Expert to Experiment
The earth is moving under the foundation of old concepts of leadership as the modern model of expertise is replaced by a new definition of authenticity. The postmodern world, the way things are and are becoming - whatever you want to call it - does not put confidence in credentials and those claiming to have the answers, but in those with whom we can join in the process of asking questions.

The call for those who would suppose to lead is to be willing to be vulnerable enough to work out their own salvation in the presence of others. Of course, the temptation of pride is to try and work it out in private, away from prying eyes, and only display that which is presentable. And so the myth of neat and tidy spiritual processes is perpetuated by those who show only end products rather than the hesitancy, confusion, doubt, and tentativeness that is truly the nature of experiencing any transformation spiritually. The myth discourages those honest enough to admit their own struggles, but who are intimidated by the apparent certainty expert leaders.

A Christian community is a group that is willing to be open enough about the journey to honestly discuss the reality of the messiness of faith as it is worked out in the presence of God. May we be bold enough to work it out in the presence of others that everyone may be blessed.

Freedom from Self
While writing a recent piece I made the statement that we have "the freedom to not be limited by what we enjoy" - which surprised me when I wrote it. It may sound weird, but I saw more meaning and truth in the statement than I had intended. It was as if the Spirit was speaking to me through words I had written, but which maybe shouldn't be called my own.

Being a slave to pleasure is a stifling existence spiritually. If we are confined to what is enjoyable, our souls will wither. Though most people would desire freedom from hardship and toward pleasure, as disciples of Jesus we value freedom from the curse of knowing only pleasure so that we may grow into the image of Christ. When I am loosed from my addiction to personal pleasure, I will be free indeed.

Responding to Persecution
Continuing my thoughts from the last blog . . . I remember my Church History professor talking about the two ways the pre-Constantinian church responded to persecution: Apologetics and Martyrdom. That seems to be the apostolic approach as well. Certainly Paul engages in apologetics as he explains himself to Roman officials. And the martyrdom . . . well, that's something that scares us.

Compare the apostolic response to the response of many Christians today. There is little true apologetic given, certainly no martyrdom, but lots of campaigning, legislative wrangling, calling for our rights, and claiming that America is a Christian nation so Christianity should be the officially sanctioned religion.

Unless Christians learn how to be aliens in America, travelers who are looking for a city whose Builder and Maker is God, their cultural faith and civil religion will continue to become more and more impotent in the marketplace of ideas.

God's People and Persecution
To suggest that American Christians are undergoing persecution would be to insult the believers around the world who know what suffering really is. I don't intend to render the word meaningless by suggesting that the American Church in being moved out of a position of governmental favor and privilege is experiencing honest-to-goodness persecution. Those accustomed to a position of dominance usually whine when forced onto a level playing field in a pluralistic philosophical environment - but that hardly qualifies as persecution. The more American Christians wail about their treatment with extremist language, the more others will be convinced that evangelical and conservative Christianity is a threat to society.

Having experienced Christendom so long some have come to believe it is the believer's birthright. Not only is it a questionable understanding of God's Kingdom, Christendom has been shown to be a poor environment to spiritual nurture.

In the midst of cultural change where Christian faith is being counted as one among the many, it would serve believers well to look at the historical response to real persecution. Maybe in that we will find a direction for reacting to the very mild situation where I am not banned from praying to God, but only from coercing others to pray to God.

More to come . . .

Neither Jew nor Greek
I think we made a big mistake when we first talked about having a ministry to Hispanics. I think it was a very honest and sincere mistake, but an error nonetheless. One of our desires was to reach out to the people in our community with love and service. That was good. We wanted to be intentionally diverse. That was good. There was an individual who had a vision for serving the Hispanic population and had the skills to do it. That was good.

The problem was that whenever we talk about having a ministry to a certain group we start thinking in a 'them' and 'us' mentality. We (the Christians in this faith community) will serve them (a distinct group not part of our community). I am not fussing over the language of describing realities. The Hispanics we were wanting to serve were not sharing life with us, and our goal was not to 'convert' them to our group. But it is almost a condescending position that we assume when we target a group in that way, though all very unintentionally.

Even though the goal was to serve and not get them to join our group, it would have almost been impossible for them to become full participants in our faith community had they wanted to do that. It would have been more like they would have always been labeled as those to whom we minister. Maybe I'm not expressing this distinction very well, but I think there is something real here.

By God's working our faith community has become more diverse, but that has been because God has brought African families into this body of believers to share in both giving and receiving. If we had a ministry to Africans I think we would be putting them at a lesser place. Instead, God has shown us how we don't have a ministry to certain groups, which presupposes they will be mainly receivers, but God has expanded our community to include more believers, who though having different perspectives and experiences than some of us, stand equal with us in ministering to one another. The differences are obvious culturally, in experience, and even the articulation of our faith, but God is showing us how to be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female . . . as God intends. We have not put these individuals into a mental category of those to whom we minister, and so we have been blessed as they minister to the rest of the congregation in teaching, leadership, and service. I believe God is teaching us how to live as the Kingdom of God in which all peoples serve one another without worldly distinctions. Praise God!

Regular visitors to this blog will see the new format. I like it . . . but I hope to play around with it more and add more graphics.

Some little add-ons I had on the old blog were lost when I chose this new template (you didn't think I did this on my own, did you?). I lost the old add-on comments, so those gems that some of you wrote are gone. I didn't know that was going to happen! Honestly, I didn't! It wasn't that I couldn't stand the competition . . . that your comments might be more insightful than my blogging! Really! Anyway, I like the new comments format better.

I also lost the stats generator. Maybe you never noticed it, but there was a link called Go Stats or something like that down at the bottom of the page. You know what I could do . . . and what I did do all the time . . . was to click on it and find out how many "hits" my blog was receiving, what days people were visiting my blog, where I ranked among the "Culture and Relationships" blogs on Blogger (somewhere usually around 270) and a bunch of other stats. When I visited my blog to see if there were any comments, there was that little tyrannical stats generator tempting me to check the usefulness of my blogging existence. The little beast became an ego-meter. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit . . . my existential angst wasn't that tied to the stats add-on . . . maybe the stats record is simply a good proxy for a bigger temptation.

Anyway, I've chosen not to have a statistical record anymore. What does it matter? Modernity lies deeply ingrained in my being and its penchant for measuring everything by numbers is a habit I don't want to foster. It's an addiction I've been fighting since going to Africa. I don't freakin' care anymore . . . well, honestly I do. I want to know how many people are visiting my blog. I want to be validated! I want to know someone is reading this! But I don't want to want to anymore.

The way I'm going to try and kill that little modern monster is to deprive it of nourishment. It's been on a bread and water diet for years, but still managing to stay alive. To break myself of a lingering numbers fetish I'll get rid of little counters like that one. But, of course, you know what the second question is after "So, where do you go to church?" - "How many members do you have?". And if someone already knows the answer to the first question, then question number two moves up to number one . . . even if they asked me that three months ago. If it is about numbers, why are we still worshipping one God?

When I published my last blog I got a pop-up offering me a free Dell laptop computer! How apropos!

Usually I don't pay much attention to "pop-ups" or other ads when I'm surfing the net, but one just caught my attention (while checking out my own blog). It was a banner that promised a free* copy of Halo 2, the limited collector's edition. Okay, I confess that I'm a gamer and think that Halo is about the best game ever produced - and I am counting down to November 9 when Halo 2 is released. So that was an enticing ad.

When I clicked on the banner I got a "pop-up" ad that promised a free* Halo 2 with free shipping*. You know what I kept seeing - those little asterisks. It was always free with a catch. At that point my well-entrenched skepticism took over and I didn't click on the pop-up because I knew I would have to do something like apply for a new credit card, refinance my home, or sell a child to get the "free" game. Either that, or I was going to have to buy the game and get the collector's edition upgrade for free. It really wasn't going to be free, but the ad didn't want to tell me on the front end what the real story was.

Too often God's grace has been presented as free* (with that ubiquitous asterisk). Investigation usually reveals that what the preacher meant was that the offer was freely given but the actions needed to qualify for God's free offer are extensive and meticulous. So stringent are the requirements that one begins to wonder what the meaning of "free" is. The nuanced small print is that one does not work to earn salvation but one must work to receive and keep salvation. God's grace and forgiveness is free to those who meet the qualifications. But it is free.

What rubbish! God doesn't have an asterisk by His free offer of eternal life through Jesus. Whatever one might construe as "requirements" God Himself supplies - be it faith, repentance, confession, humility, submission, or anything else. And as those who have received freely we become giveaway communities who share in God's generosity by extending it to others. The abundance of grace creates a celebratory atmosphere that is irresistible. The Gospel becomes Good News (as it should be) and life in Christ becomes joyous. Kingdom parties become common, and the invitations are thrown around with abandon. Come one and all to feast in the palace of our God!

I saw a billboard along the highway today - "You Must Be Born Again - Jesus Christ". My instant reaction was that the Gospel doesn't fare too well when put on billboards. I was also asked a few days ago to summarize our faith community's essence in a succinct phrase, one that would fit on a t-shirt. I was stumped. Ask me to take an hour and talk, but not 10 seconds. Do I talk about God's dramatic and gracious rescue of us as miserable sinners? Do I talk about how our day-to-day emphasis is to seek the transformation that God does in changing us into the image of Christ? Do I mention that our identity is in a communal relationship with the Triune God rather than assent to any doctrinal formulations? What do I say about what God is doing, how we seek His leading, and our emphasis on "roaming about the Kingdom"? The possibilities are many and varied.

Now I know that having a mission statement or slogan is considered essential to having an identity, but all the ones I've heard are virtually the same even though the churches that create them are radically different. It seems to me that the slogans, then, are not very representative. No church says "we are here to make you feel good" or "it's all about appearances". No, the churches for whom those statements are true are going to say something like everyone else - "where we love God and people so they grow to love Jesus and their neighbors in doing good." Or maybe it's "We Worship a Worthy God who Works by His Spirit to Win the World." That is a church that likes w's.

I think the problem is reductionism - both with the billboards and the mission statements. If you want to know what the community is about, live with us for a while. Let me talk to you. But I can't give you that picture in any meaningful way in 15 words or less. My family doesn't have a mission statement, and don't ask me to summarize my relationship with my wife and children on a t-shirt. My relationship with God and my spiritual brothers and sisters doesn't fit on one either.

I do believe that despite what any mission statement says, if you live with a group for even a short time, you will discover what they are about.

And the Gospel . . . it's much more than "you must be born again."

In Matthew 21 two questions are asked - one of Jesus by the religious leaders, and the other of those leaders by Jesus. The leaders' question is about "authority". They want to know the nature of the authority that is behind what Jesus is teaching and doing. Jesus asks a question about the motivations of a person's heart that lie behind one's actions.

To me this exchange exemplifies the differences between the ways of God and the ways of humanity. The same tension arises constantly in Christian churches as human legalistic views fight against the work God is doing. When it comes to actions the human concern is about the authority and correctness of them, and God's concern is for the motivations of the heart that gave rise to the actions. While the religious leaders examine the legality of things, Jesus talks about faithfulness in the heart of people who are moved to repentance.

Jesus and these religious leaders are like ships passing in the night - headed in opposite directions and talking about completely different matters. Those who talk about authority will never understand the One who came to be servant of all. In the Christian world we need less talk about who has authority and more about what is in our hearts.

We've been talking about baptism in our community. One thing which has become exceedingly clear to me is that baptism is to be a unifying experience (1 Cor. 12:12-13) both bringing people to God and to a communal oneness with each other through the Spirit. Tragically, that has not been the case in the Christian world. Baptism has been a cause for much division and the non-acceptance of other believers. Something has gone wrong.

My own thoughts concerning the root of the problem is that we Christians tend to think that the one baptism of Ephesians 4 is defined by human understandings of the rite and human ways of practicing it. We believe that the one baptism is a doctrine that must be comprehended instead of a mystery that is God's grace in us. The one baptism must be that God performs one work in all - even when our understandings and practices differ. We are bound together by a common work administered by God. This is something we must accept by faith, even as we acknowledge that our thoughts and convictions regarding the rite differ.

So last Sunday we talked about Brother Lawrence and the notion of Practicing the Presence of God. Actually, we had several meditative quotes from the lay brother, and we were encouraged to stay more conscious of God . . . and to adore and love Him constantly. Want to know how I've been doing? Well it's Wednesday, and really no better than the week before. I can't say that I've been particularly more aware of God or increasingly focused on the imminence of the divine in my life and around me.

Does that mean Sunday was a waste? No . . . because if I take a much longer view of where I am and where I have been, I would say that I am more conscious of God now than I was several years ago. But then again, last Sunday wasn't the first time I had been introduced to the practice of God's presence. Sunday was another nudge in the direction God's been leading me for a long time. Often the spiritual results aren't instantly apparent, though on rare occasions we humans are treated to an epiphany that does create dramatic change. We get more nudges than we do epiphanies.

Here I sit thinking about how I need to be more aware of God. Last week I wasn't thinking about this on Wednesday (at least I can't remember thinking this) . . . so last Sunday's meditation is having an effect.

"Judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes" (1 Corinthians 4:5)

A long time ago I came to understand that pride is the root of our spiral into deepening separation from God. Satan's pride resulted in his fall, and serves as a warning for us. If pride has a child, it must be selfishness - and an awful child it is. How do we mentor those who are so consumed with themselves that all they can think about is their personal circumstances, how they can get what they want, or what is going on with them? How do we encourage dying to ourselves and destroy that devastating tendency to make "me" the center of everything?

One solution seems to be in a discipline of helping others (getting out of exclusive self interest) - but selfish people won't do that. "Sorry, I'm too busy with myself to practice that . . ." Even if the discipline is presented as a way for they themselves to be helped, the spirit of selfishness has too tight a grip. My experience is that all my attempts seem to fail. Selfishness continues to cause those caught up in it to destroy themselves. I can't break that hold in someone else no matter how I try.

Humbled by the power of sin, and have to turn back to faith in God. If the spirit of selfishness will be driven out it will be through the Spirit of God. May God do the work that I cannot do in myself nor in others. Sola Dei!

I just got back from a two-week trip to Honduras (June 3-18). As you might imagine, the experience was rich with God's presence. There is little that can equal spending a couple weeks just doing good for others. There were no distractions and since our basic needs were provided for by workers at the place we were staying, we could devote ourselves to simply serving the Hondurans. Every Christian finds such a trip appealing because it is an intense participation in the discipline of good works.

As much as we might like to live this way always, it is not possible. When I got home there was the grass to mow, errands to be run, and work (the kind that is the source of my paycheck) to be done. Though markedly different, this too is the will of God. The truth to be recognized is that the presence of God which we sense so clearly in concentrated service like through this Honduras trip, is equally available in our ordinary daily existence. Tasting God's goodness in a special circumstance should help us find Him in more typical activities.

May our experiences of holy presence in the ordinary things increase.

What do we make of the changes in our world? There is plenty to be in despair about - economic woes, moral issues, war in our world, and all the questions that these are raising. When watching these matters unfold it seems that the participants in the debate have a desire to win at all costs rather than to engage in meaningful dialogue and a search for truth. There is an intellectual tribalization occurring and a genocidal warfare being waged against opposing viewpoints. Whether is it gay marriage, Iraq, or some other subject, so much of the rhetoric on all sides is a "take no prisoners" approach to winning against the "enemy" (those with whom we share in human society, our neighbors, who think differently). That does not bode well for a culture.

However, what is God doing in the middle of all this . . . if we indeed believe that God is still acting in the human story? One stark lesson is that we should have no hope in this world. We are only in despair if we expected this world to offer anything lasting. If we are distressed over economic woes, were we depending on economic vibrancy for our happiness? If we are disillusioned by evidence of moral weakness, is it a sign that we believed too much in the evolutionary progress of fallen human society? Does world instability and terrorism reveal that we sought a peace offered by military power and political alliances?

My personal anxiety about any of these current problems reminds me that I have not found rest and peace in Christ alone. May God lead me to unrivaled security in His love.

As we seek to participate in our life in God, one given by grace and lived through grace, we often hear a debate surface about the emotional and rational aspects of that life. Many times the discussion devolves into a competition between proponents of one or the other of these eminently human expressions of being. On one hand, some seem to associate the leading and guiding of the Holy Spirit with our emotions, while other see emotions as the greatest of pitfalls, and advocate a rational approach.

Let me suggest that the debate is not between these two aspects of human personhood, but between man and God. Those who would put their trust in rationality seem to miss the declaration of God that human understanding is corrupt - they are darkened in their understanding (Eph. 4:18) and their thinking became futile (Rom. 1:21) - just to point out two passages. Those who fail to recognize that every feeling is not from God, also fail to discern adequately that fundamental sins such as pride have hefty emotional components. With so many sins being emotive in nature, no wonder rational solutions meet with failure. Knowing the right one should do is little defense against a desire to do wrong.

I believe that the true situation is that both human emotion and rational thought are corrupted and untrustworthy. The debate is not between either being emotionally centered or intellectually guided - but being human centered or divinely guided. Both human emotion and rationality are redeemable and both may be used by God to guide. We must be aware not of the dangers of either one, but of both. We must seek how God leads and guides through both. Being confident in either feelings or thoughts is flawed, but trusting in God and Him through both is a journey to being transformed.

A truly formative part of my spiritual journey has been the eight years I spent in Tanzania, East Africa. The formation came in many different ways, but one of the greatest blessings was to see the spirituality of a non-secularized people who put their faith in Jesus. I say "non-secularized" because the Africans I was blessed to know had not adopted a western worldview that elevated human capability and relegated the spiritual to the realm of superstition. Once someone asked me if those Tanzanians believed the spiritual was just as "real" as the physical - but that question betrays our bias. In my response I avoided the whole question of "real" and using the physical as the standard, but stated that they related equally to both what is seen and unseen without thinking in terms of what is "real" and what is not. For those Africans everything is a seamless whole. For this reason, there is a robustness to their faith that shows the weakness of the faith of a thoroughly modern person whose belief is formed within the boundaries of modernity's parameters.

This last Sunday I was truly blessed to help welcome a new family that last week moved here from Africa. In spending time with them and seeing and hearing their powerful faith in God expressed in everything, I was reminded again why I learned so much from those Tanzanians. I might have gone as a missionary to share with them the Good News, but they accepted and believed it in a way surpassed my own belief.

Our African friends here have come as missionaries whose mission is to be a part of a mobilization effort. They are here to earn money to send back to support Kingdom work in Africa. As one said, God provides us three meals a day and the rest is Kingdom work.

Praise God that we have some missionaries among us whose sense of calling will undoubtedly challenge us all. God may have sent them for another reason as well - to feed a revival among American churches which have become too comfortable!

Well, my long absence from this blog has ended. It is amazing to me that it has been a month already.

The reason for the sabbatical was that our faith community moved to a new leased facility. It has been a good time of seeing God provide - the renovation of the building that took only two weeks with everything happening ahead of schedule (whoever heard of that!) and new opportunities for ministry becoming evident. The other aspect that I've thought about through this month is the need to keep our focus on God.

Probably the biggest temptation during this time is letting blessings move us away from God. We could easily become exactly what we resolved not to become - that is, a church focused on itself. Maybe it is just a sign of our sinful nature that we can so quickly be distracted even when God's hand is so evident. The reassuring thought is that since God Himself is moving us into this new period in the life of this church, then we know that that there is a purpose which will be realized by Divine Grace. Our faithfulness to the directing of God and openness to unexpected possibilities must be our congregational lingua franca. When God moves, there are tremendous possibilities both for faithfulness and apostacy. May we humbly choose the former and avoid the pride that would feed the latter.

Good Discussions Become Stale Positions
Vigorous and timely Christian dialogue that leads to an incarnational practice of faith daily is essential to having a relevant message. I might even characterize that discussion as argument or debate, as long as the spirit is irenic. There is nothing ungodly about believers engaged in a desperate search for the meaning of faith in our cultural context, and in a lively discussion of the possibilities as long as grace and love pervade the exchange. But, of course, such is so rarely witnessed that many will likely doubt that it could even exist.

I describe the practice of faith which we seek as "incarnational" because it must be the authentic presence of the Divine within historical circumstances. We are concerned with our historical circumstance, and should be. This pursuit of the incarnation of faith in the "flesh of our time" will be an attempt to interpret the nature of God in normative ways for our behavior, priorities, relationships, and congregational life. When done well, these discussions result in teachings about the truth of God's own revelation of Himself which frankly and perceptively address our context. The debate is vital and necessary for Christians of a specific time and place to proclaim a relevant message of hope and conviction, and for their working out of faith daily to be true salt and light.

The problem is that when the fleshly context, the historical reference of a discussion ceases to exist, or changes either dramatically or slowly over time, often the doctrines remain. Those untethered teachings which once had immediate relevance to the daily life of certain group of God's people often take on a life of their own. They are no longer incarnational teachings, but ethereal statements of belief. Once a fleshly context no longer anchors the teaching to a specific daily practice which has a immediate relevance, they become stale positions and intellectual posturing. Often, these morph into tests of orthodoxy, now in a theoretical way - far different from the circumstances of their formation.

Undoubtedly we all carry with us the baggage of some of these stale beliefs. We cling to these in the false notion that thinking the right thoughts on these subjects, which have little or no bearing on our daily attempts to live like Jesus, is somehow important to God. What would be the change if we resolve to discuss, debate, pursue, and teach no thing but that which directly involves our daily walk of faith? How many subjects would languish undiscussed for lack of any immediate relevance? How many questions would not be pursued because how we live to love God and our neighbor on Monday is not affected? Think of the Christian unity that would result.

I believe that our sense of being related to one another as Christians in the world should consist of being conscious of two things. First, we should have a sense of belonging that is based on the daily, face-to-face relationships we have with other believers. These fellow travelers share our journey, and we enjoy an intimate and immediate fellowship in love which is the joy of a spiritual relationship. Our relationship is based on our daily walks together.

The other consciousness I believe we should have is an awareness that there is a universal, invisible church that spans all places and time. My relatedness to that vast body of fellow travelers include that 'great cloud of witness' from history and the millions of other contemporary believers in Jesus. I don't have face-to-face relationships with this numerous congregation, but I have a sense of belonging that I am in the midst of that God-led, Spirit-filled throng. I should be conscious of a relationship with them by faith, if not by the personal experience of interaction.

There is a third consciousness that I once had, but don't have now, and which I believe I never should have had. That was a sense of belonging to a numerous group of believers with whom I didn't have immediate or intimate relationships, who included more than those Christians with whom I regularly shared life, but a group smaller than the church universal. My relationship with those people was only theoretical, based on the impression that we shared certain practices and beliefs in common. That group was my denomination - a group encompassing less than God's church, but more than those with whom I walked daily. With my denomination I felt a special bond. Very long ago, that denomination was synonymous with what I thought was the church universal.

When I came to see that God was doing more in this world and had children beyond my denomination, I nonetheless held onto my denomination as people with whom I felt a special affinity. I esteemed them over other believers. Being in a group of them was better than being in a group of "other believers." The real test was when I was driving on long trips. Invariably I would pass numerous places of worship. Whenever I saw a building with "our name" on it I felt a certain closeness to the people who gathered there, even though they were completely unknown to me. On that same trip I would drive past other places of worship with other names, and though I would acknowledge in my mind that believers met there, that they were people saved by grace, I would nevertheless think of them as "of other groups." I acknowledged that they could be children of my Father, but I didn't feel as close to them as those who had "our name" on their building. I was denominationally minded. My mind divided the Christian church into denominational camps.

I had no reason to think those with "our name" would somehow be warmer, more loving, more accepting, more godly, or more anything else good than those under "other names." But I had a predisposition to those with "our name" - my sense of belonging was not in God's universal church, but in my own denomination.

I have heard people justify the existence of denominations, but I no longer can. For me the journey has been long, but I am convicted that I should only be conscious of two ways of being related to other Christians in this world: 1) the Christians with whom I share my daily walk and 2) all other Christians in equality. I am repenting of there ever being a third group - larger than those who love me personally and daily, and yet smaller than all believers who are accepted by God.