I wrote this a while back and just came across it:

I am incurably restless.

Where did all the prophets go?

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.

Going to start a little series called “Lessons Along the Way”

These are just the little lessons God teaches us/me as we walk with him.

#1.  Today I was at the Chiropractor.  (I have been there a lot lately).  I had to watch a video about keeping my back healthy.  Though I texted during most of it, one thing caught my attention.  The video stated that bad posture, over time, can have just as damaging effects on the back as getting into an accident.

God seemed to whisper that this was also true of our walk with Him.  Sometimes all the small ways in which we “slouch” in our walk with Christ can have just as damaging effects as a huge failure in our faith.  I have not gotten in any (serious) car accidents.  I am much more prone to bad posture.  God whispered that I must be much more intentional in the little things.

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.

I am reading Mark Buchanan’s book, The Rest of God.  I cannot recommend it highly enough. I wanted to write a few quick thoughts down about hurry.

1)  We live in a world of busyness and hurry.  Both these things kill our souls.

2) Our work, our vocation,  is meant to be fulfilling and meaningful.  The brokenness of the Fall has turned it to toil.  We can redeem the goodness of work- the work that God has called us to do.

3) Hurry is a sign that we think we are in control of our lives, our work, of our ministries.  (I believe that we make decisions, and reap what we sow).

4) Hurry sees time as a posession- a posession that we never have enough of.  Time is a gift.  God has given us an abundance of time.

5) Stress, and busyness, drivenness are signs that indicate we think we are responsible for the results, for getting things done, for fruit.

6) Sabbath, rest, prayer, remind us that hurry kills our souls.  Time is to be shared, given, and received as gift.  We are not in control- God is.  We are not responsible for the results, but to faithfulness.  Fruit is the work of God’s Spirit, not our strivings, running, and drivenness.  And God’s Spirit works most when we are still, quiet, and open.

Qotes from Mark:

“I cannot think of a single advantage I’ve ever gained from being in a hurry.”

“Our measure of whether or not your rested enough… is to ask yourself this: how much do I care about [practically] the things I care about [theoretically]?”

Okay, there is much more richness here, but jotting down a few thoughts have been good.  I think we need to re-imagine how to practice Sabbath again.

What do you all think about the pracice of Sabbath?  Do you practice it?  Why or why not? Do you hunger for it?  What keeps us from such a core part of God’s way?

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.

I had to run an errand the other day for church.  Basically it consisted of swinging by a few houses of members of our congregation to pick some things up.  To make it to 5 houses took me well over 3 hours… and I was at each house for less than 2 minutes.

A few years back I was living just outside Chicago.  I re-connected with some old friends and was looking to connect with a church as well.  It turned out that my friends were making a 45 minute- 1 hour commute to attend Willow Creek’s mid-week service.

These are more dramatic examples of things I do every day/week.  In an age of transportation (and consummerism), I pass at least 5 local congregations in my neighborhood to attend church.   Sure, maybe it is what it is.  And maybe I ask annoying questions.  But driving around the other day made me wonder:  How “local” are our churches?

The definition of local:  1.pertaining to or characterized by place or position in space; spatial.

It seems that  our church communities are no longer “characterized by place or position”.  They are characterized by other stuff:  style, theology, likes/dislikes, etc.  But communities of God’s people are hardly characterized by their local.  (If they are, it is in only a very general sense- how much I am willing to spend on gas).  This is important to me because I believe that community (at least the sort of community that God desires for His people) requires proximity.  Community after all, demands time and space.
Against this back drop I remember stories my grandma has told me.  Well, maybe not stories, but parts of stories.  In parts of her stories she can name every family on her block.  And with each family came the names of parents and kids, stories, and shared memories.  Other stories of my grandma included walking two blocks to church every week.  And all church stories included people, stories, and relationships the exuded community.  Not everyone in the neighborhood went to church.  But everyone at church lived in the neighborhood.  Sure, times were very different.  But we still live next door to neighbors and down the street from worshipping congregations.  What I struggle with is the quality of our relationships with both our neighbors and within our churches.
There is no doubt that community is at the heart of God’s intention for His creation- salvation itself is communal.

So I wonder if we can re-imagine a local church.  What would it look like if our church building was in the neighborhood (think of the closes church to your house/apartment)?  What would it loook like if all the members of your congregation lived in the neighborhood?  Would your church community look different?  Would your relationships with your non-Christian neighbors look different?

What do you think… should this imagination inform us?  change us?