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Yesterday was one of the saddest days I’ve experienced recently.

As I mentioned in my last post, I knew yesterday morning would be hard for my kids. So I quickly made the video. I rushed home before they left for school. There was so much pain and sorrow in the living room as I walked in the door. So Debbie and I gathered them around the computer to watch the video. They really needed it.

The entire day was sad for me. I knew my children had to bear their sadness alone at school. I couldn’t be there to hug them and tell them it was okay. They all coped the best they could. Dani drew a couple of wonderful posters of Buttercup during her free time at school.

I also knew that the afternoon would be equally difficult. Because of that morning’s schedule we left Buttercup’s body in her cage so we could have a memorial service that evening. Coming home from school was very somber. Cathy, who normally likes to do her homework alone, studied downstairs with the two younger kids. Michael moved Buttercup’s cage into the bathroom. But seeing her body really unsettled him.

After homework, the kids prepared a special box for Buttercup. They all wanted to watch me gently move her body from her cage to the box. It was heartrending, but like a viewing, they wanted and needed to see it.

Last night we had a short memorial service, burying Buttercup in Deb’s parents’ garden. She was buried with her bedding, some of her food and a couple of dandelions, which she loved. I gave each child a special rock. I asked them to say a final good-bye and lay the rock on the site. Then we went inside and watched the video again. I think it’s brought closure for them.

Our family has been touched by death before. In the last few years, our kids have lost their great-grandfather and great-uncle. And each time it hurts. But I want my kids to process their grief. It’s an important component to love in this broken world. I don’t want to short-circuit it by telling them to “stop crying,” “get over it,” or “you’ll see them in heaven.”

I remember as a young child standing at my great-grandma’s funeral. I was hurting and beginning to cry. No one was able to help me in that moment. So I held back the tears and made a vow never to cry again. With no one there to help me grieve, it was my way as a young child to protect myself from the pain. And I never cried again until I was an adult. But the only way one can protect himself from the pain is to stay disconnected. And that’s what I did. I never really loved deeply for a long time.

But with God’s grace, I have learned to love deeply again. And at times, that means hurting deeply.

I hope moments like these past couple of days help my children realize that it’s okay to love and grieve. It’s okay to cry and mourn. And through it, to hope for a better renewed world someday.

My kids are exhausted. It seems like they have cried non-stop since Sunday morning. Tonight will also be tough when they clean Buttercup’s cage. But we’re moving forward and I think they are processing it all very well.

Life does go on. And it is.

And we are also aware that death, and other forms of evil, will strike us again and again and again. I wish I could protect my children from it. But I can’t. So I will do the next best thing. I will be there with them through it all. I will hold them, cry with them, pray with them, hope with them. And I pray that we will not become calloused, bitter or withdrawn. But like Jesus, we will somehow take evil out of commission and replace it with genuine, unending love.

I just finished reading N.T. Wright’s commentary on Romans in The New Interpreter’s Bible. Wow! I’ve studied through Romans in depth a couple of times in my Christian journey. And each time was enriching. Romans is such a exquisite literary and theological masterpiece. But this time through, with Wright as a guide, the book seems much clearer and cohesive.

I used to view Romans as Paul’s systematic theology, discussing sin, then justification, then sanctification, then practical ethics. But this always left large strands of Romans as parenthetical, lengthy rabbit-trails by an author who wanted to say too much. This approach also forced Paul to say things he wasn’t trying to say at all, redefining ideas like sin, justification, and pre-destination in ways foreign to Paul’s original intent.

But Wright’s approach to Romans brings better cohesion and integrity to all of its parts. Romans is about God’s covenantal faithfulness revealed through the royal announcement that Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, is the true Lord of the world. God’s people, in line with God’s eschatological promises, has finally been open to the nations as God’s New World has broken into this one. So in this light, Paul’s use of Old Testament narratives, especially Deuteronomy, Psalms and Isaiah, are not proof-texts of “salvation by faith” as opposed to “salvation by works” as normally assumed in the old and irrelevant debate. Rather, Paul is retelling the Jewish story of God’s faithfulness to creation, humanity and Israel around King Jesus.

Through Jesus, God has proven his faithfulness to Abraham — giving him a Jew plus Gentile family who would work with God for the full renovation and transformation of the world into God’s New Creation!

N.T. Wright gave a lecture yesterday entitled, “Where is God in ‘The War on Terror'” in Durham Cathedral.

I have always believed that our country’s approach to terrorism and Iraq was wrong and not adequately thought out. And I also think a lot of current critiques of the ‘war’ are equally wrong and not thought out. Blaming President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld is equally shallow and immature.

I hope and pray that Tuesday’s elections and readjustments in Washington will move beyond the rhetoric of “fresh eyes” and “new perspective” and actually forge a new way forward in a very complex issue. Too many people on both sides are dying in a ‘war’ that isn’t really addressing the real issue of evil in our world. The problem is that our current direction is wrong and simply withdrawing is wrong. A new way must be paved and I hope our leaders in Washington will have the moral fortitude to deal with this issue in more than simplistic, knee-jerk ways.

Blogs come and go. I guess it’s the nature of the blogosphere or blogdom or whatever you want to call that enchanted realm where everyone has some form of voice in the worldwide community.

However, when I read Antony’s final blog post, I was saddened. He entitled it “It’s Only a Blog, After All…” But it’s not. It contained the ideas and personality of a passionate follower of Christ who influenced my thinking and personal walk with Jesus.

I respect his decision to withdraw from blogging. His reasons resonate with some stuff I’m experiencing. But I’m sad because I will miss his voice. And I believe others will as well.

Mike, over at Waving or Drowning, posts a wonderful Franciscan Benediction:

May God bless you with discomfort

At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships

So that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger

At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,

So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears

To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war,

So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and

To turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness

To believe that you can make a difference in the world.

So that you can do what others claim cannot be done

To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

I’m currently listening to an Emergent Village podcast featuring Will and Lisa Samson, authors of a forthcoming book, Justice in the Burbs. This is an issue I’ve been wrestling with and I’m looking forward to reading this book! Unfortunately, the release date is August 2007.

Len has come up with a cool working definition of Leadership.

“Leadership is the communal process of discerning

the surprising newness of God for His people

and then forming the vehicle,

cultivating the imagination,

and selecting the practices

to take them from where they are into God’s good future.”

I like where he’s going with this definition because it emphasizes the process and community rather than a specific personality. I also like the way his definition focuses on a more organic development rather than an organizational approach. It strikes a much-needed balance between the leaders’ responsibilities in the overall life of the community and the community members’ responsibilities to actually follow Christ. In other words, if I understand the definition correctly, the leaders are facilitating from within the community’s discovery of life in Christ and enabling the whole community to embrace and live it both corporately and personally.

It’s a great definition and worth pondering and unpacking.

Having spent too many hours the last few weeks preparing a mediocre sermon for this past Sunday, I really resonated with some of Jeff Gauss’ thoughts in his post, “The Effectiveness of Sermons.” (I came across his post by way of Jan Bros’ blog.)

While I like to engage in the task of “prteaching,” a term coined by John Frye, I am becoming increasingly convinced that the role for preaching and teaching in the life of the local faith-community has become bloated. Way too many hours (and then in the case of salaried pastors, way too much money) is often spent on preparing and delivering a lecture/sermon that most people won’t remember or apply. From a straight cost-benefit analysis, the over-emphasis on preaching and teaching is a poor use of resources in the pursuit of spiritual formation.

Now that doesn’t mean we must eliminate preaching and teaching altogether. There must be a balance in our expression of worship or liturgy. And part of that balance is hearing God’s word read and taught. (And when I mean read and taught, I also mean not in the disconnected self-help style of many sermons.) But it must also be balanced with worshipful responses to the Word, with corporate prayers, with communion, with art, with service and with dialogue.

I think the role of preaching and teaching should be twofold: 1) re-imagining God’s people with the biblical vision of entering and living in God’s kingdom and 2) encouraging and equipping God’s people in the task of becoming people who actually do enter and live in God’s kingdom. Yet again (and I don’t think I can say this too much) the role of preaching and teaching must be part of a well-thought and prepared liturgy. Imagination for kingdom life must have response through worship and prayer as well as the actual entering and living the kingdom reality through communion and service.

Also, I think the sermons that are necessary for a balanced liturgy should both flow from the pastor’s own spiritual formation, yet be bigger than the pastor’s spiritual formation. First, sermons should primarily be the expression of the pastor’s apprenticeship to Christ, not the result of his or her occupational responsibility of sermon preparation. They should reflect who the pastor is becoming in his or her journey with Christ through the course of study, Scripture reading, prayers, silence, solitude, etc.

Second, sermons should be guided by something larger than the pastor’s personal study. This is why I’m so attracted to the Lectionary and Church calendar. They are NOT the lazy pastor’s way of finding weekly sermon texts. Quite the opposite. Each week’s texts discipline the pastor to remain immersed in and then offer the faith-community something larger than the latest book or the pastor’s favorite Bible passages.

Third, the sermons must come from other sources than just the pastor(s). Perhaps the pastor’s greatest role in regards to sermons is not preparing and delivering them, but rather facilitating them in the context of a balanced liturgy. That might mean finding many others in the congregation who can offer a sermon or thoughts. It might mean gathering a group of ten or twelve people who pursue spiritual formation together with the pastor and from that activity, study, craft and deliver sermons as a team. It might mean finding others who can facilitate discussion around the texts and the sermon. It might mean finding others who can provide an artistic expression for the texts and sermons. (I like the examples from the Church in Bethesda, which blend Scripture, music and video.) It might mean reorganizing the role of the musical worship from being a 20- or 30-minute indulgence of personal intimacy and expression into a corporate response to the Scriptures and sermons. It might mean rethinking and reimagining communion as a corporate experience of God’s New Creation.

Whatever practices a local church embraces, it will require relinquishing the sacred notions that 1) the pastor is God’s primary spokesperson, 2) the sermon is the centerpiece of weekly worship and spiritual formation, and 3) the sermon must entertain in order to hold the congregation’s attention.

I was asked to speak this past Sunday at the Live Oak Vineyard. (The Live Oak Vineyard is the merger of the Arcadia Vineyard and the Monrovia Vineyard, which my family and I have been attending for about a year. Although our family is deeply committed to our small faith-community, attending the Vineyard has provided much-needed opportunities for my children to be involved in youth ministry.)

Michael and I were sitting together during the musical worship portion of the service. I was praying, and quite honestly, fretting over my talk because I knew I wasn’t as prepared as I needed to be. Michael, reached over, and with tears, began praying for me. It was a moving and articulate prayer. Then he got up, went to one of the communion stations and brought over elements for he and I to share together.

Frankly, the sermon was mediocre. But that moment with my son was very powerful. He was my intercessor and cheerleader yesterday. And it made me proud!

I came across this site (thechurchyouknow.com) via Darryl at Dying Church. It is clever and witty. They have produced seven videos based off of NBC’s “The More You Know” campaign of public service announcements. The video, “Attendance,” almost made me choke, I laughed so hard.

Update: I just watched the video, “Worship.” It’s about as hilarious as “Attendance.” I especially like their write-up that accompanies the worship video:

WORSHIP

Don’t get us wrong – we love musical worship, and songs have a rich heritage and important role in worship. But when songs become synonymous with worship, the latter gets confined to nicely-transitioned 20 minute packages a few times a week. Sometimes, these packages are even off-key, or incredibly painful to listen to and participate in.

If worship is a condition of the heart and an attitude towards God, then worship can take place in so many more places and ways. It might be spending time with your children, or it might be going for a run. It might even be a group of friends sitting around enjoying conversation and a few beers and laughing when someone farts. Okay, the farting part might not be worship. But not every gathering has to have a guitar and singing to include true, heartfelt worship.

Authentic fellowship, both with one another and Christ, is always worship – and doesn’t need amplification for the world to hear.

That last line is awesome!

I came across this YouTube video through Garr Reynold’s blog, Presentation Zen. It’s a great concept and tells a wonderful story through image and music. It was what I needed tonight to make me smile.

Also, the Miniature Earth presentation mentioned in Garr’s blog is great as well.

Michael is writing a book report for To Kill A Mockingbird, one of my all-time favorite books. There’s a great quote in the book describing bravery as “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

I like that quote. Bravery isn’t something that happens in the moment. It’s calculated character. It’s moral fiber that evaluates a situation and is actually able to do what is right even when it seems to be the most foolish thing in the world. Atticus Finch exemplified this character throughout the book, even in the face of the darkest evil and the worst outcomes. And I hope when all is said and done, I will have too.

Jason Clark has reposted a great post outlining the things he loves and hates about the emerging church. It’s a great list and all I wanted to say was “Yeah! Me too!” I loved the post two years ago and I love it now.

I’m swamped and have not had time to do any writing. It sucks, because I like to read, reflect and write. But I haven’t been able to massage my life enough to squeeze out time to really blog like I want. But I’m glad others like Len are still stoking the fires. I’ve ripped his entire post to put here because it addresses something I’ve been thinking about on and off lately.

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From an interview with Mike Frost on Smulospace.. can you relate?

Q: When I was a student, and later worked with you at the Centre for Evangelism and Global Mission at Morling College, I couldn’t help but noticing every now and then that you didn’t seem overly enthusiastic with corporate singing. You’ve also written about your distaste for “Jesus is my boyfriend” worship songs. Can Christian music be redeemed through contextual forms of music and meaningful lyrics?

A: I really hope so! But I’m not a musician, so I write about this stuff as a disempowered critic. I have no ability to change it myself because I can’t write music or play an instrument. But I’m getting tired of singing love songs to Jesus-my-boyfriend. And frankly I feel silly when I have to sing songs so sentimental and cloying they could have been written for a 1990s boy band. As much as I’m loath to admit it these days, I’m not ‘in love with Jesus’ (for some people this might sound like blasphemy).

But let’s be honest, I love my three daughters more deeply than I could ever imagine loving anyone, but I have never fallen in love with them. My love for them transcends the exciting, heady, temporary feelings of romantic love. Likewise with Jesus. I love him and am completely in his debt. But I’m not head over heals in romantic love with him. So it’s not singing that I don’t like. It’s the kind of singing that I’m expected to engage in. As much as this romanticising of worship bothers me, even more disturbing is the recent trend of singing worship songs in which I have to pledge my unfaltering devotion and service to him. You know, the ‘Jesus, I will never let you go…’ type song. In these songs I have to declare that I will follow him to the ends of the earth and that I will praise him all my days. In one sense, there’s nothing wrong with making such promises to God. The Psalmist does so on occasion. But frankly, I’m so much more comfortable with singing about the fact that Jesus has promised that he will never let me go. My promises seem hollow and unreliable. It’s God’s promises to me in Christ that are solid, reliable and unfaltering.

I sorely wish Christian musicians would write songs that help to sustain us as exiles, as foreigners in a forbidding country. We need songs that strengthen our resolve and inspire us to act. Not silly loves songs to Jesus.



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I used to love intimate worship. I enjoyed singing songs of love and devotion to Jesus. And I still do on occasion. I like expressing my loyalty to Jesus through that medium.

But I think I’m growing up (or at least I would like to think so). I don’t simply want Jesus to be my “boyfriend.” I want him to be my Teacher, my Master, my Father, my Savior, my Lord, my Model, my Coach, my Shepherd and so much more. And most of the time I’m not going to feel the emotions of “romance” (for lack of a better word). Nor should I. I know Jesus is intimately present with me. But there’s so much more to our friendship than intimacy. Intimacy is at the core, but it’s not everything.

Jesus is about transforming this world, quite frankly, with or without me. Surely he loves me and calls me. But he calls me to God’s purpose for the world (Romans 8:28). There’s work to be done. And I need to train in order to be able to do that work cooperatively with Jesus. And I need to actually do the work that needs to be done. And like any work, it’s a combination of joy, love and loyalty with pain, struggle and failure.

Paul brings this out in Romans 8. There are two aspects of those who love God — the Spirit brings the intimate Abba-cry and the Spirit conforms us to Christ through labor pains.

I want my worship to reflect that. I want my musical worship to reflect all facets of my journey with Christ, which is why I’m finding more and more “worship songs” in “secular” music. There’s a gritty honesty in a lot of that music that seems missing in the mainstream worship music. Plus, I want my musical worship not to sacrifice sound theology for the sake of poetic expression or a simple rhyme. I’ve been cringing lately at a lot of the songs I used to sing as well as the newer stuff that comes out. I’m not sure we realize how singing a catchy, yet theologically incorrect chorus can distort our imagination and thinking. And I enjoy greater musical diversity in my musical worship. (Is it me or do all the “worship bands” sound the same?)

Also, I want my worship to expand far beyond music. It needs to incorporate silence and inarticulate prayer and spiritual disciplines and art and communion and icons and symbols and probably other elements than I’m unaware of right now.

Two significant elements of worship that I have found particularly relevant regardless of mood or circumstance are the Jesus prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner” — and the Lord’s Prayer. I love to pray them silently through my day. I can’t even begin to explain how beautiful they are as continuous expressions of worship through the day.

Sheesh! I haven’t had time to blog for a while. I’m hoping to get a better handle on my time so I can start writing again. (However, I must say that the break has been nice.)

I’m interrupting my hiatus to post a picture and a link. The blog, “Adversaria,” has a biography on NT Wright. The picture from that post is priceless, so I’m putting it here as well.

My youngest child, Christopher, turned 7 yesterday. It was a nice day. After worship service at the Live Oak Vineyard, we took Chris to Peter Piper Pizza for lunch. Then, Uncle David treated the kids to bowling in the late afternoon. Dang! They grow up so fast.

Kerri did a wonderful job closing our discussion in the Songs of Ascent. We spent a lot of time talking about quotes from Eugene Peterson’s book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which is based on the Songs of Ascent. Last night, each member was assigned a quote from the last chapter to talk about.

My quote from the book was actually a quote from Catherine of Siena:

“All the way to heaven is heaven.”

That statement is so rich with meaning for me. It summarizes some cataclysmic shifts in thinking and living that I’ve experienced over the last several years. Heaven is not a distant destination that I will escape to one day, leaving an evil creation to be destroyed and replaced with some new magical place.

Nope. When God looked at creation and said, “It is good,” he never changed his mind. Heaven isn’t a magical realm where we live happily ever after. Rather, heaven and earth are the two sides of God’s one good creation. And God’s goal is to see his entire creation whole, restored and reaching his wildest dreams. In that light, Jesus taught us to pray and live “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The goal isn’t escape, but restoration. It’s eventual joining and interlocking of the two dimensions so that God’s rule and presence fills the earth as it does heaven.

So when I finally arrive at that time and place — the threshold of God’s New Creation that is filled with his unleashed glory and presence — I want to be able to look back on my life and realize my entire journey has not only prepared me for my eternal life with God in his renewed and restored world, but also contributed to the actual renewing and restoring of that world.

One of the things I’ve appreciated about the Emerging Church conversations is the attempt to rediscover the biblical Gospel. For too long the Gospel has been held hostage by a modern, reductionist parody.

Recently, I started listening to some lectures given by NT Wright in 2006 while simultaneously making my way through his commentary on Romans. I’ll try to summarize some stuff that he’s brought up.

In Romans 1, Paul states that the Gospel is the royal proclamation that Jesus is Israel’s royal Messiah and therefore the true Lord of creation. This proclamation is a direct confrontation with Caesar’s “Gospel.” Caesar was proclaimed to be the “son of God” since his father was proclaimed to be divine, and the “savior” and “lord” of the world since he brought peace and justice through his political and military might. But where Caesar’s “Gospel” is achieved through oppression and power, Jesus’ Gospel is proven through the Spirit and the resurrection.

Paul then declares that through this royal proclamation of Jesus’ true lordship, God’s covenantal faithfulness, his transforming restorative justice that will make creation right, has been revealed. Jesus’ lordship is the climax of God’s plan to restore the cosmos, proving God’s faithfulness to creation and humanity.

So the Gospel is the good news that through Jesus, God is saving his creation. In this context, people are saved as part of this larger process. In fact, people are saved as they are swept up in God’s saving purposes for creation and thereby become God’s saving agents to creation.

This is where the importance of narrative functions. Romans reveals the climax of a story begun in Genesis, incorporating many biblical sub-themes. In the beginning, God creates a dynamic, beautiful and good creation and then creates a people through whom his nurture and order for creation are manifested. These people are given a portion of the larger world — the Garden — in which to express their responsible stewardship in anticipation of the inheritance of the whole world. Created in the image of God, they are to shine God’s person and presence into the world through their stewardship. However, instead of bringing care and order into the world, they bring distortion and chaos.

God then creates a new people, through whom he will save and restore broken creation. Similar to the first humans, the nation of Israel is given a portion of the larger world — the Land — in which to express their responsible stewardship in anticipation of the inheritance of the whole world. Blessed with the Law and other gifts to mediate God’s presence, they are to shine as a light in the darkness. However, instead, of bearing the solution to creation’s brokenness, they become part of the larger problem.

As you can tell so far, God chooses to engage his creation through human beings. This climaxes in Jesus. Jesus is the faithful human (the Second Adam) and the faithful Israelite (the Messiah, Israel’s royal representative) who ultimately on the cross bears the tension of the problem of sin and brokenness and God’s solution and restoration. God finally works through a human, a faithful representative of humankind and Israel, to accomplish what he purposed from the beginning.

God again creates a new people through Jesus, by giving them his Spirit, who in turn is restoring the image of God in their humanity and enabling them to fulfill the Torah as the true Israel. In this way, this new people becomes God’s restorative presence in a broken world, the light in the darkness. And since Christ climaxes both humankind’s story and Israel’s story, God’s new humanity and new Israel are no longer restricted to the Garden or the Land. Our realm of stewardship is the entire creation.

Paul makes this clear first in Romans 4:13, where he declares that Abraham — who is not just the father of ethnic Israel, but now through Christ’s faithfulness, the father of all God’s people — would inherit not just the land but the entire world. Paul then states more explicitly in Romans 8 that our inheritance as Spirit-indwelt people, and thus being co-heirs with Christ, is the entire creation.

The exciting aspect of this story is that we are at work with God in bringing about our own inheritance. Broken creation groans for God’s children to be revealed. God’s children, in the midst of groan creation, also groans waiting for the final redemption of our bodies. And the Spirit, in the midst of groaning people, also groans in intercession for us. And this whole process is driving forward as God works all things for the good — forming the likeness of Christ into those who called according to God’s restorative purposes.

Into this sub-theme of Spirit and Law, NT Wright makes a cool observation. Jesus and the Spirit in Acts 1 & 2 parallels Moses and the Law. As Moses ascended the mountain, hidden by the clouds, to dwell in God’s presence and then returns to give God’s people the Law, Jesus now ascends, hidden by a cloud, to dwell in God’s presence and then returns to give God’s people the means to fulfill the Law — the Spirit. In fact, the Feast of Pentecost is the celebration associated with the giving of the Law on Sinai to God’s people. Now on Pentecost, Christ gives his Spirit to God’s people so they can actually fulfill the Law. It is this same Spirit who forms the likeness of Christ in God’s people and intercedes for them as they become God’s restorative presence on earth.

So God’s salvation is not just given to human beings. Rather it is given through human beings to the entire creation. So we experience God’s salvation as we participate in the larger salvation of creation. That’s Good News!

Our kids start school today. It sucks. Our family goes through its annual Back-to-School Blues. It also sucks that the kids have to go back to school in August, an entire week before Labor Day. Sheesh!

We decided to end our summer with an extended four-day weekend. It was very nice. We took little day trips, including a day at the beach and a day in the mountains. Here’s a photo of our family roasting hotdogs at the beach.

On our trip to the mountains, Michael and I took our digital cameras and tripods to practice taking some shots. I haven’t had a chance to look through all of his pictures yet, but I noticed this one shot that was really cool. He’s showing a talent with the camera, which is great because he wants to be a professional photographer. And he’s only had his camera less than three months.

This is an untouched photo that he shot in black & white. I love the composition and texture. It really captures the surroundings, which were burned by fire a few years ago, but are now showing new growth.

I came across the article, “Pandemic Love,” by Charles Moore through Jason Clark’s blog. Moore recounts the early Christians’ response to severe plagues that ripped through the Roman Empire.

I pasted a large portion of Moore’s article in this blog. It’s a great reminder of how God’s people are to live for the sake of the world. We’re not to worry about our own safety, comfort and protection. Our lives are larger than just our current lives. Our lives are as eternal as God’s kingdom, so life and death in this dimension, although mysterious, is not all there is. It’s a mere drop in the bucket. And as frightening as risking our lives may look in this dimension, we are completely safe in our Father’s hands — even unto death.

We need to remember that even when Jesus was experiencing the great hellishness of the cross, he knew he was ultimately safe in his Father’s hands. That’s why Paul can call our most devastating crises “light and momentary troubles.” He’s not making light of human suffering. He’s viewing human suffering in this broken creation through the lens of God’s eternal kingdom that will eventually consummate an eternal New Creation of justice, goodness and beauty.

Moore’s article reminds us that we must live our lives now in anticipation of that New Creation. We must live abundant, self-giving, sacrificial lives for the sake of the world. That IS life in the Spirit. And it is the Spirit, through God’s community of renewed image-bearers, that will create the materials from which Christ will shape God’s New Creation.

We may not know how Christ will eventually renew the earth, but we can be sure that he will use everything that our Spirit-empowered lives produce now as the raw materials. N.T. Wright says that each of us is like a mason, crafting stonework in preparation for the construction of a cathedral. We don’t know how the master architect will use our work to create the building, but we know he will. We must be faithful to the portions of the building material he has commissioned us to create and trust him in designing and constructing the building.

So with that, here’s a portion of Moore’s article on “Pandemic Love.” Let’s ask ourselves “How is God calling me, my family, and our community to live so that a piece of God’s New Creation is fashioned through our abundant, self-giving love to the world?”

“In stark contrast to such hopelessness and fear, Christians showed how their faith made this life—and even death—meaningful. Cyprian, for example, almost welcomed the great epidemic of his time, knowing that it was an opportunity for the church to give witness to the hope that was within them. He was so overwhelmed by a sense of confidence that the members of the Alexandrian church were accused of regarding the plague as a time of festival.

Instead of fear and despondency, then, the earliest Christians expended themselves in works of mercy that simply dumbfounded the pagans. For them God loved humanity, and in order to love God back they believed they needed to love others. God did not demand ritual sacrifices; he wanted his love expressed in deeds of compassion on earth.

This love took on very practical, concrete forms. In Rome, Christians buried not just their own, but pagans who had died without funds for a proper burial. They also supplied food for 1,500 poor people on a daily basis. In Antioch of Syria, the number of destitute persons the church was feeding had reached 3,000. Church funds were also used in special cases to buy the emancipation of Christian slaves.

During the plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying. Their care was so extensive that Emperor Julian eventually tried to copy the church’s welfare system. His efforts failed, however, because for Christians it was love—not duty—that was their motivation.

The first Christians not only took care of their own, but also reached out far beyond themselves. Their faith led to a pandemic (pan = all; demos = people) of love. Consequently, at the risk of their own lives, they saved an immense number of lives. Their elementary nursing greatly reduced mortality. Simple provisions of food and water allowed the sick who were temporarily too weak to cope for themselves to recover instead of perishing miserably.

Pagans couldn’t help but notice that Christians not only found strength to risk their lives, but they also noticed that in caring for one another they were much less likely to die. Christian survivors of the plague became immune, and therefore they were able to pass among the afflicted with apparent invulnerability. In fact, those most active in nursing the sick were the very ones who had already contracted the disease early on, but who were cared for by their brothers and sisters. In this way, the early Christians became, in the words of one scholar, “a whole force of miracle workers to heal the ‘dying.’” Or as historian Rodney Spark puts it, “It was the soup they [the Christians] so patiently spooned to the helpless that healed them.”

In the midst of intermittent persecution and colossal misunderstanding, and in an era when serving others was thought to be demeaning, the “followers of the way”—instead of fleeing disease and death—went about ministering to the sick and helping the poor, the widowed, the crippled, the blind, the orphaned, and the aged. The people of the Roman Empire were forced to admire their works and dedication. “Look how they love one another,” was heard on the streets.”

Well, the day has finally arrived. I turn 40 today. Anticipating this event has initiated a lot of personal reflection over the past twelve months. And I’m confident that it will continue to be the source of reflection in the months to come.

I didn’t realize how big a milestone this would be for me on an emotional level. It’s sobering. But in a good way. I’m not depressed or filled with regret. I’m simply very aware of who I was, who I am, and who I still dream of becoming. And although I wish I were further along in the process, I like what God has been doing.

I’m also very aware of how blessed I am. Debbie asked me last week what I wanted for my birthday. And although there are things I’d like to have, I couldn’t think of anything that I really wanted or had to have. Jokingly, she said, “It must be nice to be a man who has everything.” To which I replied, “It’s not that I have everything. It’s that I have so many great friends whom I can borrow from.”

This made me realize that perhaps the wealth of a person isn’t measured in the abundance of what he or she possesses but rather in the abundance of friends that he or she can borrow from. Friendships. That’s how wealth is truly measured. I’m glad I’m still young enough to continue exploring life fulfillment on that premise.

So on my fortieth birthday, I want to say “Thank you!” to all of the great family and friends that God has surrounded me with. All of you make my life rich.

Chris Erdman posts a timely piece about the need for the Church to pursue “white martyrdom.” It’s both brilliant, yet frightening.

“It is that martyrdom we must pursue today. We must form an alternative Christian witness against so much that popularly passes for Christianity. We must intentionally work to raise martyrs—not folks who are preoccupied with dying, but folk who are so preoccupied with life that death no longer holds power over them. If and when that happens, we just might see a church on the earth. If and when that happens, the nations will not only hear but see the gospel. And if we begin with this martyrdom of conscience, our white martyrdom, we will prepare God’s church for the more colorful martyrdom that may still come our way. Whether or not we’re ever called to bleed for our witness, the world will have a more robust and faithful Christian witness because of our efforts. And that may be the most helpful thing we can do for this warring world.”

This is so biblical. It’s right out of the Book of Revelation where the Church follows the Lamb to sacrificial death as a way of embodying the Gospel and participating in the movement of God’s kingdom from heaven to earth.

Youtube has a new superstar. It’s a 79-year old British widower whose moniker is geriatric1927. He began uploading videos about life onto Youtube only last week. So far, his first video has been viewed over 600,000 times!

He seems to be gentle man who is using the internet to build community. In the video below, geriatric1927 states that he has received over 4,700 emails from the Youtube community and that Youtube has changed his life.

One of the comments on about video said, “You’re like the Grandfather I wish I had.” It reminds me how disconnected the younger generation is from the lives, stories and wisdom of previous generations. Considering all the junk you normally find on Youtube, I’m glad geriatric1927 is finding a voice.

In chapter four of The Great Giveaway, David Fitch deals with two forms of evangelical worship services — sermon-centered worship and song-centered worship. He begins his chapter with a fundamental question, “How do you know good worship when you see it?” As a staff member at a couple different churches, this question always surfaced. And the usual answer focused around the worship event itself — the music, the mood, the activity, the emotions, the song selection, the musical style, the preaching, the worship team’s skill and performance, etc.

But Fitch answers the question, “Simply put, faithful worship reveals itself in the shape of the lives it produces.” You know worship is “good” when it produces Christlike lives.

Fitch argues that unfortunately, the typical evangelical worship service contains an inherent design flaw that prevents it from properly shaping Christlike lives. I’ll bypass Fitch’s arguments regarding the postmodern critique of knowledge (through sermons) and experience (through singing) and cut to the chase:

“Evangelicals go to church on Sunday yet are unaffected because we either sit passively in a lecture hall taking lecture notes for later use or we indulge in a rock concert/pep rally that titillates our emotions but leaves little to order our selves into the glory of God.”

Instead, worshippers need to be immersed into something larger than our selves in order to form our selves into that reality. That something is worship that “orders our desires, orients our vision and livens our words through art, symbol, prayers, mutual exchanges, participatory rituals, readings of the Word, and the Eucharist every Sunday morning.”

However, both forms of evangelical worship are incapable of immersing worshippers into this kind of life-shaping experience because they “put the worshiping self at the center of worship.” That’s the design flaw of typical evangelical worship.

If the sermon is the centerpiece of the worship event, then the listeners are at the center of worship. He or she comes to the Scriptures and sermon analyzing and deciding which portions to believe and apply.

If the singing is the centerpiece of the worship event, then the singers are at the center of worship. The songs become a vehicle of the worshippers’ self-expression to God.

Either way, the worshipper remains the center of worship, and thus in control during worship. According to Fitch, although the Holy Spirit’s involvement in worship is assumed, the Spirit cannot truly transform without permission as long as the worshipper remains in control during worship. “One’s mind when firmly in charge cannot transform itself.” Rather, in such situations, the mind can only reinforce the ways it already thinks. The results:

“Individuals enter worship and use the sermons and songs totally unaware of the fact that they are but furthering their own schemes, which are already in place… Therefore, contemporary Christian worship turns inevitably to self-indulgence based in whatever it is we bring to worship that day.”

The direction evangelicals must turn is back toward life-giving liturgy that is structured around “call and response” and incorporates art and symbol as valid mediums of truth. In other words, worship must move from the mere communication of the concept that Jesus is Lord to the holistic immersion into the reality that Jesus really IS Lord.

“By reordering our worship liturgically, embodying it through art and symbol, and re-sacralizing the mysteries of the Word and Eucharist, we can recapture the shaping of our people’s imaginations for the lordship of Christ. Such a worship may take practice and therefore require patience because we have been so addicted to appeasing our ‘selves’ in worship as opposed to shaping our ‘selves.'”

Fitch suggests several practices to restore life-giving liturgy. Because this post is already long, I will simply summarize his main points to stir our imagination:

1. Restore liturgy and make it accessible through explanation and contemporary language.

2. Pattern worship after the rhythm of “Call and Response” so that sermon and songs are not forms of self-expression, but responses to the presence of Christ made real through Eucharist, Scripture, symbol, and art.

3. Revive the Church calendar so that it reorders our whole lives around the rhythms of Christ.

4. Reinvigorate the Eucharist by both placing it as the dominant activity of worship and reviving its mystery and power.

5. Use candles and other tactile symbols so that our worship can be visualized and ritualized in a way that invites us into God’s transcendence and mystery.

6. Use the visual arts to present the narrative of God in Scriptures in a way that requires the worshippers to submit to, participate in, respond to, and enter into.

7. Sing substantive music that both avoids individualist self-expression and exceeds emotional catharsis and becomes a communal response to the goodness and glory of God.

8. View the sanctuary as a sacred art gallery that displays God’s beauty and invites the worshipper to participate in God’s truth that is embodied visually and tangibly.

Mark has a good post on liturgical worship from the Orthodox tradition that captures a lot of what Fitch is saying. You can read it HERE.

Michael and Catherine, my two oldest kids, are on a week-long travel camp with the youth from Live Oak Vineyard. They left Saturday and will return on Friday.

I sure am missing them.

Janet Ruffing writes about the demon of busyness on the Church of the Savior blog. And yes, it’s a demon. It’s a power that takes on a life of its own and robs people of the abundant life God offers. It’s not morally neutral. And it’s not just a lifestyle. It’s a demon and many of us, including myself, need to experience genuine deliverance.

Matt pointed to my blog with some very kind words. So I wanted to say “Hi” to anyone coming this way from his blog.

I’ve been making my way through Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger’s book, Emerging Churches. They do a great job summarizing the significant aspects or themes of the various forms of Emerging Church.

One of the important contributions of the emerging church conversation/movement in western culture is the identifying of and responding to the rampant consumerism that has infiltrated the western Church. Here are a couple of poignant paragraphs:

“Much of marketing practice borders on manipulation by creating needs. Until one sees or experiences a product, one often does not ‘need’ it. The creation and the presentation of a product create the need. When churches decide to make entertainment their main focus, they create a continued expectation and desire for more. Marketing is not neutral; it fosters human desire as much as it satiates it“ (Emphasis mine).

A couple of paragraphs later, they write:

“Marketing churches may say they are only meeting the felt needs of individuals. But like all marketing organizations, they have a strong say in what those felt needs are. They create desires as much as they fulfill them. In that respect, they cease to be a neutral provider and instead are using their power to control individuals. Their consumers are wired to seek the fulfillment of their needs. They adopt cultural narratives that say that every person lacks something, is impoverished, and needs a particular product to be satisfied.”

And one more paragraph:

“Churchgoers associate the consumer church’s products with ‘need satisfaction.’ There are areas of an individual’s life that are ambiguous and insecure, to which the church seeks to respond by creating and offering products that will address those gaps. Consumer churches present a relationship with Jesus as the answer to widespread feelings of angst. Thus, Jesus is turned into a product that satisfies needs. The problem is that Jesus won’t satisfy individual needs, for the gospel is primarily about God’s agenda, not ours. For true satisfaction to take place, needs must be reformed and transformed to correspond to the gospel.”

These paragraphs make me think about a few things. First, the Church’s delving into marketing is as bad as delving into white magic. I know that sounds harsh. But Gibbs and Bolger make a valid point — marketing is not neutral. (David Fitch made a similar point about “effective leadership.”) Marketing is not a skill, technique or art form that one can simply use without any kind of moral and ethical ramifications. In fact, using marketing is a moral decision in and of itself. It is manipulation just like forms of magic. Regardless if one uses it for “good,” it is still contrary to God’s kingdom and will eventually violate people’s integrity. It creates a power structure that is inherently broken, easily influenced by evil, and can quickly take on a life of its own. Marketing creates needs as much as it satiates them. Therefore, it becomes similar to drinking salt water. A person thinks he or she is quenching one’s thirst. But in actuality, the thirst is getting worse and worse.

Second, Jesus’ good news of God’s kingdom coming to earth was never about satisfying individual needs. Rather, it was about aligning one’s life around God and satisfying God’s intentions for his creation. And in many cases, it requires those who enter and receive God’s kingdom to die to themselves. It requires laying aside felt or perceived needs as potentially illegitimate. It requires trusting that as God’s kingdom comes and makes everything right, it will reorganize human life in such a way to bring about God’s good purposes for our lives, not our own.

Another thing that comes to mind is that those of us in the emerging church must think and act carefully in our response against consumerism. It’s easy to shift from a consumerist model in which the local church and its leaders functioned as service providers and shift to a decentralized “do-it-yourself” (DIY) model where everyone is simply in charge of his or her own spirituality. That may work well for those of us with adequate training — who read the theology books, study Scripture, lead worship, and other activities. But, quite frankly, it leaves everyone else in the dust. And it wasn’t Jesus’ model.

Jesus, in reconfiguring both image-bearing humanity and presence-bearing Israel around himself and in anticipating the fullness of God’s New Creation upon the earth, created community. Building community wasn’t a principle for effective leadership. Jesus didn’t do it because it was the most effective way of transmitting his ideas to his students. If so, he would have gathered more students into a network of groups.

Rather, Jesus chose twelve men. As N.T. Wright has shown, every Israelite immediately understood Jesus’ symbolism. Just as Yahweh chose the twelve tribes of Israel to be his people, Jesus was reconstituting Israel around himself through twelve men. And it is especially important to note that Jesus wasn’t one of the twelve. As he calls the twelve around himself, he embodies Yahweh dwelling in the midst of the twelve.

Why bring this up? I believe that proper understanding and implementation of community is a primary answer to the consumerism in the western Church. For Jesus, community was the embodiment of the good news of God’s kingdom. It was the embodiment of humans living as the image of God. It was the embodiment of being God’s transformative presence in the world. It was the embodiment of the Trinitarian reality on earth. It was the embodiment of the human journey toward the fullness and likeness of God in human form. It was the embodiment of God’s future New Creation.

It’s important that our emerging faith-communities become collaborative communities of generous creative producers gathered around the living and resurrected Christ. Together we must follow Christ, discovering new vision, new theology, new expressions of faith, new liturgy, new ways to serve, new ways to resist, new avenues of formation, and new ways to embody God kingdom.

We are not to be a support group of individual DIYers. Rather, we are to be a family (another symbol Jesus reconfigured around himself), journeying together, creating together, and serving and supporting one another in the process. And we do this by unashamedly bringing our gifts, our stories, our personalities, and our full lives into this process. And like Jesus and his original twelve, our faith-communities become local embodied expressions of genuine humanity, called to join Yahweh in responsibly serving his world.

This is something that came to mind as I’ve been working through Fitch’s chapter on leadership in The Great Giveaway.

If someone went to a typical pastor of a typical local church and asked that pastor “Is your church a safe place for me to work through my personal sins and grow in Christ?” that pastor would probably say, “Yes.”

I believe the best-intentioned pastors really try to build an organization that houses a safe Christ-centered community of healing and formation. They try to lead a community where people can come and safely engage in worship, confession, accountability, teaching, fellowship, discipleship, service, and mission with others so that they can grow out of their sins and further into Christlikeness within the life of the faith-community.

But here’s the catch: In that typical church, the pastor is exempt from that community. He or she organizes and leads the organization, but rarely participates in the healing life of the community. It’s a safe place for the average congregation member to confess sins and engage in the various ministries to discover deliverance from those sins within the community.

But what happens to the leader-pastor when he or she confesses depression, pornography, gambling, alcoholism, lust for another congregation member, eating disorder, pride, rage, or any other kind of socially unacceptable sin or addiction. Like it or not, it is presumed that the leader-pastor is above this. Sure, the leader-pastor can admit vague sins — I got angry at my spouse, I yelled at my kids, I got angry on the freeway. But unfortunately, confessing and dealing with the dirty stuff jeopardizes his or her ministry and job.

So the leader-pastor buries it and hides it for the sake of his or her ministry. Ironically, the leader-pastor cannot participate in the necessary healing and forming life of the community that he or she leads. They’re only course of action is an individualized, and therefore stunted, attempt at spiritual formation. And then everyone’s shocked when the leader-pastor’s sins become public. They never had a chance.

David Fitch’s chapter on leadership has been an interesting read so far. I think he may be overstating his case, but it’s one worth thinking about. In fact, I saw a bit of myself in his description of why modern pastoral training sets pastors up for failure.

In a nutshell, Fitch states that pastor-leaders are formed for character failure by evangelicalism’s obsession with “effective leadership” training.

“Effective leadership” places effectiveness as the leader’s priority, perpetuating the modern myth that technique and skill can control the outcomes of organizations. This subtly trains the pastor to act, behave and lead as though he or she were in control of the church. As a result, the CEO-pastor does not serve, but leads. He or she doesn’t submit as a member of a community to the community’s gifts and discernment, but directs an organization. In most of these situations, the CEO-pastor discerns the Spirit’s leading for the organization and then uses his or her leadership skills to “make it happen” by envisioning, organizing and managing its members. This is not biblical Christian leadership.

Also interesting is the discussion that “effectiveness” is not morally neutral. The quest for effectiveness in Christian leadership means something has been sacrificed for effectiveness. Local churches must come to the realization that within Christian leadership effectiveness may not be a good thing. The typical church’s mission to share Christ or make disciples of the most people as possible is primarily a pursuit for effectiveness. In this light, the church becomes a managed system of disbursement of teaching and ministry to the most people in the most effective way. And usually in this system, the marginalized suffer.

The postmodern critique of modernism also asks who can be trusted to determine what is “effective” and therefore control outcomes the bring about that “effectiveness.” At times the pursuit for effectiveness in Christian leadership is but a guise for the leader’s attempt at control or personal success.

“Effective leadership” training also shifts the pastor’s moral behavior to become a subset of effective leadership. In other words, pastors view their moral lives from the context of their leadership. The pastor-leader maintains moral faithfulness primarily because moral failure would ruin their ministry. The pastor-leader then becomes an expert at managing his or her external life with little internal character formation. Simply put, they learn to smile on the outside when they’re seething on the inside.

Fitch taps into something important with the following words:

“Ministry can only flow out of one’s life and character. In the end, moral failures are not the worst of the problem: the worst is when leaders give off the air that they are doing things in order to be effective instead of doing things out of faithfulness to Christ and who they already are in him because of what he has already done.”

Here’s the question: Are “faithfulness to Christ” and “effective leadership” compatible in genuine biblical Christian leadership? If so, how? In the end, one must submit to the other. There will be times when what is good for the community is bad for the organization. There will also be times when success must take a back seat to what is simply good, just and right.

In just a few hours, my family and I will be going camping for the very first time. Debbie has been camping many times as a child, but we have never gone camping as a family. This will be my kids’ and my first time camping.

Fortunately we’re going with a group of 7 or 8 families (32 people in all), so I don’t feel too much pressure.

Len Hjarlmarson has a GREAT POST about Parker Palmer and how our knowledge causes violence. I like Palmer’s definition of violence:

“It is important to recognize that to do violence to each other we need not drop a bomb or hit someone with a stick. We do violence in much more subtle ways. My operating definition of violence is that violence always involves violating the integrity of the other. We do violence whenever we violate the integrity or the nature of the other, whether the other is the earth, or another human being, or another culture.”

This is why I can’t be a pacifist with any kind integrity. It’s because I have learned and perfected the subtler ways of inflicting violence and violating the integrity of others. I yell at my kids. I can vie for a position of dominance simply with a glance. I can manipulate with a carefully turned phrase. And sometimes I just get pissed off because I don’t get my way.

Len’s post reminds me of my inward nature and my propensity toward violence.

Yet, while I may not be able to view myself as a pacifist, I believe there are spiritual disciplines of pacifism or peace — exercises of solitude, silence, sacrifice, submission and secrecy. Len’s post reminds me that although I may not hit someone or kill someone, I still need to follow the Prince of Peace, in order to become a man of peace in the fullest sense.

Chris Erdman has a great post called “Jesus Christ Says ‘No’ To War.” I love his line, “War is a failure — that is an empirical fact.”

As followers of Christ, the living Prince of Peace, I cannot fathom any way we can rationalize war. Evil cannot be used to overcome evil. Violence cannot be used to overcome violence. And please don’t quote Old Testament stories about God telling Israel to go to war and kill off certain groups of people. That was a different time, culture and part of God’s developing Story for creation. Christ’s life has transformed the Story, taking it to a new place. Jesus has redefined what it means to be human and God’s people. He and his followers have given us a vision of where all of this is going — a renewed world without war, violence, murder, hatred and chaos. And like Christ, his followers are to pull the future into the present by living it now through the power of the Holy Spirit, who is divine living love.

Any argument in favor of war from a nationalistic, political or economic perspective must bow to God’s eternal perspective. Christ has come. He has inaugurated his Father’s kingdom coming to earth, a vision that must fill our imagination and must rearrange and redirect our lives. “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

The closest we can come to any kind of rationalization for war is to claim that in our broken world war is a terrible inevitability. Is war necessary at times? Perhaps. But that simply affirms Erdman’s claim — war is a failure. It’s our failure as human beings and more specifically our failure as the God’s people to bear God’s image and to bring his future into our present.

Erdman’s words need to be heeded:

“Jesus Christ says “no” to war. Utopian? No more so than our more approved visions for the world. Jesus Christ may be the most realistic answer the world will ever know. Love is the only power on earth worth its salt. It is the great cause and must now be dared. The state cannot do it, but the church can; it must. Only the church can lead the world into its future.”

I have always found it helpful to review the basics in order to maintain a true course in whatever I’m trying to accomplish. It helps me avoid missing the forest because of the trees.

So what are the basics of a missional community? A missional community is a group of people who have arranged their lives so that they are cooperating with God’s dream of redeeming creation by living in constant missionary engagement with the world. This involves a few things worth unpacking.

First, the members of a missional community are committed to being Jesus’ apprentices, arranging their lives to learn from him how to be like him from the inside-out. This is accomplished primarily by being with Jesus throughout one’s day by wisely practicing spiritual disciplines, worship and community, all supported by a natural rhythm of life.

It also means that this group of apprentices gathers in various ways, either formally or informally, that build the members up in love. These gatherings are “in Jesus’ name,” centering around his essence and presence. They involve worship, prayer, communion, story-telling and the full exercise of spiritual gifts. Ultimately, it’s the members’ rich participation in each other’s lives that then supports the members’ lives outside the community.

Ultimately, the previous two facets are means to a greater end — a constant missionary encounter with the world. We are called by God not for privilege but for service. We are called to be a blessing to the world by living a life of sacrificial love, and thus imitating God (Ephesians 5:1-2). As N.T. Wright has said on many occasions, what Jesus is for Israel, the Church is now for the world. Or as Wright states in his commentary on Romans 8 (I pulled this from Scot McKnight’s blog), “And, if one dare put it like this, as God sent Jesus to rescue the human race, so God will send Jesus’ younger siblings, in the power of the Spirit, to rescue the whole creation order, to bring that justice and peace for which the whole creation yearns” (p. 596).

Perhaps the primary way members of a missional community, both corporately and personally, can embody Jesus’ good news of God’s kingdom come to earth is through inclusion. To refer to Wright once again, he states that at the heart of Jesus’ kingdom practice was the practice of inclusion, especially around the table. Table fellowship became a powerful symbol and practice for Jesus as he used these moments to shatter revered social categories and welcome all into his Father’s life.

Therefore, the missional community must explore new ways to welcome everyone into their relationships, their homes, and their gatherings. The good news of God’s kingdom come to earth; the good news of God’s future New Creation dawning in the present is expressed through loving hospitality and inclusion.

Much more can be said, but right now these are the basics I need to focus on.

Last night, Debbie, Michael and I were watching one of my favorite movies of all time — “What About Bob?” I’ve seen this movie several times and never get tired of it.

Yet as I was watching it again, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. Dysfunctional and imperfect community can be a greater source of healing than the professional and sterile relationship between the therapist (or pastor) and client.

When Bob Wiley first meets Dr. Leo Marvin, it’s in the sterile setting of his therapist’s office on the 44th floor. Dr. Marvin sits behind his monolithic desk with his symbols of success and identity surrounding him. But Bob is taken by Dr. Marvin as a person. He wants to talk, to hang out, to just be with Dr. Marvin. While Bob’s neuroses naturally drive people away, inwardly he hungers are for fellowship.

Now fast-forward to Lake Winnepesaukah, where Dr. Marvin has taken his family on vacation. Unable to bear the thought of being without his therapist for a month, Bob tracks down Dr. Marvin. Confronted with the reality that Dr. Marvin will not see patients on vacation, Bob decides to “take a vacation from his problems” and stay at the lake, not as Dr. Marvin’s client, but as a friend. To the chagrin of Dr. Marvin, Bob is quickly embraced by Dr. Marvin’s family, who have their own personal issues.

I observed two interesting dynamics as I watched the movie unfold. First, it’s through genuine fellowship with broken people that Bob takes major steps in his healing. As trained and successful as Dr. Marvin may be, Bob’s ultimately healing comes in the rub of daily life with real people.

Second, as a professional, Dr. Marvin cannot switch paradigms. He is safe within his professional environment. He is the master and commander of his therapeutic world. And as such, he has attained a significant level of personal success. Yet, Bob needs something that Dr. Marvin is incapable of giving — authentic friendship. It’s Dr. Marvin’s family that fulfills this need, welcoming Bob into normal family life. And Dr. Marvin’s inability to step out of his professional role ultimately drives him insane. Ironic.

Okay, I know it’s a far-fetched comedy. But it was a reminder of how pastoral professionalism can become a barrier to people’s health — the very people I would desire to help. It’s also a reminder of the importance of community, a group of imperfect and hurting people who embrace each other and make outsiders feel like insiders.

I’ve mentioned in a previous post that I believe the Jesus’ kingdom agenda, while rooted in personal and communal spiritual formation, is a global political revolution of renewing the entire world within his Father’s dynamic rule.

But how are Christians and local faith-communities supposed to interact with our political systems. The simplistic approach is to get into bed with one of the dominant political parties. If a Christian wants to rally around abortion and terrorism, he or she usually has to buddy-up with the Republican party. On the other hand, if a Christian wants to engage poverty and social justice, he or she usually has to become intimate with the Democratic party.

Yet, because every political party has both good and bad, I believe Christians need to steer clear of political parties so that they are able to speak clearly and prophetically into any and every arena.

So I was very excited when I read Scot McKnight’s blog entitled “Politics and the Church.” This post is a reflection generated by an article about Greg Boyd’s church. Boyd has ticked off a lot of people in his church and lost significant membership because he refuses to align himself and his local church with a one-sided political agenda. In the article, Boyd states that Christians are not to seek “‘power over’ others by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have ‘power under’ others — ‘winning people’s hearts’ by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did.” So he refuses to put an American flag in the sanctuary, endorse Republican candidates, or allow members to distribute one-sided political literature in the church lobby.

We are to have “power under” others. I really like this concept. I personally hate it when Christians throw all of their energy into trying to pass “godly” legislation in the attempts at “keeping homosexuals from taking over our nation” (their words, not mine). As much as I believe that homosexuality (and a long list of other issues like divorce, consumerism, imperialism, bitterness, war, racism etc.) is a symptom of humanity’s brokenness, I don’t think the answer to Jesus’ global revolution is to legislate holiness for everyone to obey. That’s imperialism. As Boyd states, “When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses. When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

The people of God must learn how to engage in the political aspects of Jesus’ revolution without getting tied up with the current political systems. Reflecting on the article about Boyd and his church, McKnight offers four valuable points of direction for the Church’s political engagement:

1. The church should educate Christians on what the Bible says and about how the entire historical Church has thought about particular political issues. Many, if not all, political issues are nuanced and Christians throughout history have held differing views and approaches to these issues. Christians need to be educated, but then allowed to chose how they will respond.

2. Christians need to remain independent enough to provide a prophetic stance. Jesus remained independent of every group in his culture and was then able to offer essential critique to the various Jewish groups, to Gentiles and even his own followers.

3. The idea that Christians can remain apolitical is simply nonsense and irresponsible. Withdrawing from politics is a denial of the gospel, which encompasses the entire individual, society and the world.

4. Each person is responsible to decide where he or she stands. There is a difference between educating and indoctrinating. Churches cannot align themselves with one political party because that does not allow its members to choose how they will respond to issues. What this means is that in a faith-community, you will have a variety of views and emphases on various issues.

In the second chapter of The Great Giveaway (I know I’m only in the second chapter. I told you I was going through it slowly…), David Fitch discusses evangelism. The entire chapter is good, but my favorite parts was toward the second half where he discusses practices that restore the church to the center of evangelism. He suggests that Christians must:

1. Practice hospitality by inviting people to their homes for meals and fellowship. In this way, we say to people, “Here, take a look. I am taking a risk and inviting you into my life.” This is evangelism through vulnerable inclusion into a family’s life.

2. Reinvigorate the ministry of prayer, mercy and justice. The faith-community must embrace its role as a people who prayer and strive for mercy and justice in the world, primarily by including the sick, hurting and oppressed into their care and fellowship.

3. Be a community. Christians must gather together regularly for genuine fellowship where people have fun together, engage in social rituals, pray together, and commission one another. In this way, the natural rhythms of life together bear witness of God’s goodness and presence.

4. Create room for “Third Space” evangelism. Christians must frequent places such as coffee shops and build friendships with people who normally would not feel comfortable coming over to a home for dinner or joining the life of a faith-community.

5. Worship together. By using the arts of word, music, dance, drama, and creativity, the faith-community embodies the presence and power of God in ways that surpass the verbal strategies most Christians associate with evangelism.

6. Reinvigorate the rite of baptism. Use baptism as it was used by the early church as climactic moment when a person completes one’s initial training in the ways of Christ and formally declares one’s intention to follow Christ as part of his community.

These suggestions build upon Fitch’s argument that postmodern culture challenges the modern Christian assumptions fueled by the Enlightenment that evangelism occurs through rational and verbal persuasion that climax with an intellectual decision. Truth is more about character than evidence. Therefore, postmoderns respect truth that is lived.

I love Fitch’s summary at the end of this chapter:

“If we accept postmodernity’s challenge to our modernist ways, evangelicals will no longer give away evangelism to places outside the church. Instead, amidst postmoderns, we will make the church, the living body, the vortex of evangelism. We will no longer impart universal truths to individual minds outside the church. We will live truth together so as to compel the lost to come and see his lordship in full display in a worship service. Salvation is more than a matter of one’s individual status before God. It is the victory of Christ over sin and death into which Christians invite strangers via the forgiveness of sin and the infilling of the Holy Spirit. Our evangelism then strives not to make the gospel relevant to the categories of the post-Christian generation outside the church. It strives to embody the gospel in the church so that all else becomes irrelevant to the stranger who walks in. In a world where the truth that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is viewed as irrelevant, the task of evangelism is not to somehow make his lordship relevant to that world but to live his lordship so truthfully that it makes it impossible for alternative worlds to ignore.”

The a bit later:

“As a living vibrant people, Christians do not sell, they just live; they do not peddle, but do speak sincerely; they do not debate, they witness to his presence in worship and invite people into this great victory over sin and death we have in Christ’s death and resurrection.”

That is really good stuff. I love the idea that the people of God are NOT to make evangelism relevant to the world. Rather we are to live the Good News of God’s kingdom coming to earth so that everything else becomes irrelevant. In other words, when you’re in a dark room, you don’t try to make the light relevant to the dark in order to convince people that light is better than the darkness. Instead, you turn on the lights so that the darkness becomes completely irrelevant. We are to be and live the Good News, not trying to convince people of something we many not even be living in the first place.

Kevin Miller has posted on Out of Ur with a some great thoughts about a PROVEN MODEL FOR SPIRITUAL FORMATION. What is this model? The monastery. Whether you agree with him or not, it raises some valid points. And anyone attempting to live an alternative expression of their Christian faith should give some serious reflection to what he has to say and how to incorporate these ideas into a faith-community. Here’s a quote to whet your appetite:

“So I return to my original question: What would happen to your life if you lived in close geographical community and relationship with other people; if you lived in submission to authority; if you practiced silence and simplicity and discipline; if you regularly read the Bible and prayed and meditated on what you read; if you made study part of your life; and if you worked hard in some daily occupation, seeing your labor as full of dignity and offering it to God? At least Saint Benedict thinks you’d become a healthier human being and godlier Christian. And 1,500 years of history would prove him right.”

Okay, here’s something I’ve been thinking about. I first need to lay down a couple of working assumptions. I believe that when God renews the earth, human advancement will not be destroyed, but renewed along with the rest of creation. In other words, culture, business, economics, politics, government, technology, and the sciences are all natural developments of what humans are to accomplish as image-bearers. However, because of our brokenness and sin, these developments have themselves been broken and distorted and have been used primarily for selfish gains at the expense of others. But I truly believe that at the consummation of God’s kingdom on earth, these things, like the rest of God’s creation, will not be destroyed but renewed and filled with God’s glory and presence to create an entirely new order of life. As a corollary, I also believe that all of life and creation is sacred. There is no secular/sacred split as presumed by the Enlightenment.

I also believe that the task of God’s people in this moment of his Story is to embody the future New Creation in the here and now. This begins primarily with spiritual formation since the small piece that we have to work with is primarily our own lives. This then works outward into our relationships and the world around us. The point is, it’s our vocation as God’s people to be foretastes of his future New Creation in the present — to live right now in our broken world as if the New Creation has already come and by doing so, ushering in a bit of the New Creation from the future into the present. And since all of life and creation is sacred, we embody the New Creation in EVERYTHING that we do.

I also believe that the good news of God’s New Creation is embodied through a genuine community committed to pursue a common rule of life as Jesus’ apprentices. This is a community not just committed to spiritual disciplines and worship, but a community committed to being Jesus’ presence in the world as a natural expression of the community’s life.

So, one thing that a few of us in our faith-community did a few years ago was start a business. This new business partnership had a couple of goals. One was to make money since Mark and I had both left our careers as professional pastors. But the other was to be a missional presence in the business world through our talents and practices as an expression of our faith-community’s life. So we started a wedding video business. We are now in our third year with each year bringing in a bit more business.

So here’s what I’m thinking about (it’s almost anti-climactic after such a long introduction): What does a small business look like in the New Creation? How should we run our business in anticipation of a new economics in which reconciliation, beauty and goodness are the primary goals and the bottom-line is not sheer profit? How should we run our business in a heavenly kingdom that values the poor, the marginalized, and the hurting? How should we run our business in a manner that provides our clients a foretaste of the New Creation with our talents, artistry, and business practices more than canned evangelistic methods? Specifically as wedding videographers, how can we go beyond documenting the beauty of the wedding day and invest into our clients’ eternal marriages? Can our product contribute to the reconciliation, beauty and goodness of the New Creation now by taking our world’s brokenness, selfishness, and disharmony out of commission in small, but real ways?

Now I realize that some theology will make all of this thinking a moot point. If you believe that this world’s burning up in the end, replaced by a completely new world, then a lot of this questioning is for nothing. Also, if you believe that marriages and weddings will end completely at the “renewal of all things,” then, again, all of this questioning is for nothing and we’ve started a business that is transient and void of any significant value.

But I believe that what we have started has eternal value now in many ways. My vision of God’s glorious future is much grander than the discontinuation of projects begun in the present. Instead, I envision God’s renewing and transforming presence altering these projects as much as it will alter our bodies and our earth into something so wonderful and so good that it fills the imagination with blinding glory. My desire is to follow in Jesus’ way and, like him, bring some of that future into our present.

I’ve been slowly making my way through David Fitch’s, The Great Giveaway. I mean sloooowwwwly. I’ve been reading a few books simultaneously, so I’m jumping from book to book and posting on Fitch’s book as quotes or ideas trigger thoughts.

So if you’re interested in a more systematic and indepth synopsis, there are a couple of blogs to visit. One that I’ve mentioned before is Scot McKnight’s blog-series on the book. Another one worth visiting is Len Hjarlmarson’s blog-series on the book, which began last week.

Any way, I read a great paragraph from Fitch’s book a couple of days ago and wanted to post it here:

“The church is much more than the machinery that produces decisions for Christ. It is the social space, under his lordship where the Holy Spirit works to build up believers and equip the saints (Ephesians 4). It is the social foretaste of his reign where God is taking the rest of the world. It is spatial because we are a people ‘called out’ from the world to be the ecclesia. Each church is a body of Christ, his physicality in the world, so to speak, where he is the head. And things happen here under his lordship that can happen nowhere else. The powers of his salvation are set loose in his body through the mutual participation of its members through the gifts before the watching world. IT is this new society’s life that calls the world to an awareness of their lostness and their separation from God. Out of this new life, the call to a decision for Christ, to repentance from sin and new life in Christ can actually make sense to those who are lost without Christ.”

Dang! That’s good stuff. I love the idea that the local faith-community is “the social foretaste of God’s reign.” Our lives together as a community of Christ-apprentices should be a foretaste of the New Creation.

When I read that, it doesn’t communicate the popular idea of community in which everyone has “lovey-dovey warm fuzzies” for one another. Rather, it’s a community that joins the resurrected Jesus in participating in God’s redemption of the entire earth through forgiveness and servanthood. That’s the good news of Jesus’ kingdom message — enter a new life where God is king and live in his redemptive reign by becoming people who can actually help fix the mess we have made of all aspects of life on this earth. All facets of our daily lives should point to the reality of God’s reign.

And our communal lives as local faith-communities should have specific expressions of what God’s reign looks like in a society — speaking truthfully and lovingly to one another, resolving conflict and forgiving one another, making discerning decisions together, sharing the Spirit’s gifts among each other, confessing our sins to one another, praying for the sick, worshipping together and anticipating God’s full reign around the Lord’s Table.

Fitch states, “Activities such as these define the church as Christ’s body. They can happen here in a way like nowhere else.”

I came across this cool website called Friend of Missional. I liked their descriptions of what a missional church is and is not. The list serves as a wonderful reminder of the values of a missional church. Here’s the list:

Description of a Missional Church

• A missional church is one where people are exploring and rediscovering what it means to be Jesus’ sent people as their identity and vocation.
• A missional church will be made up of individuals willing and ready to be Christ’s people in their own situation and place.
• A missional church knows that they must be a cross-cultural missionary (contextual) people in their own community.
• A missional church will be engaged with the culture (in the world) without being absorbed by the culture (not of the world).
• A missional church will seek to plant all types of missional communities to expand the Kingdom of God.
• A missional church seeks to put the good of their neighbor over their own.
• A missional church will give integrity, morality, good character and conduct, compassion, love and a resurrection life filled with hope preeminence to give credence to their reasoned verbal witness.
• A missional church practices hospitality by welcoming the stranger into the midst of the community.
• A missional church will see themselves as a community or family on a mission together. There are no “Lone Ranger” Christians in a missional church.
• A missional church will see themselves as representatives of Jesus and will do nothing to dishonor his name.
• A missional church will be totally reliant on God in all it does.
• A missional church will be desperately dependent on prayer.
• A missional church gathered will be for the purpose of worship, encouragement, supplemental teaching, training, and to seek God’s presence and to be realigned with his God’s missionary purpose.
• A missional church is orthodox in its view of the Gospel and Scripture, but culturally relevant in its methods and practice so that it can engage the world view of the hearers.
• A missional church will feed deeply on the scriptures throughout the week so they are always ready to speak up and tell anyone who asks why they’re living the way they are.
• A missional church will be a community where all members are involved in learning to be disciples of Jesus. Growth in discipleship is an expectation.
• A missional church will help people discover and develop their spiritual gifts and will rely on gifted people for ministry instead of talented people.
• A missional church is a healing community where people carry each other’s burdens and help restore gently.

What Missional Church is Not

• A missional church is not a dispenser of religious goods and services or a place where people come for their weekly spiritual fix.
• A missional church is not a place where mature Christians come to be fed and have their needs met.
• A missional church is not a place where professionals are hired to do the work of the church.
• A missional church is not a place where the professionals teach their children and youth about God.
• A missional church is not a church with a “good missions program.” The people are the missions program and includes going to “Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
• A missional church is not missional just because it is contemporary, young, hip, post-modern-sensitive, seeker-sensitive or even traditional.
• A missional church is not about big programs and organizations to accomplish God’s missionary purpose. This does not imply no program or organization, but that they will not drive mission. They will be used in support of people on mission.
• A missional church is not involved in political party activism, either on the right or left. As Brian McLaren recently wrote, we need “purple peoplehood — people who don’t want to be defined as red or blue, but have elements of both.

I had a chance to have a time of silence and solitude on Saturday. During the time, I felt God direct me to read Isaiah 1. The entire chapter was like diving into a cool pool. The impact was bracing and the entire time was refreshing. As I read and reread the words, I felt God extending an invitation to explore a new level of missional life. And despite the harshness of Isaiah 1, I felt safe, loved and encouraged by my Father.

The particularly poignant passage was:

Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. “Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best from the land; but if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.” For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

Isaiah 1:16-20

I sensed God wanted to teach me about how to seek justice, encourage the oppress, defend the cause of the fatherless and plead the case of the widow. This experience was in the back of my head throughout my meeting with JR and Maria. I’m so excited about her desire to facilitate greater mission in their faith-community as part of her fieldwork. And I’m excited to dialogue with and learn from her and JR.

Now I’m struck by Sondra Wheeler’s plenary lecture on the biblical perspective of wealth. One of the things she talks about is how money is not a means of exchange, but a means of relationship. That’s one I want to reflect on for awhile. (You should listen to her lecture if you still haven’t done so. I put a short “teaser” clip below.)

All of this is to say that these moments, along with some personal anxieties from a couple weeks ago, seem to be converging. I’m trying to listen to what God may be saying in all of this.

I’m listening to the Plenary Sessions from the conference, Christianity in a Consumer Culture. The audio files are available HERE. Sondra Wheeler made a statement that I needed to hear. She said:

“The Gospel invites us to live without anxiety in a world whose one secure event is the coming just reign of God.”

What a great statement! It’s definitely worth reflecting on throughout the day so it can seep deep. The coming kingdom of God, climactically inaugurated by Jesus in the past, incrementally implemented by his people in the present and fully consummated by Jesus in the future is THE defining event for this earth and its people. It must shape how I live every moment of every day from the inside-out — “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Our faith-community had a wonderful blessing for our Sunday night gathering. We were visited by JR Rozko and Maria Bjordal — two new friends of our community who are endeavoring to live in an organic missional community in the Pasadena area. Both are students at Fuller Theological Seminary. Their faith-community began in January ’06.

JR hails from Ohio and Maria is from Norway. In about a week, both will be traveling to Norway for about three months. During that time, Maria will be involved in a field education portion of her degree, researching and participating in missional activity for at-risk youth in Oslo. Simultaneously, JR will be finishing up his master’s thesis. I was so glad that they were able to take the time to join us Sunday and share their experiences about living in a missional community. Both are intelligent and winsome individuals, who have a passion to see God’s people engage the world in authentic and transformative service.

Meeting with them reminded me of something Andrew Jones once said, “Our mission is what gives us purpose, which is what attracts others to us. If we are not bringing justice and transformation to the world, we should ask if we have a right to exist.”

When JR and Maria return from their three months abroad, I will have a further blessing in that Maria has asked me to be her supervisor for six more months of field education within her missional community. I’m very excited about this opportunity for a couple of reasons. First, I get to hang out with JR and Maria on a regular basis for six months and I’m looking forward to what we will learn together. Second, I hope this is the first of many internships through Fuller into the realm of organic/missional/emerging churches. I love the work that Ryan Bolger, who teaches at Fuller, has done in this area and it would be wonderful for Fuller to pioneer some great internship programs in conjunction with the teaching that is taking place.

I would encourage you to jump over to JR’s blog. He’s a great thinker and has some wonderful insights. You can also check out Maria’s blog. Unfortunately, if you can’t read Norwegian, you probably won’t understand what she’s writing. However, she told me that she hopes to have an English blog while she’s in Norway. I’ll post the link when it comes online. It will definitely be worth your time.

In The Great Giveaway, David Fitch summarizes the primary question that drives most local churches from an organizational perspective:

“How can we best organize to produce the largest amount of decision and the best quality of services for Christian growth most economically and efficiently to the largest number in this geographical location?”

He states there are two powerful forces that compel the modern church to ask this question. First, he states that evangelicals are individualists. Salvation is the result of an individual decision. Holiness is an individual pursuit. Worship is an individual experience. He states:

“As a result the church becomes a place where saved private individuals come to be ‘fed’ intellectually, to serve out of their personal duty to Christ, to get in touch with an individual experience of worship, and to pool their resources as individuals to further the mission of getting the gospel out to more individuals.”

The second force is the business-oriented forms of organization the modern church embraces. This compels the local church to become an organization catering to the religious needs of individuals in the most efficient, effective and economical way possible.

Reading Fitch brought back some memories. One memory stands out as a watershed experience for me. I was on a personal retreat, praying, studying and reflecting on how to be and make better disciples. I was a professional pastor at the time, so much of the personal retreat was spent trying to construct an organizational approach to spiritual formation. Believe me, I had the best intentions. I really wanted to help as many people as possible within our church to become authentic disciples of Jesus. But underlying my best intentions was the bottom-line organizational approach articulated by Fitch in the question above. How could I organize our church’s resources to produce the largest amount of services to impact the largest amount of people in the most efficient and economical process?

It was during that time of thinking that I sensed God speak to me. I felt him say, “Authentic disciples are not mass-produced. They’re handcrafted.” At that moment I set aside my organizational diagrams and strategies and set out on a new course of exploring spiritual formation within a community rather than within an organization.

Years later, I am confident that I heard from God that day. Sure, a certain level of effective discipleship can be obtained from an organizational approach. I do not deny that. But for me, there is something lacking. I prefer the “messiness” and “ineffectiveness” of community-oriented discipleship over the organizational approach.

My wife, Debbie, has become a living metaphor of the difference between the two approaches.

Debbie is a mom of four kids and also works part-time in a daycare. She lives both in the realm of organic community (mom of four) and structured organization (daycare). She also has a nurturing heart toward children. Any child that comes near her is going to be the beneficiary of her compassionate and loving heart. But there is a significant difference between her ability to nurture within the confines of the daycare and within the relationships of our family. You will probably never find Debbie up in the wee hours of the morning caring for a sick and feverish child from the daycare. But she will do it, without thinking, for one of our children. You will probably never find Debbie taking a child from the daycare on a family vacation. But we plan our family vacations around our children.

It’s not because Debbie doesn’t care about the children in the daycare. I watch her ache over the future of the children from the daycare. I watch her agonize over how to best discipline and nurture those same children. I watch her strategize and try to determine the best approach to provide the best service for these kids. She cares for them. And she’s able to witness some significant changes. She watches kids who normally bully the other kids and disrespect the daycare workers show significant turnarounds in their behavior. She has won the hearts of many of the children.

But none of those children will demonstrate the kind of formation that our four children will experience. None of those children will have memories of mom holding their hair out of their faces and rubbing their backs while they vomit into the toilet at 2 in the morning. None of those children will have memories of being read to on car rides from Robert Louis Stevenson in a Scottish accent or from Genesis. None of those children will hear the sound advice of engaging in friendships and dating with fidelity. None of those children will have memories of mom listening, crying or lecturing on how to live life as a good, caring and compassionate follower of Jesus. It’s in the messiness and ineffectiveness of a community, like a family, that real formation takes place. And when you look closely at our kids, you won’t find the cookie-cutter perfection and the “Made in Taiwan” label of mass production. Rather, you’ll discover the unique blends of grace and blemish of being handcrafted — the true signature of the love, the sweat, and the tears of an artist. And most importantly, you’ll see Debbie looking out through their eyes.

Fascinating website showing the one-year journey of Kyle MacDonald. Kyle started with one red paperclip and a website, offering to begin trading with people as long as they traded up in value. One year and fourteen trades later, Kyle has accomplished his goal of trading for a house.

Over on The Complex Christ blog, there’s a funny post called, “How May Emerging Church Bloggers Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?”

Pretty funny.

David Fitch’s first chapter begins with a line that made me smile:

“When going from ten to a thousand members in five years is the sign of a sick church.”

Quite frankly, as a pastor, I can’t count the number of conversations I’ve had that centered around attendance. I think we all know what I mean. We hear the story about the new church that grew from ten to several hundred or a thousand in several years and we think, “Wow!” It’s not only automatically assumed that it’s a good thing, but it’s placed before us as a model of success. No one ever says about the rapidly growing church, “How sad. Now the pastor can’t pastor all of his people anymore.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone state something as Fitch has. Perhaps a swelling church is a sick church.

When I go in for a physical, the doctor doesn’t check my weight and say, “Great! You’ve gone from 170 pounds to 210 pounds in 1 year. You’re really healthy!” In fact, he usually says the opposite. Rapid weight gain isn’t usually a sign of health in an adult body. Other tests are performed and measurements taken to assess a body’s health. The same must be true for Christ’s body.

Unfortunately, because of our distorted values of success, the typical questions we usually hear about churches revolve around attendance, doctrine, programs or preaching series. Rarely does anyone ask questions like:

• How’s your church’s prayer life?

• In what ways are the people loving each other?

• What kind of things is God speaking to the congregation?

• How are you bringing about justice in your community?

• How is God’s love being demonstrated in the people’s lives?

• How are the people exhibiting Christ’s life, character and power in their daily lives?

• How is the sense of authentic community among the people?

• Are conflicts being reconciled?

Not that our local faith community is stellar at these things. It just seems that questions like these (and many others) are better indicators of a church’s health.

Perhaps a day is coming when we hear about the church that rapidly swelled in attendance and our first response is to pray for its healing.

Have you ever attended a major sporting event and arrived early to watch the athletes warm-up? And while you watched the star athlete warming up, you realized this guy or gal is really good? That’s how I feel as I made my way through the introduction of David Fitch’s The Great Giveaway.

This is a book about ecclesiology, what it means to be the Church. And Fitch believes that the practices of the evangelical church are preventing it from truly being the Body of Christ in North America. According to Fitch’s view, the evangelical church has married itself to modernity. One of the most damaging results is that:

“Because evangelicals articulate salvation in such individualist terms and because modern science and individual reason carry such authority for evangelicals, we do not need the body of Christ for daily victorious Christian existence… We don’t need the church to live salvation because we have personal salvation augmented by reason, science and immediate (charismatic) experience. The church is left with nothing else to do but distribute information, goods, and services to individual Christians” (pp 17-18).

A caricature, perhaps. But in many places, this description is very close to reality. And that’s a shame.

A few sentences later, Fitch defines the Church as “the social manifestation of [God’s] lordship where he reigns over the powers of sin, evil, and death, the prolepsis, the very inbreaking of the kingdom of God.” I love that definition! The local church is the social expression of God’s dream for creation; the corporate reality of his renewing and reshaping authority over the powers of sin, evil and death.

This raises the question, “So, do I need the church to be saved?” (And by saved, readers of this blog know I mean the entire life of salvation.) Do I need the church to have victory over sin? Do I need the church to be transformed into Christ’s likeness? Do I need the church to embody, demonstrate and announce the fullness of God in the world? Do I need the church to be God’s New Creation in human form now? Do I need the church to participate in God’s kingdom coming in justice and peace upon this planet?

If I view the church as simply an organization that provides me with information, goods and services, then the answer is probably “No.” I will attend a local congregation if it provides me with the teaching, friendships and programs I feel I need to be a good Christian. And when my needs change or the church’s direction changes, I will shop for another local congregation.

But if I view the church as the social manifestation of God’s lordship, or to borrow from Newbigin, the living hermeneutic of the Gospel, then the answer is a resounding “Yes!” In fact, I couldn’t have salvation without the church.

Let me say that again with a bit more boldness, “You and I cannot have the salvation offered by God through Christ without the Church.” That’s because God’s salvation is not something I possess as an individual, but something we share as a community. In fact, the very core of God’s salvation is community — love of God and love of others. There is no real salvation in individualist terms. Sure, there is the personal aspect of a renewed friendship with God. But this is the threshold to God’s salvation, which is joining God and his people in being and accomplishing his dreams on earth.

Too often we view Christ’s work on the cross in individualist terms. I hear it so often in sermons, altar calls, and Christian music — Jesus’ nail-pierced hands reaching out to me. There’s two things wrong with this overly romanticized picture. First, as I mentioned in a previous post, Jesus’ death is multilayered, first dealing with the cosmic victory over the powers, then reconciling all things on earth and in heaven back to God, and then moving to the personal level as it delivers us from the dominion of darkness. But that work then resonates back up from the personal to the cosmic level. And the way it does this is through the Church, the social manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth.

Second, Jesus died as the climax of Israel’s history. In other words, he died to reconstitute what it means to be God’s redemptive and renewing community. The personal aspect is that you and I are personally invited to join Jesus by joining the people he has recreated. So to borrow the romantic image mentioned above, Jesus’ nail-pierced hands do reach out to me… in order to welcome me into his community. A community, by the way, which will continue to be his healing nail-pierced hands to each other and the world by welcoming all people into his redemptive community.

So, yes, I do need the Church.

I just finished listening to the audio version of Brian McLaren’s, The Secret Message of Jesus. I have read all but one of McLaren’s books and this is by far his best work yet. I know McLaren has generated some intense controversy. But I think it’s because many people try to read him as a theological spokesperson for the Emerging Movement rather than as a “pastoral artist,” generating brisk and imaginative vision for authentic life with Christ.

Please don’t misunderstand me. By contrasting theologian and artist, I’m not saying that one is more intelligent or valued than the other. I’m simply saying that theologians are often read for concise technical argumentation resulting from intense research and study. McLaren is obviously an intelligent guy, who has done a fair amount of research and study. But he uses these things more like a painter uses a palette and brush or a songwriter uses melody and chord progressions. Like a brilliant storyteller, McLaren creates beautiful images of God’s kingdom that are accessible to the average person interested in Jesus’ teachings and life. There were several times I had to rewind so I could listen again and again in wonder to how he phrased things.

McLaren does such a great job unshackling the ideas and implications of Jesus’ message from the restraints of religious language. He has taken the message of Jesus’ revolutionary kingdom message, which has been held hostage for too long to popular, yet distorted evangelicalism, and released it with fresh and invigorating life back into the world for a new hearing. Like any good artist, McLaren’s work both inspires me with new perspective and challenges me to find my own creative voice in the conversation.