it’s a boy

After 4 and a half months of wondering, Niki and I are going to be parents of a boy!  That will even out the estrogen that floats around our home (we have a daughter, a dog and a cat – all female!).  He’s expected to join our family and the outside world in the middle of June.

temptation of the urgent

Over the weekend, our staff met with about 20 leaders from our church to begin a discussion on vision. A few months prior, at a day retreat, our staff watched a seminar produced by Willow Creek Association on vision planning. Bill Hybels was the featured speaker and what he said made a lot of sense: when pastors think of “vision” they generally think of something God drops into their heads to present to the church. It become ‘top-down’ leadership with an outside vision forced on the congregation. What Hybels advised was in fact much different than the traditional model of “vision-casting”: involvement of as many interested parties as possible. In other words, one person’s vision of what God wants to do in a church does not translate very easily to the congregation. Sure, the pastor can be passionate about it, maybe even the staff is totally on board. But this type of leadership and thinking only reinforces what is the common misconception:

“Ministry is what the pastors and staff do; being led is what the members do.”

Thus the idea of mass-involvement surfaces. The theory is that the more people who are involved in the vision casting of the church (since it does not belong to the pastors, but to the members), the more active role in fulfillment of that vision those members will take.

The key concept is ownership: how easy do we find it to “own” someone else’s vision? What if we believe that God has something different for the direction of our local body? What voice do individuals have?

So, to counteract the thinking that “ministry is what pastors do”, we began the long process of inviting church members and leaders to a common table to prayerfully discuss what God wants Mirabeau Chapel to look like in five years: if we could gaze into a crystal ball and see our church in five years, what would be its hallmarks? What would the community think of us? What does it do on a regular basis? What does it offer and look like? We’re inviting all sorts of people because when people are part of the process, passion comes out and commitment to vision is fostered. Ultimately, the vision for our church is for the whole church and thus should come as a result of hearing the cumulative voice of God through the church.

But this takes time. Lots of time. Months, maybe more than a year.

This process is the opposite of urgency. What this process helps facilitate, however, is more committed vision, more involved “church-goers” and much more structured and effective ministry. The downfall in too many churches, including ours, is the rush to begin “a ministry” without thinking through the process. We get to consumed with the urgency of need that we bypass the planning that could guarantee success.

The temptation of the urgent: do and do and do and do and do as fast (and as ineffective) as one possible can.

It’s antidote? Process. Formulation. Structure. Big scary words that don’t sit well with me, except that I believe in them because of the end result: better equipping of Christians and more effective ministry.

thin places

This evening, after coming home from work, having dinner with my family, putting my 20 month-old daughter to bed and listening to my 4-months-pregnant wife talk with her mother on the phone, I relaxed on the couch in our sunroom (yes, one needs one in the frigid, 9-degree Pacific Northwest).

This is the first time today that I have been able to relax in relative quiet (aside from my wife’s muted conversation in the other room) and only one thought was present in my mind:

Thanks.

Thanks for the most incredible family. Thanks for a satisfying job. Thanks that even in the middle of bitter winter, I am stilled in this thin place, this place where the Ultimate softly touches the Present.

Thanks, most gracious God, for these gifts.

personal. not private

I once heard a pastor say, “The Christian life is personal but it is never private.” He was teaching on the subtle fallacies that are built into the way in which we, as western Christians, often see faith. His point at the time was to encourage those in attendance to see the personal nature of their relationship with Jesus and at the same to be Christ in little worlds: the little worlds of their workplace, their home, their neighborhood, their city.

But that statement has a much deeper meaning. “The Christian life is personal” means that following Jesus is an individual choice. No one can make that decision for someone else – even God refuses to coerce. “But it is never private” implies something very important, the opposite of which 1700 years of institutional Christianity has solidified in our westernized religion. It implies that we are not meant simply for a private relationship, namely “me and Jesus”; the Christian life is not, and can never legitimately be, “me-centered”. To employ a musical metaphor, being a Christian is not singing a solo melody line.

No, the Christian life thrives on – even depends on – something much bigger:

others.

It is too easy to say, “I just want to follow God. I don’t want to follow man. I want to follow what the Bible says for me and not what someone else interprets it to be.” But can we ever really follow God on our own? This arrogance – intentional or not – ignores the fact that predominantly for Christianity’s first 300 years and somewhat also over the past 1700 years, Christians knew their need for each other. “Others” had to teach. “Others” had to mentor. “Others” (yes, certainly through God’s Spirit) even had to choose which books would form the Bible. Those early years were hard for many believers: they relied on their brothers and sisters to aid them in their physical needs as well as spiritual.

They needed each other and they knew it.

We need each other but too often we don’t know it.

The Christian life is not simply about “getting to heaven.” When that is the sole aim of Christianity, it falls short of God’s purpose for us here and now. Christianity is about our personal relationship with Jesus lived out in a community. Our individual lives enrich the community of believers and that community in turn enlivens ours. Does it take a village to raise a child? It certainly takes a community to mature as a Christ-follower.

No one sings a solo. Instead, our voices join together in a great unified, sometimes out-of-tune, harmony. Christianity is not about the melody line; it is about harmony.

the medium is the message

Spring semester at opened with a class on Personal Transformation and one article I read by John Stott made some startling points, two of which hit home with me.

The first was his implication that those who preach the gospel are first preaching themselves, that we as Christians are our own first important message. This rings clearer when we realize that the first things people see is who we are before they hear what comes out of our mouths. This begs the question, “What are we presenting to those who are not Christians?” In other words, we “need to look like what [we] are talking about. Authenticity gets across.”

What do we look like? How do we act? Or respond to people? Are we Christlike? Do we love like He loved? These questions should shadow us, haunt us. To spur us on, for his coup de grace, Stott quotes Reverend Iskandar Jadeed (a former Arab Muslim): “If all Christians were Christians – that is, Christlike – then there would be no more Islam today.” It might do us well to substitute “poverty”, “inequality”,”oppression”, or any number of social or spiritual ills for “Islam”. If Christians were Christians, there would be no more ____ today.”

God transform us into the likeness of Christ.

a return to tradition

I recently read an article that Jason Clark wrote for the Bible Society on the recovery of liturgy. He referenced a great article in US News and World Report. At 4 pages, it’s long but worth the read. It covers an interesting twist in focus in many of today’s postmoderns: seeking historical theological roots. This return to ancient faith, including such things as celebrating the Eucharist weekly and praying the Apostle’s Creed is worth exploring in our attempts to incarnate Christ in postmodernity.

communion

After a brief discussion regarding communion (the Eucharist) with some of the staff at our church, the subject of Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11:26-30. Paul says that since communion/Eucharist is about proclaiming the Lord’s death and recognizing His body, participating in this sacrament lightly is the reason that many are weak, sick, or dead.

So, we talked about what it means to be weak, sick or dead. Whether or not Paul’s words implied physical sickness or death may be important, but it begs the question, “Why don’t we see this today?” Maybe we do – or would, but we ourselves are sick or dead.

Communion, the Eucharist, is about not only Christ, but about His body, the Church. Since we experience Christ in the community of fellow believers, how we regard others in celebrating the Eucharist must be important. Paul says that we eat and drink judgment upon ourselves if we do not recognize Jesus’ body. I think this must to some degree imply not only remembering Jesus physical death, but acknowledging and celebrating His metaphorical body – the Church.

To the extent that we attempt to make communion singularly about “me and Jesus” and exclude the very root of communion (community), we are in danger of refusing Christ’s body, though we may even receive the elements. We are in danger of becoming weak, sick or dead. Whether or not physically or literally, by refusing Christ’s community, we experience the saddest state that humans can encounter on earth:  weak in offering mercy; dead to compassion.

pat’s predictions

So, it’s January 1st, 2008 and the world is watching to see what kind of prophecies (or predictions, as he calls them) will come out of Pat Robertson. I for one am not disappointed that his 2007 predictions haven’t come true (I’m sure everyone is glad that millions of Americans and cities were not destroyed by terrorists), but I wasn’t holding out for them to happen. I know that sometimes God speaks through donkeys, but given Robertson’s track record, I wasn’t too worried.

It’s not out of spite that I write this; it’s not even out of disdain. What gets me is that Pat claims to speak for God and yet stops short of calling himself a prophet. He’s more a Nostradamus than an Isaiah, but Nostradamus was much more poetic. And, according to Beth Newman (an ethics professor at Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond), Robertson falls short in a terribly important way: “In Scripture, the prophets deliver a word from the Lord that always carries with it a self-judgmental call to repent, to turn to God, to be God’s people,” Newman said. “Robertson’s predictions lack that wider theological context.“

Why is this important? Because the prophets of old always called people to repentance. Their callings included with them God’s passionate plea for His people to return. Prophets gave no doom-and-gloom predictions; rather they spoke God’s words in power. The acknowledged that the proof of their prophecy was its fulfillment. Prophecies were filled with the rich metaphors of impending judgment and the undying devotion of God to His people. Pat Robertson lacks this. He is simply content to stand in his television corner, pronounce preposterous predictions and claim divine inspiration. Perhaps he should take more lessons from biblical prophets.