network. We argue about scripture because we believe it matters. Not all argument is unhealthy. If you never have tension over scripture you probably take it too lightly. My father used to coach me, “Don’t ever tell the church that we used to believe X and now believe Y. Just preach the Bible and if they see what you are talking about there, they will follow you because they know they believe in the Bible.” Is that easy? No. Is it possible in our network? Absolutely.
A history of change for the sake of faithfulness and effectiveness. Our network started with people who abandoned previous beliefs and practices because they were archaic, erroneous, ineffective, self-serving, divisive, or problematic in some other ways. That is part of our DNA. In order to be faithful and effective, our churches are continually changing and innovating in method while trying to remain faithful in message. Because of our local autonomy, any congregation is free to make the changes it believes it needs to make without outside interference or control. There is great diversity from one congregation to another and from one region of the world to another, which is exactly what we should expect given what we observe in the New Testament churches.
Passion for christian unity is in our core identity. We began as a unity movement frustrated by the division in the body of Christ and the desire to love all those who belong to the Lord still matters to many in our network. This is messy and difficult, but it is part of our story and legacy.

Where Wonder Finds a Home

2011-08-18T11:46:00.004-05:00

I kept wondering what I was seeing. The faces in front of me had expressions and intentionality that were unusual but not completely unknown to me. Still, something seemed out of place. At first I thought it was just because I was in a place very foreign to me, but that didn’t seem to explain it fully. Not everyone here had that look on their faces, but these young people did. What was it that I was seeing that I couldn’t quite describe? Then it dawned on me. It was a total lack of cynicism and jadedness. There was an innocent wonder, an eager sincerity that is common on the faces of American toddlers exploring their world afresh. But this look disappears in very early childhood never to appear again in my world.

These young adults I was observing in a Bible school in Savannakhet, Laos were too old to be this open eyed with wonder to me. Maybe they were just fascinated to have American visitors, unusual for them, but I don’t think so. They didn’t seem that interested in us as persons. They were not as eager to line up and have their picture take with us as most of the people we met around Asia. However, when my colleague Mark Hooper began to teach them how to do a three column Discovery Bible Study, they opened their notebooks, took copious notes, and looked transfixed as they soaked everything in with a eagerness I haven’t seen in a class room since video games entered the world of kindergarteners. They acted like they were sitting at the feet of a great master and they had no shame in looking amazed and eager to learn. These were people who had come to know Jesus and found real purpose in him that gave great meaning to their lives in a part of the world where that is rare. It showed in their faces in ways I miss in myself.

Americans don’t look this way. We are hard to impress. We’ve been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. We’ve seen it and we want others to know it. The wonder we associate with childhood has a short shelf life in the U.S. After all, how do you impress a child who has played high tech video games on a giant HDTV with Wii, Xbox, or PlayStation? How do you amaze children who regularly go see 3-D movies filled with computer generated graphics? What will get a child worked up who regularly vacations at Disney World? How do you generate excitement for kids who constantly play with their Nintendo DS, iPod touch or their parents iPads any time they have to sit still for 5 minutes? How do you impress children who have a weekly high octane VBS-like Bible class every week complete with drama, dynamic music, and dancing?

Children in America are already getting jaded and bored by the time they are five. At twenty they are down right cynical. It just isn’t cool to get excited about anything. What is there to get excited about? In the world ruled by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the world is a but a joke and the only right response is to make fun of it in non-stop sarcasm. The whole culture of young adults feels like a safari through Ecclesiastes. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” It’s one long epic fail. It’s been seen, done, and it doesn’t matter. It’s all corrupt beneath the surface anyway. Don’t be a fool and let yourself get too worked up with excitement. You’ll only end up getting disappointed.
But not in Savannakhet. Here I was seeing something I had not seen in a long time: unfiltered and unashamed sincerity. I was seeing the hunger to learn and grow and matter with the expectation that such was possible. I was seeing faces of people who had been raised without the toys and experiences that we think are essential and I was seeing a more authentic human face with eyes that were good and let in the light and ears that can hear. I thought to myself, Jesus can do great things here. Then I wondered, can he do great things in me?

One Reason Ministers Are Angry Without Knowing Why

2011-08-16T15:44:00.001-05:00

I have been a huge Eugene Peterson fan for years. His insights into Biblical languages, scripture, worship, practical theology, and ministry are rarely matched. His books are so thick with meaning that I have to read them slowly and pause to ponder at the end of most paragraphs. So when he recently published his vocational autobiography entitled The Pastor: A Memoir, I downloaded it immediately even though I’m not living that life any more. He did not disappoint.

I don’t agree with everything he says and at times feel he is nostalgically longing for a Christendom world that will never return. His out of hand dismissal of mega-churches seems unfair to me even if he is probably right more often than not. But disagreements not with standing, I am relishing his reflections. The following quote hit me particularly hard and gave me words for something I’ve felt for years but did not know how to say. He is writing about a group of ministers that met for decades once a month to learn from each other in changing times.

. . . we were pastors in a culture that “did not know Joseph.” Our identity out of which we lived was unrecognized by virtually everybody, in and out of church.

Which also meant that we were lonely, and sometimes angry that we were lonely. A few years before we started meeting, Ralph Ellison wrote one of the great novels on being African-American in America, with the title Invisible Man. He provided a detailed and penetrating understanding of what it means to live in a society in which nobody even “sees” you, the actual you, the feeling, thinking, working you. If you are black, your skin color makes you, the real you, invisible. In prisons, solitary confinement is the cruelest punishment. In society, nonrecognition is comparable. Our vocation made us invisible. A pastor in American is the invisible man, the invisible woman. (p. 153)

I wonder how many other people in ministry feel this way? I’ve described it as the Pinocchio Syndrome'; i.e., the desire to be a real boy vs. a wooden puppet. Or at times I called it the desire to be a full person in the church instead of just a function.

I also think that in the post-Christian era, in Peterson’s words “in a culture that did not know Joseph,” where the pastor is seen as little more than the epitome of uselessness, living on funds wasted by superstitious ignorant masses, instead of a respected person of authority or even a fellow professional, this problem has probably gotten worse. I wonder how much of this is contributing the the exodus from pastoral ministry of so many of us. I’m not sure I’m ready to know.

Please don’t hear me whining. I know ministers can do a lot of that. I’m merely trying to understand the emotional world of my kind who are collectively in crisis within a church system that is itself depressed, as a friend of my put it. Understanding some of the forces impinging on, if not emanating from, our models of church in this culture are going to be important in finding ways to over come them and devise healthy models that can incarnate the gospel in ways that will penetrate our culture effectively. If nothing else, just knowing other people there know ministers feel this way might help some.

The Cross Looks Different from Here Too

2011-08-12T17:25:00.001-05:00

“The parents have no pity on these girls because they believe their bad karma from a former life dictates that they should suffer and they see this as a way their daughters can serve the family even if it requires they endure misery,” explained the director of a ministry devoted to stopping human trafficking in Laos. “Besides, the fathers who are doing this have no relationship with their children anyway. They just don’t value human life that much.” After all, from the point of view of the fathers and slave traders, these girls will just come back again and again into a world where suffering is inevitable.

I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of parents selling their daughters on the black market to be sex slaves. How could this be a common practice? How could it be tolerated by any society? Yet it is. And many of these girls end up working as prostitutes in America. Prostitution is not just about desperate women with low morals. They are most often victims of people who have power over them and don’t value them at all.

This director, who is a Christian from India, has great insight into the Laotian culture where he has served many years in very primitive conditions. He and his wife plan to stay in Laos and develop a personal ministry when he retires from his position with a large para-church ministry which is closely scrutinized by the communist government. His whole life is devoted to rescuing people from injustice and suffering. He and his ministry rescue slaves and try to prevent trafficking by giving at risk girl vocational training that will make them more valuable to their families by working a legitimate job than being sold. This amazing man opened my eyes to many things I didn’t want to see but which God’s sees without interruption every day.

I’ve been hard on American individualism through the years. Our excessive focus on personal rights and personal fulfillment have been destructive to family, church, and society on many levels. The emergence of consumer Christians has been devastating to healthy congregational life. The understanding of God’s work through the cross of Christ has been reduced from it’s full meaning of redeeming, restoring and reconciling all nations and all creation (cf. Ephesians 1-3 or Romans 8:18ff) to saving individual souls from Hell and for Heaven. This has set us up for all kinds of problems as our mission has gotten truncated and distorted and our eschatology fuzzy. However, the move toward individualism began in the west with the influence of the gospel and produced an understanding of individual rights which are basic to justice and human flourishing. However, after spending three weeks in Asia, which is very communal, and after seeing what happens in a poor county that does not value individual human rights very much, I came to appreciate some aspects of individualism much more.

While the gospel certainly speaks to God’s determination to redeem and form one new humanity out of the many diverse people groups in the world, and while the gospel forms a community called the Kingdom of God or church and rebukes excessive individualism, the gospel also says that the individual matters. Jesus did not just die for humanity in general, he died for you personally. Jesus saves people for community but he saves them one at a time as each person calls on his name and is baptized into Christ. Jesus says that the community cannot scapegoat individuals and bracket them off as unimportant even if they are “sinners,” “unclean,” or “diseased.” Jesus did not just see Israel or crowds, he saw specific people. He saw Peter, Nathaniel, James, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Martha, Zacchaeus and you. Jesus intentionally encountered social castaways like the woman at the well or the woman caught in the act of adultery. He touched the untouchable lepers. He gave attention and value to children and got angry when his disciples tried to keep them away from him because “they don’t matter.” Jesus said that anyone who causes a child to sin would be better off to be fitted for cement shoes and sent to sleep with the fishes.

The cross says to parents who would sell their daughters for a few hundred dollars (which is more than a year’s income in Laos) that you don’t understand the value of this one created in God’s image and who has an eternal soul that only has this one chance at life. She did nothing to deserve this and Jesus came for the poor, powerless, and oppressed to give them dignity, life, and hope. Jesus loves the trapped sex workers who have been consigned to this life by uncaring parents and opportunistic slave traders. The cross helps us see that everyone matters to God. He knows each person’s name even better than he knows every sparrow that falls or knows the number of hairs on our head. Jesus died for each one and wants to bring each one into the kingdom of the redeemed where there is real hope for a world with no suffering, death, morning, or crying.

If the parents and slave traders understood their own value and the value of the people they were trafficking they could not continue. This is why evangelism and discipling are critical to any efforts to stop injustice. In the gospel we find the resources to value each and every person made in God’s image and who God longs to restore to the world he is bringing in Jesus Kingdom. The church is his instrument to begin the justice project and give people a preview of what is coming as we demonstrate love for the unloved and rescue those others throw away.

Yes the cross looks different in Laos and it compels us all to value every individual who is being discounted and sold on the cheep because those in power do not understand how much God has already paid to buy them back for himself.

Quick Impressions From Three Weeks in Asia

2011-08-11T18:12:00.001-05:00

In the coming weeks I will have several posts dealing with the things I learned and stories I heard on my recent trip to Singapore, Thailand, and Laos, but here are some tidbits floating on the top of my cerebellum after visiting 5 cities in 3 countries in 3 weeks.

I love the practice of not wearing shoes in the house. The floors of homes in Asia are very clean and there is something about everyone being barefoot or in slippers that creates a warm causal ambiance.
I also loved being in a part of the world where the flip-flop is appropriate for all places and occasions. Here is to the flip-flop, the official footwear of Asia!
There is something beautiful about the way the Thai people put their hands together, like they are praying, and bow to everyone they meet. The respectful quietness and gentleness of Asian culture has a social beauty I miss in America.
I was impressed that the greatest vice in Laotian culture is anger. I’m still mulling that over but there is something to seeing anger as the root of evil.
Turns out, I can eat Asian food for three weeks three meals a day and not get tired of it. I was surprised. Then again, I haven’t gone out for Asian since I’ve been back.
You don’t want to know what replaces toilet paper in much of Asia. No, you really don’t.
Many Asian people are hungry for the gospel and their cultures desperately needs the hope and direction that Jesus gives. However, the western church and missionaries who have worked there need to learn how the gospel speaks to other aspects of human brokenness other than personal guilt. Asia is a shame based communal culture not a guilt based individual culture. The way the western church talks about the gospel requires evangelism to start with insulting bad news (You are a lost sinner) instead of good news about how God’s work in Christ bring relief to problems Asians already feel. More about this in a full blog post.

The future of the world is with the Asians because they want to succeed more than people in the west and they believe they can. Americans are not willing to give the hours or energy to building for the future that Asians are. Their intensity is impressive. Asia has 62% of the world’s people and they will dominate the world for the next few centuries. If we want to make an investment in the Kingdom that will have lasting impact, we have to give great priority to Asia.
The problem of human trafficking coming out of Laos and through Thailand is horrifying. Who can sell their daughters into sex-slavery for $300? I’m so thankful for World Vision and other ministries that are addressing this problem. Meeting with the head of World Vision in Laos was educational and inspirational.
Spending time with Christians who spent 18 months in a wrenched third world prison for their faith in Jesus and kept worshipping and reaching out in Jesus name was deeply meaningful. I’ll never forget getting stopped at the border by the police and our hosts, who had both been incarcerated for Christ, honestly told the authorities we were Christians visiting our Laotians brothers and sisters. We got through anyway, thank God.
Most of the church problems in Asia did not arise there but got imported from American. We reproduced after our kind.
God is on the move in Asia. The potential for global impact there is huge, but it needs to be lead by Asians not Americans. Asian Christians know far more than Americans ever will about reaching their own and American churches and missionaries need to listen to them more and entrust the front line work to them. They still defer to westerners because they respect authority and expertise, but if the American church wants to be part of what God is doing in Asia, we need to be humble servants who work alongside Asian who take the lead. American money and power have created a lot of problems in Asian churches that are going to be hard to undo.
The investment American churches have made in Asia has had a huge impact for good and I have tremendous respect for the early missionaries who pioneered the work there at great personal sacrifice and without the modern ability to travel and communicate.
My favorite two words from Asia: Thai massage.
Durian is . . . unique. I can’t imagine who first looked at it, smelled it, and then said, “Hey, let’s try eating this.”

Running to Catch Up with God, Part 4

2011-07-19T23:00:00.000-05:00

What do these global trends (see previous posts) mean for today’s church and our mission? I think it means that the frontiers of the world are not just overseas, they’re across street. The nations have come to us. What will we do with them? God is gathering diverse peoples in cities all over the world where they can be evangelized more easily. Remember, only 10 righteous people could have saved Sodom.

Since the future of the church is not with the former western strongholds of Christendom. I believe western Christians must reposition ourselves to serve the work God is initiating and leading from what we think of as the mission field. The vision for world missions will not arise from the United States. The models of church that we support need to make sense and be sustainable in non-western nations. We need to stop imposing a western Christendom model of church on the world and let churches emerge in forms that fit the soil in which the gospel is planted as we focus on making disciples who can replicate themselves. The future of global missions is in mutual partnerships with global Christians who can educate American churches about how to reach their part of the world better than we can educate them.

In light of all the information above, I have some serious concerns. The people of my heritage in Churches of Christ are mostly rural people (by culture) recently moved to cities and have a bias against urban culture. We are generally mystified about how to interact with multi-cultural people in truly urban v. suburban settings. We are mostly white and segregated. We are excessively individualistic and mono-lingual. We are overly nationalistic and struggle to trust people in developing nations. Most of our churches are either consumed with internal issues (e.g., worship) or have sold out to a consumer driven gospel–“its all about blessing me.” As our world becomes increasingly urban and international, our churches are perpetuating white flight. None of our Colleges (except possibly Lipscomb) is in a true urban area. I hardly think Malibu counts as urban, though it is in greater LA. Those who train our ministers are just recently getting into any kind of serious urban ministry training and we have very few professors who are multi-cultural. Most of our ministry training and experience has been about how to reach people like us. Most church growth focuses on reaching one niche market: mostly middle-class white professionals. Most of our mission works have been to rural parts of the world. Our churches are fleeing cities as rest of world flocks to the cities.

As bad as all this sounds, it also represents a great opportunity and increasingly I see our churches willing to face the new realities and open for counsel about how to reach populations they previously had not been able to attract. My experience at Central in Amarillo convince me that “country club” churches can make the missional turn and learn to minister to their urban context. It will take time and focus as well as new and diverse approaches. It will require a theological re-visioning. But, the American church is increasingly going to find it’s own future will depend on learning from the missionaries they have been sending oversea how to reach the people back home. Fortunately, Churches of Christ have tremendous flexibility with our local control in each congregation. Each congregation is free to embrace all kinds of new approaches and MRN exists to help them do just that. Obviously, if we are going to follow God and reach the masses of diverse humanity he is collecting for us in cities around the world, we are going to have to open our eyes and realize the world is changing and we are not ready. It’s time we ran hard to catch up with God.

Running to Catch Up with God, Part 3

2011-07-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

With the Biblical foundation from earlier entries as a filter to screen reality, I think it becomes easier to see God at work in the global trends today. Let me share some facts with you (mostly from Ray Bakke). Only 13% of the world is white. 80% of the world lives outside of the west. Only 4.5% of world lives in US (but we consume 25% of resources). There are more Scandinavians in US than in the 4 countries of Scandinavia. The US is the largest Irish nation in the world. There are more Jews in New York than all Israel. There are more Jews in Miami than Tel Aviv. Arabs now outnumber Jews in US. The US is forth largest black nation in the world (and there are 55 countries in Africa). 133 nations are represented in 1 zip code in Queens NY (out of about 200 nations). Chicago has 100,000 more Polish people than San Francisco has people. Warsaw only recently passed Chicago in the number of Poles. Chicago has more Bulgarians than Sophia. In one High School in Chicago, there are 63 nations and 11 languages represented. LA public schools have children speaking over 200 languages. In St. Paul, Mn schools, 25% of students are Hmong (a people who don’t even have country). The US is the third largest Spanish nation in the world out of 25 Spanish speaking countries. The US recently passed Colombia and Argentina. Only Mexico and Spain have more Spanish speaking people. Mexico is moving to the US by the thousands each year. By 2020 Hispanics will be the largest racial group in Texas. In Anchorage Alaska, the fastest growing group is Hispanics. They will outnumber Eskimos by 2020. The US has become a global country.

This is not just a trend in the US. The same is true of the UK. My wife and I were recently in London and we didn’t see an “Englishman” until the second day. It’s the same everywhere: Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin. People from 97 nations live in one parish in Downtown Oslo, Norway. People from 100 nations are represented in one High school in Bangkok. Sao Paulo Brazil has 1 million Japanese. Peru has a former President named Fujimori. There are more honors students in India than the US has students. There are 140 mill. Chinese outside of China. That alone would make the top 10 list of world’s largest countries. Every year a population greater than Canada relocates from rural to urban China (over 30 million a year). The government of China has to create 20 cities of 1 million each year just to handle the flow to the cities. My wife taught for 5 years in Amarillo public schools. In her classes in North Amarillo she had 11 languages spoken and world refuges from all over the planet. A white face was rare. Amarillo is a city of under 200,000 in a fairly isolated stretch of West Texas, but it is a global city.

I can’t help but believe that God not only knows about this, but is involved in these global trends. God seems to be working through two ways to alter our world landscape: urbanizing and globalizing. These are the two greatest phenomena on the planet. In 1900 only 8% of world in cities, today it is over 50% and growing. The nations that once colonized the rest of the world are now finding the people of those nations moving into their former overlord’s backyards and taking over. If not for immigration, the once great powers of Western Europe would be collapsing under the forces of negative population growth. The future of Europe does not have a white face. The same is true of the church. The future of Jesus’ movement is not with the nations and ethnicities that have been its traditional stronghold throughout Christendom. It is in those places considered the “mission field” in the past. Today the traditional “Christian” world is becoming increasingly post-Christian and a new mission field increasingly being reached by Christians from outside the west.

Despite our biases in the US, I’m also convinced that God loves cities. The Bible refers to cities 1250 times. There are 142 different cities mentioned in the Bible. The first gentile church was an urban mission church and they began world missions with a distinctly urban approach. Paul’s strategy involved locating in a large city and then sending out disciple makers from there. We cannot be a “New Testament church” and not be concerned with urban missions. The New Testament is not a book of systematic theology; it is missionary literature in a first generation church crossing cultures with a goal to get to the world’s premier city: Rome. Paul only went to cities and he approached each on in a unique way. The Bible may begin in a garden, but it ends in a city—a global city—the New Jerusalem.

Running to Catch Up with God, Part 2

2011-07-18T08:15:00.000-05:00

In all his world travel, the Apostle Paul was driven by a global vision that finds expression in words like these.

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

The Bible concludes with a vision of global restoration and unification.

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

From Abram’s call on, God has been on mission to undo the divisive effects of human rebellion to his rightful reign and bring all creation back into harmony with him and each other. God’s mission involves saving a remnant of every expressions of humanity. He wants people from every people group to bring the best of their cultures into the restored heaven and earth. God’s mission involves bringing people together from every nation, race and language to make us one again in his love under his blessed reign.

Running to Catch Up with God, Part 1

2011-07-15T11:01:00.001-05:00

There is an old saying to wit, “People do not plan to fail; they fail to plan.” However, there is planning and then there is planning. We can decide what we want to do and ask God to bless it or we can seek to understand what God is doing and join him in it. It is probably wiser to do what God is blessing than to ask God to bless what we are doing.

One of the benefits of the move to a post-modern mentality for me is that it is teaching me how arrogant it is to assume we know what we need to do or what the church should look like. I’m beginning to understand that all “strategic planning” must begin with spiritual discernment of what God is already doing where we are and wherever we go. I see a need to trace the trajectory of God’s movement through the scripture and then ask how this story is playing out in God’s current work in our world. So, for me the first question is, “What is God doing in the world?” My first turn is then to look at what scripture says to help me interpret God’s work.

After introducing us to the world as God created and intended it and then telling us four stories of how humanity corrupted God’s creation through rebellion to his reign, the Bible begins the story of salvation with a call to Abram and a vision from God to bless all nations through one sent family. God stations this family at the crossroads of world civilization where all nations will be able to see what he does with them. Then he builds them to the size of a nation in the womb of the world’s greatest empire: Egypt. He saves Israel from Egypt in a dramatic fashion so that the entire world would know of his power and returns them to the crossroads of the world. Throughout the history of Israel, he continually calls them to have a vision for global redemption and restoration of all the nations and creation (cf. Isaiah 2:2; 49:6 and Jeremiah 3:17). This global movement then hits turbo drive with the coming of Jesus and announcement of the Kingdom of God.

I don’t see how we can view this overarching global narrative and continue to see the gospel in an American-centric way. As I’ve begun to see the gospel through the lenses of God’s objective of global restoration and reunion, I’ve been challenged to see beyond my western-oriented individualistic understanding of salvation to see a communal, relational understanding of God’s salvation that speaks a word of hope for the whole world.

John 3:16 says God loves the world not just me as an individual. He wants to save it all. He sent Jesus for it all. Our God is a go and rescue God with a global objective, not a come and get it God speaking to individuals. He is a God whose love drives him to pursue entire people groups who don’t even know they need him. He is a God who sacrifices whatever it takes to be in a loving relationship with his whole creation. God doesn’t just love us as individuals but has a love for “the world?” God doesn’t just love the church, but loves the whole world? If we were going to join what God is doing, we must join God in going to all peoples as the sent ones who follow the model of Jesus.

I’m longing for a time when the church recaptures the frantic pace of the book of Acts where the church is panting with their tongues hanging out of their mouths and their sides hurting as they run to catch up with God’s expansion of his reign to all peoples. From the global impact of Pentecost, to the removal of barriers to reaching Samaritans, to a gender ambiguous Ethiopian proselyte, to the cataclysmic moment when Peter stepped across the gentile threshold of Cornelius, baptized his household, and ate with them as God’s holy people, the church struggles to keep up with God relentless march from the hinterlands of Judea to world capital in Rome. This is a gospel that is too big to be contained in one place or for one people group. It propels people out beyond their local and personal world into the world of others and draws all people together into one new forming reality called Kingdom of God.

(I will post the rest of this essay in subsequent posts. The entire piece will be published in an online journal called Missio Dei.)

The Questions God has of You

2011-07-13T14:59:00.001-05:00

Last week I tweeted, “The questions the Bible has about you are more important that the questions you have about the Bible.” It was just a flash from the blue. I have thoughts like that all the time and most last about as long as last nights dreams. But this one was different. It keeps coming back to me. Maybe because I am by nature a skeptic who doesn’t find faith easy, I’ve always had lots of questions about scripture. But, I have to say that the questions that I really wrestle with the most are the ones I read in the Bible about me. God asks much tougher questions of me and I ask of him? If I was still preaching, this would have turned into a sermon series. Since I’m not, I’ll just list a bunch of questions the Lord asks me through the scripture starting with Adam and Eve:

Where are you?
Who told you that you were naked?
What is this have you done?
Where is your brother?
Why did you laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord?
What is your name?
What is that in your hand?
Who gave human beings their mouths?
Have I not commanded you to be strong and courageous?
Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts?
Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?
Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?
Do you believe that I am able to do this?
Why do you worry about your life?
Why do you worry about tomorrow?
What do you want me to do for you?
Do you want to get well?
Do you have eyes but fail to see and ears but fail to hear? Do you still not understand?
Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?
Who do you say that I am?
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Where are the wise? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
What causes fights and quarrels among you?
If anyone of you has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in you?
What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as though you did not
Is it right for you to be angry?
Should I not have concern for the great city Nineveh, in which there are more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?

The Cross Looks Different from Here

2011-07-11T16:07:00.001-05:00

Betrayed by those closest. Handed over to death by priests acting out of fear and twisted values. Blood called for by the masses. Humiliated and slaughtered in cruel fashion by the agents of the government in a travesty of justice. I could equally be talking about Jesus of Nazareth or the victims of genocide in Rwanda. Turns out, as much as I have reflected on the meaning of the cross throughout my life, I had never seen it from the angle I witnessed it in Rwanda. The cross looks different from there.

In America the cross looks very personal and somewhat sanitized. Jesus died for me. Jesus loves me. “For God so loved _____________ (insert your name) that he sent . . . .” Jesus is portrayed as your “Personal Lord and Savior” who died for your unique sin so you, as an individual, can go to heaven when you die. It has nothing to do with government powers, social location, social justice, rescuing a people, or so many other things that the Bible seems to attach to the cross. It doesn’t even seem to be that much of a help for this life because life is pretty good for most middle-class church going people. In America, Jesus pays our individual debts on the cross so we can get a coupon to heaven. Jesus saves us one at a time from our personal guilt and our personal sin. But we don’t identify with this Jesus very much. We don’t often see the cross calling us to sacrifice much. He died so we don’t have to, right? He suffered so we don’t have to right?

Somehow the cross looks different in Rwanda where a whole race/tribe of people were targeted for elimination and slaughtered ruthlessly in the spring of 1994 as the principalities and powers of the world either swung the machetes or stood by and watched with little more than indifference. Here, Jesus’ unjust death at the hands of the principalities and powers looks different. He came as one of the suffering, despised, oppressed masses who are killed by the machinery of institutional evil in the world. Jesus identifies with the victims of injustice and comes as a force for God’s justice. He comes to takes sides and he takes sides against the powers of the world who seek to eliminate him. Yet, by crushing him, the powers of this world sealed their fate because he rose up in victory and revealed them for what they are, pretenders who cannot deliver on their claim to rule. Since God can raise the dead, the powers of this world have no lasting power. Their bluff was called and shown to be toothless. Where is their victory?

While what Jesus did on the cross impacts people on a personal level everywhere, it is not merely personal anywhere. It certainly isn’t private. Jesus gives value to the poor and oppressed. Their deaths are not in vain and neither are their lives. He says their lives matter—they matter. Stalin was wrong when he said that killing one man was a tragedy but killing a million was a statistic. They all matter. The cross says history is with them—the meek who are over-run by the powerful of this world and hunger and thirst for justice and righteous days to dawn. They are the ones who will rejoice when God settles all accounts. Jesus came to save more than a collection of individuals. He came to save a people under threat. Jesus came to redeem, restore, and re-form a people into the powerful Kingdom of God that takes in outsiders and oppressed of every race, tribe, and tongues—all those who will admit what they are and come to him trusting his reign. Even those who killed him and the victims of the Rwanda genocide.

In Rwanda you can’t just preach a gospel of personal debt reduction or personal sin management. You have to preach a more robust gospel about God’s triumph over the forces of evil and darkness in Christ. You have to preach the gospel of God’s redemption and restoration of all creation. You have to preach the gospel of God’s uniting of all humanity into one new man in Christ Jesus. You have to preach a message of forgiveness not just of our sins against God’s law but our sins against each other and him as a person. This is a gospel of power, love, and justice. It calls on us to take up a cross, to identify with the condemned and despised and die with them and for them if necessary. It is not about avoiding suffering but giving meaning to suffering and joining in the suffering of the victims of evil and injustice in the world. It is about the in-breaking of God’s new government or reign over the world. Yes, the cross looks different in Rwanda and Americans need to see it from there.

When Irish Eyes Aren’t Smiling

2011-07-05T16:46:00.001-05:00

Hollow. Hopeless. That’s how I’d describe them. The blank stare in the eyes we saw all over Dublin shocked me. In our recent trip through England, Scotland, Ireland, and Rwanda, we had many memorable experiences. Nothing compares to what we witnessed in a church building misused in the genocide in Rwanda that I described here. But another lingering image was the eyes of the Irish teens and young adults I saw loitering on all the trains and in every public place. It was not a look of anger, bitterness, mischief, or even aimlessness. It was just blank.

When I think of “The Irish” I think of leprechauns, Lucky Charms, and Notre Dame. I don’t really feel affection for any of the three. In fact, I was raised to despise Notre Dame. Never-the-less, I have always had a positive impression of the Irish. I have family ancestry there. I love U2 . I pictured the Irish as having a twinkle in their eyes like the Irish character in Braveheart (“It’s my island.”) I associated the Irish with playfulness and light-heartedness. I pictured a pub with laughing and smiles all around and the Guinness flowing freely. But that isn’t what I saw when we spent a few days roving around Dublin. I saw eyes that scared me a little. I saw desperation to the point of despair. I saw more hopelessness than in any Rwandan eyes, which is remarkable given the history of both nations.

I might not have been surprising if we had been in Belfast where there had been so many years of violence. But we were in Dublin where things have been pretty good by European standards until the global recession of the last couple of years put the breaks on a roaring Irish economy. This is a very modern city built around the remnants of an ancient one. It is blowing and going like any major metropolis. There is no step down from any US city to Dublin, but there was something missing in the eyes of the young people. It was a sense of purpose in life. The county is culturally Catholic but functionally secular. Religion just doesn’t matter much except as a cultural label on a few holy days. Religion is an identity marker but the idea of an intimate trusting relationship with God is rare.

It just seems like the feel of the city is one of pure nihilism. Nothing matters really. Do what you will or must, this is all there is and nothing is going to get better ultimately. It wasn’t a mean or cruel look--just empty. There was no sense of hope or progress. It is like there is something in there that wanted to get out but had now where to go. At least the young people in England and Scotland looked focused and purposeful, for the most part. It felt different in Ireland.

I was struck by the difference I saw in the USA and Rwanda. The people of my home country are basically optimistic. We believe, religious or not, that society is improving with growing scientific and technological knowledge and skill. The Rwandans have been to Hell and back and are rebuilding a country from the dirt up. But, there are signs of progress everywhere and you can see people beginning to believe life can be better. Hope may be like a fragile flame in kindling, but everyone seems to be blowing on it. But in Ireland no one seems to be blowing on the dying coals of a once robust culture. Rather they seem to be slouching away as the fire dies behind them.

I saw that hallow look in the eyes of countless young people on the train stops across Dublin and I felt a call to do something. I wanted to burst out with good news and say, “Christ is risen, God is on the move, you can be filled to over flowing with the joy of the Spirit.” But I didn’t say anything because I knew there were no ears to hear such ranting from a strange foreigner in a train station. It would take time to build a relationship strong enough to carry that freight. Amy and I were there to visit a team MRN trained to do just that and they were well under way. But being there, seeing that look, I felt more connected and committed for that team. I’ll pray for them more urgently. I’ll make sure to connect with them more often for the sake of the redemption of more of those hollow eyes.

The whole time we were in Ireland I kept thinking about a line from the movie The Devil’s Own. Harrison Ford plays the father of an American family caught up in the terrorism of North Ireland. He just can’t understand what is happening around him in this country which seems so close and yet so foreign to America. At one point, the IRA operative played by Brad Pitt says to him, “Don't look for a happy ending. It's not an American story. It's an Irish one.”

I would suggest to you that there is hope for Ireland, Rwanda, and America for the same reason and it’s not American optimism or confidence in the inevitable progress of the human race. Rather, there is hope for a happy ending to life because there is only one story after all and it’s God’s story and we are all caught up in it. And, to steal a phrase, Love Wins.

In Memory of My Favorite Eeyore Christian

2011-07-02T11:18:00.001-05:00

Thursday my dear friend and prayer partner, Jim Nesbit, was killed when a car ran a stop sign and hit him on his motorcycle. He died on the spot. Right now everyone who loved Jim is in shock. Sudden accidental deaths are hard to absorb. There is no way to prepare when you can’t anticipate something this jarring slugging you in the jaw. “What?! You’re kidding! Really?! Wow! Oh no! How could that happen?! Wow! Oh God, please no!” or something like this came out of my mouth when I got the call. I’m not sure I’ve moved much beyond those thoughts two days later. Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. I’m having a hard time believing that Jim in is not walking and breathing on God’s green earth (a stretch, I know, since he lived in Amarillo). But, like often happens to me after someone I love leaves this life, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Jim in the last few days. Several things stand out about Jim that I loved and still love about him.

First, our relationship really began to grow because he was angry at me. Jim was deeply wounded by the church of his youth and struggled to find God in the Church of Christ. Yet, he remained because he wanted to redeem his church rather than abandon it. Still, he had a hard time putting up with the slow pace of change and the politics that inevitably crops up when there is more than one person involved in something. I don’t remember what the issue was, but Jim was not happy with some decision our church leadership had made about worship. He wasn’t causing trouble, but he was upset and I was included on his list of people who were responsible. Jim let me know he had a problem with me. I visited with Jim and his wife Elaine, who later worked in our office as part of our staff, and their good friends the Crawfords, who shared their concerns. As I listened, I saw their point. In fact, I agreed with them, but I couldn’t fix whatever it was for whatever reason. But I could pray with them. They were people of prayer. So we began to meet every Sunday morning before worship and class to pray over the day. This went on for many years. I forgot the issue but learned to love the people. Those four family in Jesus blessed me more than I could ever have imagined when we began. They lifted me up and gave me courage. My preaching ministry was much more effective because of them and I grew to love them each dearly. It all started because Jim honestly expressed his frustrations rather than stuffing it. Plus he committed to resolve his offence in a godly way. That was Jim.

Second, Jim never found faith easy. In fact, he was what I call an Eeyore Christian. Like the lovable character from Winnie-the Pooh, Jim always saw the world through a gloomy set of glasses. He assumed that things were probably going to start out terrible and then get worse. He wrestled with depression and, like Jacob, he wrestled with God. He had a life filled with hurts and disappointments that it is not my place to list. He had many unanswered questions. He battled a constant cynicism. He didn’t smile much and expected to be rejected and disappointed often. BUT, he didn’t let that basic disposition keep him from loving and trusting God. He loved to worship with abandon. He would stand and raise hands to the Lord when he felt the need and didn’t care who saw it or what they thought about it. He threw himself into ministries like Walk to Emmaus and Kairos. He had a special love for people who had made big mistakes and were incarcerated. He had an ability to minister to people who were hurt and found life hard, the kind that few Christians can understand. Jim could talk to the hopeless and give them hope without blowing silly sunshine up their skirt. He was real. His faith in God was real. His questions for God were real, but so was his relationship with God. God was all that kept him going and he had no problem telling anyone that. Jim was one of those people who would show up when there was a need and work hard. He cared about people. He struggled with the church as institution, but he loved Jesus with all his heart and loved people. He was grumpy, but he was also loving and loyal. If you were not real, if you tried to bring some weak-sauce, smiley-faced, platitudes into his wheelhouse he would slap them down like Hakeem Olajuwon. When you were talking to Jim you better get real or go home. He wouldn’t be mean to you, but he wasn’t going to be fake polite and let you spout spiritual non-sense that only alienated people whose lives where not like a Norman Rockwell painting. For that reason, Jim made me a better minister. He loved me too much to accept simplistic preacher answers that ignored the reality of human brokenness.

One of Jim’s sayings was “Life is not about weathering the storm but learning to dance in the rain.” I never saw Jim dance and that is on my list of things to thank God for. But, you get the point. Jim accepted the brokenness of life as it was and refused to put lipstick on a pig. With that unblinking realism as a background, he fully trusted God and found every reason to praise him and serve others in his name anyway. He believed in the reality of sin and the greater reality of the power of the cross. He lived it. In a twisted way, Jim died the right way. I can just hear him saying, “I knew one day someone would run me over on that bike.” But, he road it anyway. That was Jim.

I know Jim is with the Lord and is able to experience pure joy, free of the stains of a broken world now. I also know that Elaine will survive this devastating blow and move on in faith sustained by the God who loves her like she has with every other pain in her life (which have been too many for one life). I also know that Jim meant more to some other people than he did to me. But, Jim was my brother and my friend, and I will miss him. I’m thankful he was part of my life. He made me a better disciple, better minister, and a better man. Thanks Jim. See you soon.