Incarnation is a theological world.  Though fancy, its meaning is simple.  Simple, but deep.  It is the combination of two words “in” and “flesh”.

Incarnation means that before we attempt to fumble our way towards God, God has already moved intentionally towards us.  The God of heaven, the God that often feels far away, the God who reigns in heaven, the God who created all things at the beginning of time, the mysterious God who we cannot see or comprehend… has come “in the flesh”.

Incarnation means that God is know –able.

Most religion is the movement of people towards God.  Incarnation is the movement of God towards us.

Most religion is humans moving away from earth towards the heavens.  Incarnation is heaven moving towards earth.

Most religion is learning how to love God.  Incarnation is realizing that God loves us.

Most religion is our struggle to find God.  Incarnation is God’s struggle to find us.

Most religion is trying to get closer to God.  Incarnation is the truth that God is closer that we realize.  Much closer.

Most religion is our pursuit of God.  Incarnation is God’s pursuit of us.

“Sometimes we hear our friends talk in moony, romantic terms of the early church.  ‘We need to get back to being just like the early church.’  Heaven help us.  These churches were a mess, and Paul wrote his letters to them to try to clean up the mess.” (Peterson, Practice Resurrection)

“If we permit- or worse, promote- dreamy of deceptive distortions of the Holy Spirit creation [the church], we interfere with participation in the real thing.  The church we want becomes the enemy of the church we have.  It is significant that there is not a single instance in the biblical revelation of a congregation of God’s people given to us in romantic, crusader, or consumer terms.  There are no “successful” congregations in Scripture or in the history of the church” (Peterson, Practice Resurrection)

At times in my life, I have lost trust in the church, rejected it, walked away from it, written against it, critiqued it, worked for it, gotten paid by it, bashed it, loved it, planted it, cultivated it, and more.

Over this time, I realize that my understanding of the church is extremely important.  Too often, I looked to the church with with unfair expectations that lacked a biblical grounding.  Church, I thought, was supposed to be perfect, meet most of my wants and needs, be centered in Christ without any entanglement in sin, deeply spiritual, and generally idyllic.  When it failed to meet these criteria, I was left with 2 options:  1) criticize and critique it (and thereby, I would often remove or distance myself from that tangible community); 2) romanticize and  mystify it (i.e. remove the theological dream of the church from its tangible reality).  Over time, neither of these options satisfied.

Don’t misunderstand me- engaging in critical thought on the church and embracing the mystery of the church are both important.  However, these things cannot be separated from the tangible, living-breathing, social and local, worshiping community.  For so long, I struggled with this tangible, living-breathing reality called the church.  It had too many warts and hang ups.  Truth is, it was easier to critique the imperfect bride of Christ than to be part of it.  If I privatized my faith, dabbling in occasional conversation with family and friends, I did not have to do the hard work of becoming part of the “body of Christ”.   I reasoned, as a believer, I was part of the mystical body of Christ while refusing to engage in the tangible body of Christ.  But biblically and historically, God’s people have always been a social and tangible reality in the world- warts and all.

It has been in the context of the church, the real, living-breathing community, that my faith has been sharpened the most.  Reading books, talking to friends, writing blogs, listening to sermons are all great and helpful.  But they easy.  They engage my heart and mind, but not my humanity.  It is in the context of the church, I am challenged with difficult people, actual arguments, differing personalities, real needs, and so on.  This context, better than any other I know, helps me to grow up in Christ- taking up my cross, submitting my my brothers and sisters, encouraging and being encouraged in the faith, forgiving and being forgiven, etc.

I admit, that I also find my workplace, the neighborhood, “the world” as a context for growing up in Christ.  This is important both for my maturity in Christ and the mission of God in the world.  And there are many Christians and churches, who in avoiding the world, seriously hinder their faith and neglect God’s mission.   But this is the church scattered, it is not the body gathered around the Christ’s body.   I have certainly learned that I cannot be the church alone.   It is both too easy and too difficult.  Mostly, it is not God’s intention.

“I want to look at what we have, what the church is right now, and ask, DO you think that maybe this is exactly what God intended when he created the church?  Maybe the church as we have it provides the very conditions and proper company congenial for growing up in Christ, for becoming mature, for arriving at the measure of the stature of Christ.  Maybe God knows what he is doing, giving us church, this church.”  (Peterson, Practicing Resurrection)

If pastors only carry moral sayings in their pockets and go through the parish sticking them, like gummed labels, on the victims of the week, there will be no good pastor work; they must learn how to be gospel storytellers…  The storytelling pastor differs from the moralizing pastor in the same way that a responsible physicial differs from a clerk in a drugstore.  When and ill person goes to a physician, the physician “takes a history” before offering a diagnosis and writing a prescription.  THe presumption is that everything that a person has experienced is relevant to the illness and must be taken into account if there is going to be healing.  The clerk in the drugstore simply sells a patient medicine off the shelf- one thing for headaches, another for heartburn, another for indigestion- without regard for the particular details of a person’s pain. – Eugene Peterson

God does not call us to love the world. He does not command us to love everyone. (yes, I just said that) God, the Bible says, loves the world. God loves everyone.

But the second greatest commandment is to “love our neighbor.”

The question, for thousands of years has been, “who is my neighbor?” Jesus himself got asked this question. And yes, Jesus greatly expanded who we are to think of as our “neighbor”- pagans, enemies, the poor, the unclean, etc.

But I would like to ask a different question. Not, “who is our neighbor?” But, “why neighbor?” Why not just command us to love the world, love everyone? If that is the nature of God, why not command us to do the same?

We do not have the capacity to love the world, to love everyone. God does. But we do not. The command to love our neighbor is a profound statement about what our love is to be like. Our neighbors are the people that God has placed in our lives. They are real, and tangible, and close. They have names. They are our family, friends, co-workers, and literally neighbors.

I think we have made a huge mistake in expanding the word neighbor to mean “everyone.” When we do this, we turn our love into an emotion without much content. Love becomes a feeling we are supposed to have, but a feeling that is incapable of changing the world. I believe that God called us to a much more powerful and tangible kind of love.

God calls us to love our neighbors. To love the people he has placed in our life… but to love them well. This is a tangible sort of love, expressed in action- time, meals, visits, phone calls, prayers, play, shared experiences, and so much more.

God does not call us to love the world. But He has called us to love our neighbors- the people He has placed in our life. But He has called us to love them well.

Our energy is not meant to be spent on trying to love more and more people. Rather, it is best spent on loving the people in our live better- in a way that changes things.

Tis’ the Season

It is the season of stress, busyness, chaos, and the pressure to buy a bunch of things you do not need.  I guess this is always true of American lifestyle, but it is certainly heightened in the month of December.  I was reminded of this while driving TO Thanksgiving with my wife, seeing tents lined up outside shopping centers.  How sad that people were choosing to get a good spot in line to buy something over spending the day with family and friends.  You cannot tell me that consumerism does not shape our souls.

Here are some thoughts that I think might make you holiday season deeper:

1) Give presence, not presents. Giving gifts to loved ones is not a bad thing.  But remember then greatest gift you can give to people is your time and love.  It is sadly ironic that we give so many presents over the holidays, but spend such little quality time with the people we give gifts to.  Love is better measured by how much time you spend with someone, not how much money you spend on them.

2)  Do things that energize you, not drain you. Most people get to the end of their holiday season exhausted.  This is because they give in to the pressure to say “yes” to everything.  Most of the activities around the holidays drain people.  Say no to the things that drain you so you can say yes to the meaningful things.  Find your salvation in quietness and rest (which holidays can provide).  And when you are rested, you will enjoy the relational part of the holidays more.

3)  Remember God. I will be frank: the holiday season in our culture has nothing to do with God.  In fact, it is remembering God that will give you the strength to resist the holiday season.  Prayer, presence, remembering Jesus, are the spiritual practices that allow us to resist the holiday practices of shopping, busyness, and freaking out about all the things we “need to do” to have a good holiday season.

I truly hope you all have a deep, rich, and restful holiday season.  May it be filled with the love of God and the love of people!

On August 1st I resigned from my position on staff at a local church.  This was the 4th church I have been “on staff” (getting paid to perform a ministry job).  There are many benefits, comforts, and good things about being on a paid church staff position.  However, from experience and talking to others, it has a dark side.  As a friend said recently, the danger becomes when we only read our Bible or pray, as a part of what we are hired to do.  As most pastors know, reading scripture to prepare a teaching is not always the same thing as reading scripture to hear God’s voice and to grow in the faith.

Which brings me to the past 2 months…

I did not realize how refreshing it would be to continue in ministry (and following God’s call) with no paycheck attached to it.  In many ways, this is a very trying time.  I am unemployed, Natalie is working to keep us afloat, the process will be slow, fund raising is just starting.  I am learning to walk by faith in new ways.  I would not say that our sacrifices have been overly dramatic (we are blessed).  But there is a very significant difference in ministering as a job (with pay and benefits), versus ministring out of calling (with no pay and at personal sacrifice).

My point is not all that profound.  It is simply re-energizing to work hard at something solely because God has called me to this thing.   As I have experienced and others have confided in me, those who get paid to minister usually are called, but often confuse their calling at times with job responsibilities.  Sometimes it gets so bad, that some of us minister solely because it is a job that pays the bills and we can do it (superficially).

I wonder how many ministers/pastors would continue to do their daily work if the paychecks stopped.  Are these pastors ministering out of calling, or job responsibilities?  (this has all sorts of implications when brought into Jesus’ teaching on the good shepard verus the hired hand).

For me, I got confused along the way.  Somewhere in the last couple of years, I started doing a job versus obeying a call.  And I am grateful that after the paychecks stopped and the job ended, the call was still there.  The call will always be there.  And I will have to obey and follow it whether there is pay or not.  Of course, I pray there is.  And I know I am called by the One Who Provides.

My first year in seminary, I had to interview for a few internships.  All of us first year students would talk with the internship director, who would try and place us with churches that matched our gifts and passions.  For this reason, I interviewed with a handful of churches looking to do local outreach.

While the interviews were designed for the leadership to get to know me, this was one of my first experiences getting to know church leadership.  It was one of my first experiences “behind the scenes”… getting to see how things run, the questions pastors ask, the goals they have, etc.

Again, all the churches I interviewed with were interested in doing more local outreach.  But over the course of our conversations, I discovered something that continues to bother and frustrate me.  These churches were driven to outreach out of selfish motives (not blatant, evil selfishness, but a real self-focus).

In these particular cases, the churches were dwindling.  The communities were filled with people with grey hair.   And the pastors were waking up to the fact that if they did not begin to reach out, the church would be in jeopardy of closing.  No doubt, many pastors and communities are waking up to that reality daily across the country.  But I remember leaving these interviews slightly confused and frustrated… they wanted to reach out to the community for  the wrong reasons.  Self preservation is not a good motive for loving our neighbor.  It allows “self” to remain our first love.  Which, makes loving others secondary.

It has been many years since that experience.  And I have learned that this is not just a problem for the small, dwindling congregation.  It may be more of an issue for many of the pastors serving in growing churches, many of them strong and stable.  What I mean by this, is church leadership often focuses on itself first.  Too many pastors, it seems, are driven by an image of success that highlights the “type of church” they want to lead.  While there is nothing evil in this, I believe it is subtly dangerous.  When “self” becomes the priority, things like outreach become secondary.  In other words, outreach becomes the means by which we become the type of church we want to be.  In this way, our outreach is not motivated by broken hearts but by becoming successful (success is a form of narcissism).

I think this is made most evident in our hearts and the language we use.  First, where is our heart?  If we are honest, many of our hearts are set on creating a certain type of church.  Again, there is nothing wrong with this… unless our hearts become more set on this than loving others.  Second, listen to the language we use.  I am amazed by the difference between pastors who talk about their city and pastors who talk about their church.  We tend to talk about the things that are on our hearts.  When the people of our city our continually on our hearts, we will talk about them and how we can show love and serve them.  When our church (and more so its style and programs, than people) are on our hearts, we will tend to talk about these things often.

These things are not mutually exclusive.  However, I believe we have gotten things quite confused and out of order.

So there has been some talk/debate lately about the pros and cons of missional churches versus mega-churches.  Mainly, the debate has centered on the argument that missional churches don’t produce conversions.  Here is my take:

The critique of missional churches is mainly that people are not being “converted”.  By converted, they simply mean putting their faith in Jesus Christ.  In other words, missional churches talk about incarnating culture, hanging out with non-Christians, and building relationships, but it all adds up to… well, very little.  Simply, people are not coming to faith.

The critique of mega-churches is that their growth also is not really “converstion”.  Christianity, as a whole, is not growing in America.  Rather, the growth of mega-churches is really just a “shift”.  Christians from “other churches” (mainly, traditional churches) are now attending the mega-church.  In addition, people that are coming to faith, are typically not “unreached” people, but rather people who grew up in church, left, and are now coming back to the faith.  Their conversion is dependent upon their being raised knowing about the Christian faith.  Also, the critique of mega-churches is that their definition of “conversion” is incomplete. The critique being giving one’s life to Jesus Christ also ought to include a dying to the ways of the world, i.e. the consumerisitic, individualistic, materialistic, ways of Western culture.

Missional churches argue that “conversion” of a post-Christian culture is much trickier than their critics suggest.  Here are some of my thoughts, based completely on personalexperience:

1) Missional engaemement is difficult.  I bartended for 3 years of my life and now coach wrestling at a local high school.  Occasionally I meet a person who is a Christian, was raised in church, or attend a church.  It is amazing how much easier it is to talk about matters of faith with these people!  Even if they now hate the church, there is a common language and experience that allows for conversation.

However, having conversations about faith with people that have no religious background is very difficult.  There is very little common ground.  Rarely there is a person that is interested in the subject matter and willing to talk.  Mostly, people are embarassed about how little they know, are turned off by the subject matter, or are simply apathetic.

2)  Attractional Churches attract Christians (in my experience, the middle-upper class).  I have worked at a few “attractional” churches.  All of them have have great people trying to do great things for God.  All of them have done missions and ministry.  But honestly, none of them were very successful at reaching the broken and those who did not know God.  Sure, I know stories of a few people giving their lives to Christ (and all of them are awesome), but most of these stories are people who were raised in church, left, and then came back to the faith.  Honestly, I love those stories.  They remind me of Jesus leaving the 99 to find the 1.

However, most of the “growth” of these churches came from Christians who became discontent with “their” church, and “liked” our church more.  Maybe it was a bad church experience, a personal conflict, different taste in music, the quality of teaching… whatever, the growth was not lost people coming to faith.  My experience is mega-church growth is Christians being attracted to a “better” church.

3)  Missional/Emergent Types are Scared of Conversion (and so are mega-churches). My experience is that both missional and mega-church advocates are scared of conversion.  Let me explain.

Missional/emergent types (they are different, by the way) are scared of conversion, generally.  This is because of 2 reasons, I think.  First, Christian history and conversion has left a bad taste in their mouth.  Genocide of Native Americans, street corner evangelists with bullhorns and tracks, etc. makes conversion a sore subject.  Second, the practice of incarnation is not balanced with the call to take up the cross.  In other words, missional thinkers over-emphasize the incarnation, and forget to ask people to loose their life in order to find it in Christ.

However, attractional church types are scared of conversion too.  They are not scared of asking people to put their faith in Jesus.  However, they are scared to ask people to follow the “way” of Jesus.  In other words, attractional church types, in my experience, seperate faith in Jesus from the way of Jesus.  This makes it altogether possible to believe in Jesus, but trust and follow the ways of the world… accumulating and trusting in wealth, allegiance to country (i.e. violence), maintaining an individualistic and consumeristic lifestyle, etc.  To bring these rather direct teaching of Jesus to the forefront of Christian spirituality makes many very uneasy.   They, too, are scared of conversion.

In the end, ministry and missions are being done.  However, no matter what side of the conversation you fall on, neither side is being extremely effective in converting people to the way of Christ.  Despite the allusion of “success” that is portrayed by the mega-church, and despite the buzz of missional/emergent conversation… the way of Christ remains narrow.  Fewer and fewer, in America, are finding it.

It has been a while. Sorry about that. The last month or so has been filled with taking kids to camp, a mission trip to New Orleans (pre-Gustav), and filling in on some preaching responsibilities.

Can’t say that I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but here are some things that have been floating in and out of my mind:

1) Finding peace in God. I am utterly convinced that the world we live in is designed to kill our peace and “shalom” in Him. I also pray that our church communities can be people/places of “shalom”, as it is all to easy for churches to fall victim to the demands, and busyness, and pressures that we place upon ourselves.

2) The blessing of family and friends. Sure, not all people have this blessing. But I have been thinking a lot lately about how blessed I am in this regard. This year I have barely seen my family and friends, and that is my biggest regret this year.

3) Sunday morning church services. While I am absolutely convinced that geterhing weekly to worship is essential to healthy Christ-centered community, I am beginning to wonder if Sunday services are killing our community. What I mean by that is Sunday is often responsible for worship, discipleship, evangelism, community, communication, and the list goes on. My fear is that we do too much on Sunday mornings and not enough the rest of the week.

4) Community. What does a living, breathing, community look like? Living in a suburban type setting, I am not sure if I am “in community” or not.   How social should church be?

Okay, just ramblings letting you know what is happening and on my mind. I hope to be posting some more stuff soon.

Shalom

I came across this quote the other day:

“We inoculate the world with a mild form of Christianity so that it will become immune to the real thing.” – E. Stanley Jones

What do you think? I would have to agree that the world seems to be rather immune to Christianity in America today. Why do you think this is?

Does the church offer the world a mild form of following Christ (if so, is there such a thing)? What then, is the “real thing”? Why does it seem that a being a Christian or not being a Christian makes very little difference in the overall direction of one’s life in American society?