Lord Have Mercy on Us, Your Children

What Not to Do

2008-12-19T16:42:00.001-08:00

I haven't posted in quite a while, and for a very simple reason. I am not really sure if I am qualified to give advice at the moment. Since my last post we have moved to a different state, and most of what I have worked on has not worked out that well. So instead of posting about what to do, ideas and insights like that, I thought I'd spend some time posting things I know far better, what not to do.

So in honor of so many of my friends getting engages, here are some ideas on what NOT to do when you're going to propose.

Put the ring in your pocket, fill the ring box with toothpicks and at the end of dinner open the box with both hands and offer her a tootpick.
Follow behind her and when she stops, get down on one knee... to tie your shoe.. repeatedly.
Ask her to hold your phone because you told your buddies you'd put them on speakerphone when you proposed.
Anything involving Crackerjacks or Secret Codes.
Order alchohal and say anything like "I need a stiff drink before I do this."
Place the stone anywhere she can swallow it, hoping that she'll find it. She won't, the ER guys will.
Begin every statement with "I love you so much, will you..." and then saying whatever you want.
Spend time with your future in-laws, unless you really don't want to get married.
Have an ex-girlfriend there to hand you the ring so you can propose.
Break her leg so your friends at ER can slip the ring into her IV bag.
Using smoke signals from a forest fire, that you set to show your love.
Say anything along the lines of "this is where I always propose."

As for the right way? I have no idea.

Help For Shepherds

2008-07-05T19:10:00.001-07:00

I realize that for the last month I have not posted on this site at all. This last month has been a whirlwind, to say the least. In addition to pastoring, I am currently continuing my master's program. This summer I am also attending 5-7 sports games a week, editing the film from 20 sports games a week, and launching a pastoral help website.

It is that site which is the subject of this post. For several years, a few pastors and I have been planning this site and the launch is approaching. We're calling it "Help For Shepherds" because pastors often take a shepherding role with their parishoners, guiding and teaching them. And yet those same shepherds are often left alone in the field without much to go on.

Ask any pastor and they will tell you that there are always more needs than they have skills, and that we often simply come up blank when we really need an idea. And as time goes on, every pastor encounters situations that we are not trained for and have no idea how to approach.

This site is designed to be edited and filled by pastors, sharing their favorite books and links, best ideas, best research, best message ideas, and teaching moments. It is based on a wiki format, where every pastor can add whatever they have, and use whatever they find. We are hoping that this can be a way of giving shepherds what they need to better shepherd and lead others. If you are reading this and are a pastor, come check it out. We could use your help, and hopefully we can help you out too. And if you're a layperson, please pray for us. This is a big step, a big gamble, and we're just madly hoping and praying that it pays off in some way.

Faith

2008-05-20T16:17:00.000-07:00

I am not usually very poetic, and there is a reason for it. I am not very good. However, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that I just want to put down on paper. I wrote this a few weeks ago but have not posted it for a variety of reasons. Ok, mainly because I didn't think it was that good and wanted to "refine" it a bit. Well I can't seem to refine it any more (surprise surprise) so here you go. It expresses well, I think, what faith is like for me

A wall of deepest nothingness
I’m falling ever deeper
Spending my days searching for light
Trying to strike a match in darkness
Fumbling for light without seeing
Catch fire to the night?
Afraid to be burned
by the flames
terrified of being consumed
by what I attempt to bring forth.
Hating the old.
Hating the cold.
Afraid of the light.
Afraid of the heat.
Afraid of the change.

A wall of deepest nothingness
I’m falling ever deeper
Spending my days searching for light
Trying to strike a match in darkness
Fumbling for light without seeing
Catch fire to the night?
Afraid to be burned
by the flames
terrified of being consumed
by what I attempt to bring forth.
Hating the old.
Hating the cold.
Afraid of the light.
Afraid of the heat.
Afraid of the change.

A pinprick of light.
A match finally caught.
Slowly growing?
Our brightest lights
Still so little heat.
Like artic sun
Reflecting on snowy tundra
So bright
So light
So cold
Where is the heat?
Where is the burn?
Where are the flames to scorch the dark?
I want the light
My fear wants the cold
Snow melts slowly
Without fire.

The untamed flame of change
I convince myself I don’t need
Try to get by on light alone
Glowing without burning
My match kept under glass
Never touching my life
Never touching the world
Just looking good
Glowing softly
Burn away the dark
Melt my life
Kindle the flame
Burn it all away
Start with my fear
End where you want
I don’t want the night
I want light
Your light
Your fire
Now your life
In me.

Poetry and Faith

2008-05-05T09:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes normal words don't say enough and something more is needed to really express what is going on. This is something I wrote last week in the middle of the night. It isn't the best, but that's part of the point. We need to be able to express what we are feeling and thinking. Whether it is five star quality or not, it is very important that we express what is going on inside of us.

A wall of deepest nothingness
I’m falling ever deeper
Spending my days searching for light
Trying to strike a match in darkness
Fumbling for light without seeing
Catch fire to the night?
Afraid to be burned
by the flames
terrified of being consumed
by what I attempt to bring forth.
Hating the old.
Hating the cold.
Afraid of the light.
Afraid of the heat.
Afraid of the change.

A pinprick of light.
A match finally caught.
Slowly growing?
Our brightest lights
Still so little heat.
Like artic sun
Reflecting on snowy tundra
So bright
So light
So cold
Where is the heat?
Where is the burn?
Where are the flames to scorch the dark?
I want the light
My fear wants the cold
Snow melts slowly
Without fire.

The untamed flame of change
I convince myself I don’t need
Try to get by on light alone
Glowing without burning
My match kept under glass
Never touching my life
Never touching the world
Just looking good
Glowing softly
Burn away the dark
Melt my life
Kindle the flame
Burn it all away
Start with my fear
End where you want
I don’t want the night
I want light
Your light
Your fire
Now your life
In me..

McMunnion

2008-04-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

I had one of the most bizarre religious experiences of my life today. As I sat in District Assembly we were given communion. Now I love communion. I love the way we can gather together and drink from one cup, eat from one loaf, and know that while we each taste and experience God slightly differently in the end everything everyone ate came from the same source. I like that what we have together in communion was given to us by another person, even if it was just to put the wafers on the tray.

But the communion experience I had today was very different. I think I was the first human hands to touch this food in its’ entire existence. This communion came prepackaged with a measured amount of juice sealed into a plastic cup by foil. On top of that foil was a plastic sealed piece of bread. It was all hermetically sealed and individually processed.

I know I am old fashioned, but there is something disturbing about hearing “you may now remove the foil” and “open the plastic, take and eat” as part of the communion liturgy. I felt completely separated from all other believers as I had my own McMunnion. It was perfectly American, and to me it signified not only American consumerism, but also American Christianity’s individualism.

Instead of sharing from the same bread, the same Lord, we all have our own. Instead of receiving God from someone else, we open it up all by ourselves. We are reliant on no one for our communion, or our faith if the analogy holds. And what does it mean when the most important repeated ceremony in the Christian faith is fake? What does it mean when the juice and bread are artificial and fake in a ceremony we claim to be real?

It isn’t the end of the world by any means. But we need to think about what we are saying not just with our words, but with our actions and our priorities. If we are more interested in saving ten minutes and fifty cents than we are in making communion a meaningful experience that says something horrible about us and our faith. It says that the bottom line and convenience are more important than worshiping and serving God in meaningful ways. That is a scary concept, and it doesn’t come through just in communion. What we do, where we spend our money and our time scream out what we really believe is important, and whether our people realize it or not they’re learning from those things just as much as from our words.

When is a religion Dead?

2008-04-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

I apologize for not posting for the last several weeks. I wish I had a wonderful reason, but I don’t. I’ve been thinking a lot, working on my master’s, being a father, and everything has just caught up to me the past couple of weeks. A few months ago I posted a blog about what I saw as the death of Christianity in America. Since then I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about how to really define when a religion is dead.

Is a religion dead when there aren’t any people claiming it anymore? That’s the simplest explanation, but doesn’t really fit. I can claim to be Zoroastrian and yet not practice anything that the ancient Zoroastrians did. In that case, the ancient religion would still be dead and instead of rebirthing it, I would be practicing something completely different. Perhaps we could say that a religion is dead when it is no longer growing, but while that is a good indication of health it doesn’t equate with true death as the group could grow again.

Perhaps we could talk about whether the early beliefs of the religion are still being practiced. But then we have to find a cut-off point that defines “early”. In Christian circles, we have abandoned much that defined the early Church. We no longer sell everything we have and live communally. We no longer practice love feasts, or the Sabbath, or live in such radical faith. We are not persecuted either, which was a huge part of the early Church’s faith. And even if much of what we believe is different, there is always the chance that it will come back full circle. So while a difference in belief and practice are good indicators, they don’t seem to completely define the death of a religion. It needs something else. What about if we talked about a religion being dead when it no longer changes people like it did in the beginning? A religion catches on with people because it brings change into their lives, change for the better presumably. But when that change no longer comes, what drove that religion is gone. The faith is dead, even if people still claim to be a part of it. Individual ideas, beliefs, and actions can change in a religion as the times change, but if that change in their lives does not appear, or significantly changes, then the religion is dead, or is no longer the same religion it once was.

So is Christianity dead or alive in America by this criterion? I would say it’s pretty well dead. When people come into the Church today, we ask them to change their behavior, but not in ways that the ancient Church would have understood. The most strident ways we urge people to change are in their dress, their language, and their voting habits. There are many churches that are faithfully leading people to God and seeing people changed to serve others, to give sacrificially, to study and care for people together. But the dominant view of Christianity in America today is one of ethics and politics. That is not a change the early Christians would have understood. So if not dead, I would say that Christianity in America has kept the name, but changed into a new religion for many of the believers here, one that is more about “being good’ than showing love in service.

But there is always hope. Christianity is founded on rebirth, and that includes not only the individual but the Church as well. I only pray I help to keep the faith alive and lives changing, instead of stagnating and dying.

Roman Christianity

2008-04-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

I am a student of history, and especially medieval and Roman history. A few weeks ago I posted a blog about similarities between Britain under the Roman Empire and American Christianity. Today I wanted to take that comparison a bit further and look at comparisons of Rome right before the fall of the empire and America today, especially where it comes to religion. Much of this comes from “How the Irish Saved Civilization” page 29.

The Roman Empire was being pressed by floods of immigrants who were largely staying in their own groups and not being integrated, or welcomed, into Roman society (Mexico?). The Bureaucracy of the government focused on keeping themselves in office and afloat more than helping people. Military service became avoided by the elite (Clinton, Bush, etc) and shunned as a lower job by the rest (if you can’t go to college you can always join the army).

The army became mainly immigrants and not Romans (our army is disproportionately minority) and the standards for acceptance in the army were reduced (we have lowered our standards several times just since invading Iraq). Also, towards the end the army became dominated by hired mercenaries (Blackwater Company in Iraq anyone?). The amount that the government was spending on defense increased dramatically until the government could not sustain the infrastructure and taking care of its people (we spend over 50% of our taxes on defense I believe, and have cut schooling, and infrastructure to do so).

There was a big emphasis on the past instead of the future, they kept claiming old values as being alive today (sounds like the moral stuff we’re dealing with now by calling on what the founding fathers did like we practice it today) and legislating that while living in complete opposition to what they are claiming (think governor Spitzer, chasing prostitution rings but in reality using them).

The population was losing its middle class and either being extremely rich or extremely poor (middle class is dying off here too, think inner city). Those rich became the true deciding people in making things happen (Bill Gates recently approached congress with an idea and got it passed basically that day, while most things take months or years to go through). The people passed lots of laws that didn’t really effect anyone but sounded great (think making marriage one man and one woman only).

Order became the thing to keep, not justice (like renovating inner cities without helping those who live there but just kicking them out, CIA interrogation, or ignoring Darfour because it isn’t us). Religiously, the people had been Christian for centuries and it was assumed that people were believers just because they were Roman (ding). Attendance in church diminished, and involvement in church became the role of the pastor only (we are seeing the same thing right now).

The priesthood was raking in money at the expense of their people (prosperity preachers, televangelists, etc). The Church had become a political entity as much or more than a spiritual one (think James Dobson, the Christian Coalition and special interest groups). The Church became linked with the state, with priests preaching about the Roman Empire and preserving its’ glory more than the preaching the gospel (see most Fourth of July services in most churches here, or September Eleventh remembrances. The Church began to rely on the state for its’ support, purpose, and guidance (the big thing right now is making sure we follow the State’s guidelines in order to not have to pay our taxes).

The Church also became very turned inward, looking towards the Christians in its’ country as being the true church and everyone else around the world was a second class Christian (why else would we consider all other places in the world “missionary” work except here if we didn’t honestly consider America the heartland and center of Christianity). Preserving the Church in Rome became more pressing than getting more Christians outside of its’ realm (think about how much more money we spend on “church growth” books and plans for locally sustaining ministry than we spend on people outside of our nation).

There are many more analogies that can be made, and it’s scary. But I don’t have time, and you don’t have patience to read it I’m sure. Suffice to say, Christianity in America is in trouble, America is in trouble, if the analogies hold up in the long haul. I don’t know if there is a simple solution to it, but there is a first step. We are acting like Rome, thinking that Christian and American are the same thing, and being American means we’re a better Christian. We need to get over ourselves. I love my nation, but my God is bigger than any nation. Christianity flourishes where the people live it out, not where it is legislated, or where it is politically powerful, or even where it is allowed. We don’t need our nation to be Christian, and we need to start acting like that, like we are Christian first, American second, not the other way around.

Passing on Grace

2008-03-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

Easter has come and gone, and it was a blast to experience for me even though it was so hard to get everything done and prepared on time with school and baby. I can’t say everything went smoothly, but what happened was very meaningful, at least for me. We had a mock Ash Wednesday service (mock because it’s the right service on the wrong day), a Good Friday service, a baptismal service Sunday, and then Easter itself. Partway through the week, as I was meeting with the people about to be baptized and planning Sunday I really realized something.

I am not worthy of what I have been given. Not only has grace been given to me for forgiveness of sins, but even my position is grace. I was baptizing people who I had not led to Jesus. But I was still given the honor of ushering them into the faith. Somehow I have been allowed to give communion and pass out God’s grace to people who barely even know me. I watched people’s sins literally burned to ash and then placed that same ash on their foreheads, telling them that all that’s left of their past is the cross marking their lives. I don’t deserve that. I am not worthy of administering grace like that. But as I assure people of God’s grace in their lives I am experiencing it myself.

It is so powerful to administer the sacraments, to make the cross on someone’s forehead with their ashen sins, knowing they are seeking forgiveness and knowing that they take this sign as evidence that God forgives and as proof that they are Christian. It is amazing to be able to mark a believer as a Christian in a physical way and have them accept it. It is powerful to dip someone under, knowing that your arms are God’s arms to them as you bring them out of the water and into their new life. I am so humbled by what I am called to do, so thankful.

I have never before experienced so fully how amazing grace is, how awesome faith is, as I did this Holy Week. In a very real sense we experience grace most when we give it to others, and we can sense our own faith when we are sharing in the ancient symbols with others. I know this is usually a pastoral duty, but I really want to share this feeling with others. I want to create experiences where all Christians can take the grace we have all been given, and pass it on to another, while at the same thing receiving it from someone else as well.

When everyone was administering the ashes to another, and receiving them as well, I could see how each person was passing on the assurance of God’s forgiveness to another, and was bowing expectantly as another assures then that their sins are gone as well. I was very moved as I watched the ashes pass through the crowd. But that is such a rare experience for Christian laypeople. It is so rare for us to be able to assure each other of grace in practical, physical ways. None of us are worthy to do that, none of us. But someone has to, and it is one of the most powerful and humbling experiences any of us can ever have. That is what I want to do with all believers in my church, make grace real, make faith physical and universal. .

Britain and the Death of Christianity

2008-03-18T10:56:00.000-07:00

I am a student of history, and the more I study the more I realize that situations in the past can shine a very bright light on what is going on today, and even on what will happen in the future. Take Christianity in Britain for example.

The Roman Empire became Christian, and everyone who was Roman was assumed to be Christian. Fairly soon, it infiltrated the culture on every level. That included the culture of Britain. As the Roman Empire took over Britain, the people naturally assumed that being Christian and being Roman were the same thing.

When the Roman Empire was doing great, people in Britain flocked to the Christian banner, and Christianity reigned in southern England for several hundred years (200 CE at it was already there). It looked like it had really taken hold and would last. But as soon as the Roman Empire started to crumble, so did Christianity. The locals saw the two as identical and so as Roman culture crumbled, so did Christianity. Within a terribly small space of time Christianity was gone from almost all of Britain (post 400 CE with the legions leaving), and would remain missing for about hundreds of years. People had not accepted Christianity, they had accepted Roman culture, and without the Roman culture there was no reason for anyone to be a Christian. Some pockets remained, but the majority was gone.

I think we see the same thing happening in America today. American ideals have been founded on Puritan work practices and Christian ethical systems. It has been expected for 200 years that if you are American you are Christian. To be one is to be the other. Christian leaders have encouraged this by trying to bring about legislative change in the name of Christianity. We also celebrate secular holiday’s more than religious ones (how many times have you celebrated the fourth of July in church, and when was the last time you remembered Pentecost, or ascension Sunday?) and rely on people’s patriotism to bring them into church. We have made Christianity and American culture synonymous.

But now the culture is changing. It is no longer based on the same ethical, political, or economic system as it once was. Postmodernism has changed the very definition of truth in our culture. So what should be the Christian response? Some believers have been trying to reclaim the old culture in order to reclaim the prestige and the power that Christianity had in years past. But if we look at Britain I think we see that is a bad idea.

Christianity is more than a political idea. It is more than an ethical system, and it is more than any one country or culture. That includes America. We do not need to reclaim the lost “glory years” of American Christianity. What we need to do is to make sure that people know Christianity is not American and vice versa. Only if we can show that our God is real no matter what is going on in the world do we have a chance of surviving the cultural storms.

Unfortunately, many Christians are living like the Romans in Britain, and cannot see that there is a difference between their culture, their nation, and their faith. But the more we try and make those two different things the same the more likely it is that Christianity in America will go the way of Christianity in Britain so long ago, and die out as the culture and politics change. And that is not something I am willing to see happen.

My Daughter and My Finger

2008-03-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sorry about not posting now, but I became a father last week, a very odd, wonderful, tiring, frustrating, exhilarating feeling. Some of what my little girl does I was told to expect, and some of it completely catches me off guard. Her first day in the world I was holding her on my lap and just went to stroke her face. Instead of rubbing against my finger, or moving away, she rolled into it, grabbed my finger tip in her little mouth and started sucking like mad. I was so surprised I didn’t do anything for a little bit, I just sat there.

I knew babies breast fed, of course, but I had no idea how instinctive their latching and sucking instincts were. I was completely caught off guard. In a moment I got my bearings and tried to pull my finger out of her mouth. It was actually hard to do. She had such a grip on my finger that I was a little worried about hurting her to be honest. I couldn’t easily remove that finger, it really took a bit of effort. I thought that once she understood she wasn’t getting anything from my finger she would let go, but no luck. She didn’t care if she was getting anything from it, she just knew she needed to be sucking on something and was hoping that if she sucked on everything coming her way she would get something from it. I just sat and marveled at how naïve my daughter is. But then I started thinking about my job as pastor and realized that the Church often does the exact same thing. We grab at whatever fad is coming our way, whatever idea has the label “Christian” on it, and hope that it fills our needs.

But most of the time those things don’t really help at all. Or they help for a time, but they don’t feed us in the long haul. But do we get rid of them? Of course not. We just suck harder, trying to get some food from something that simply does not feed us. And so we are sometimes left with service ideas, songs, rituals, and entire ministries in the Church that do not feed us at all, but we’re like my little daughter, still sucking away at my finger, not even knowing if it gives us food or not.

Unlike my daughter, though, we should be able to know what feeds us and what doesn’t, at least after we try it for a while. We need to take a long look at what we do, both as individuals, and as churches, and think about what actually feeds us and what does nothing more than fill our mouths without giving us any spiritual food in return. I can pull out my finger from my baby daughter, but no one except us will stop part of the church that doesn’t feed us. We have to release the fingers in our lives and try and find where God is really giving us food, emphasize that, spend time with those things.

Holy Days

2008-02-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

Easter is almost upon us again, and I have no idea what we’re doing about it. Easter is the holiest day of the year, more holy than even Christmas to believers. It is the day when our salvation was made real, when our lord came back from the dead to guide us into true life. It is sacred. However, throughout my life I have rarely experienced the holy on Easter Sunday.

I want to change that. I want to find a way to make the holy relevant to my people, and find some way we can grasp how special Easter is. The problem is that I have no idea how to do that. When I went looking for ideas of Easter services, I found something very disturbing. Almost all of the ideas I found were about how to get people to show up at church. They were about mass mailings, signs, handouts, and gimmicks. Many of the ideas revolved around giving out gifts and promotions, raffles even and drawings, to bribe people into coming to church on Easter. Nearly every site I looked at talked about how to use giving gifts as an effective way of getting people to attend church and return. Most sites also included ways of making the service more “seeker sensitive,” removing all elements of the holy in an effort to get more people in the church.

I understand being sensitive to others, but Easter, our holiest day of the year, should be the one day where we are unapologetically Christian. It should be the day where we should that our roots are deep in history and our branches touch heaven itself. Easter should be the last day that we sell out on, not the first.

If there is something real about what we do, then this is the day we show it. Easter is holy. How can we convince anyone that there is anything sacred about our faith if we profane the holiest day of our year.

If we put getting more people in the pews at a greater priority than God we have a problem. We say God comes first, but quite often it is numbers that we worship. But if there is one day where we need to show that we are not just putting on a show but giving thanks to our God it is Easter.

The problem is I am not really sure how, because almost all I know is the show.

Waiting for Birth

2008-02-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

Right now I am anxiously awaiting the birth of my first child, a daughter. In fact, I have been waiting expectantly for weeks now. My wife was having preterm labor for months now, and when we finally got her off the anti-labor medication we naturally assumed the end would come soon. That was two and a half weeks ago. My wife has been having frequent and painful contractions ever since then, but no baby. After two weeks of pain, turmoil, waiting, and anxiety, we are both so ready for this baby to be born that we could, and periodically do, scream.

You’d think that as the time continues to draw closer to our daughter being born we would be getting more and more excited in anticipation. But with all of the pain and false starts we are just getting more and more jaded and frustrated and willing to give up one it all. We know that our daughter has to come sometime. There is a definite maximum date that she can stay unborn, but because we have been waiting so long and expecting so often we are getting frustrated instead of excited.

I think many Christians are like my wife and I right now, waiting for a new birth and getting frustrated because they don’t see if fully yet. We want to be changed, want to be reborn in the image of God, but the longer it takes, the more pain and hassle it causes, the more false starts we have, the harder it is to be excited for it. Our patience dies away and we are just annoyed that it hasn’t happened yet, or even lose faith that it will happen at all.

There are little changes in my wife that continually show us that change is coming, just coming slowly. And with our little one kicking away inside of her it is hard to forget that something is happening. That isn’t in question. What we so often have a problem with is the timing. We want it now, not later.

Don’t lose hope that change is coming. Look at your life and if you are walking with God you will be able to see little changes happening all throughout your life that points to a new life coming out in you. Little kicks and jabs that you never felt before, evidence that God is working in us. The problem is that we take our eyes off what is going on now and can only see what we want to happen in the future.

My daughter will be born. We are being changed. But what is happening in us now is what needs to happen before God can work the next step in our change. We cannot rush it anymore than my wife and I can encourage our daughter to come early. Instead, if we want to avoid being frustrated and giving up, we need to focus on the changes happening right now in our lives, and encourage those changes to continue and grow so that we can move on to the next step in our new birth with Christ. This step might not be as glorious as we want, and it might be more painful than we would like, but it is necessary, and it is changing us into Christ’s image.

Counting the Numbers

2008-02-12T19:10:00.000-08:00

When I first started training for the pastorate I thought it would be spending time with people every minute, glorious time of prayer with God, and lots of deep spiritual conversations with people until 2 in the morning. I never envisioned the paperwork. I never thought about the numbers I would have to deal with. As a pastor I have to report to my DS (a good man, which I am ever so grateful for) how many conversions, baptisms, church memberships, and sanctification experiences happened in our church. I also need to keep track of monthly finances (though only in the loosest of senses here, we have an awesome treasurer), monthly attendance, how many times I preach, how many visitations I made, and everything else I do.

Everything, from the number of people in bible studies to the amount of money we gave to missions is recorded and tabulated. And that’s just for the district. How the district thinks I am doing as a pastor and what they expect from the church are dependent on those numbers I give them. And then there are all the numbers that count online. I keep track of how many people view the wiki each day, what edits happen, who visits my facebook, who visits my myspace, how many people viewed my video, how our church is doing on goodsearch, and everything else you can imagine. There are more numbers running through my head any given day than I can count. And the fact that I am trying to count only reinforces how much numbers affect my life.

And here’s the thing, by the time I am done counting all of the numbers I need to, the first ones I counted have changed again and can be counted again. I can spend my entire day just keeping track of numbers without actually doing anything. But I’ll be quite busy. And because numbers are one way of knowing how different things are doing I could even justify an entire day spent counting as being necessary. But I wouldn’t actually get anything done, I would only be understanding what has already happened or what is happening. I would not be making a single thing happen.

In a more abstract sense I think a lot of us are in that place with our Christian walk. It’s really easy to learn about it, and we can spend our entire lives learning about what God did in the past, can do in the future, and is doing now, without doing a single thing ourselves. But the stories are so compelling, the numbers so important, surely aren’t we are justified if we don’t actually add to those numbers ourselves, but just marvel at them as they go by? Aren’t we allowed to learn about what God has been doing? Yes, of course, but at some point we have to take a break from learning and actually do. Do something worthy of someone else wanting to count it, and then encourage that person to act as well.

But why are numbers so important to begin with? What is the draw that keeps us watching for God and not acting with God? What is going on where I could spend several hours refreshing different web pages and feel justified in doing so?

I think there are two things that hold me back personally; and perhaps you as well. First, there is a deep but hidden insecurity that is seeking to try and justify my existence. I am constantly finding myself trying to discover if I was successful at something, if something worked, it people care about what I have been working on. And so I try and justify my existence with numbers instead of with my worth as a child of God. The second thing that prompts me to look and not act is that I am afraid. I am afraid I will fail, afraid I don’t know enough, afraid I will miss what God wants me to do. And so I don’t do anything, but try to learn more and more until the fear is gone.

But here is the truth. The fear will always be there. Every time we act it is scary, no matter how much we know. And every time we try to find ourselves in what we do and not in how God sees us we will always be insecure. No amount of training or numbers will fix that. I can have the best numbers in the world, and it won’t change who I am. I can have the most training anyone has ever had and it won’t mean I am unafraid of acting. Faith is when we step out and act anyway. Faith is when we trust that God’s vision of us is the right one and step away from the numbers, away from our fears and insecurities and act.

Follow the King

2008-02-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

Well I finally posted it I've been working on an animation for well over a year and while the audio isn't anywhere near done the video is completed. I've been delaying posting it because I was hoping to get the audio done but that doesn't look like it'll happen.

So here it is, a modern day parable in lego. It's the story of a king who hs to reclaim his people from a terror they don't even recognize. Check out the Youtube link on the left, or download the better quality version at the link at the top of this post. Hope you all like it, let me know what you think. Oh, and make sure to watch it all the way through, even after the credits.

Confessions of a Preacher

2008-02-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

I am in the middle of a preaching class right now and while it is nothing particularly new, it is definitely reminding me that how a message is prepared by a pastor is a mystery to many Christians. In fact, we pastors have shrouded the entire process in mystery, trying to make ourselves look better. So today I want to take a brief moment and talk about what it takes to get a sermon ready, and hopefully dispel a few myths in the process. Consider it a pastor’s confession.

Many Christians seem to have an exaggerated notion of their pastor’s spiritual connection with God and a degraded notion of their own ability to hear from God. These people honestly assume that pastors have a more direct connection with God than the average Christian. This leads these people to assume that pastors either spend most of our time in prayer while creating a sermon, and then directly write it down as God inspired us, or that we spend very little time preparing because God gives it to us. Either way, these well-meaning Christians assume that every word from their pastor is inspired in a way that their words never could be.

I wish I could say that God stirs over my blank notepad like God stirred over the waters of the deep in Genesis and that form divinely comes from the nothingness that is there. But I would be lying if I did. Pastors don’t have a special connection to God. We have simply been asked by God vocationally to be pastors. Our ability to connect with God is the same as everyone else’s. What that means practically is two things. First, please don’t accept everything a pastor says as the perfect word of God. Sometimes we really miss the mark, sometimes we confuse God with us, and sometimes we even forget to listen to God in the first place. Second, it means that the forming of a sermon is not an instant or even fun process. It takes many hours of thought, work, and worry.

Because pastors don’t have a superhuman connection with God it also means we have to spend a great deal of time studying what we do know contains God’s word, the Bible. We spend hours looking at a single passage of scripture, until we feel confident we can see how God is moving through that passage. From there it is fairly easy to compare how God moved in the Bible with our world and find where God is moving, or wants to move, in us today.

I wish I could tell you that every sermon I’ve ever given has been God’s word to the people, but I know that isn’t true. I spend a dozen or more hours researching a passage each week, and I still miss the point sometimes. And just like you pray and seek direction, but don’t always seem to find it, I also try to find how a passage best applies to our church, and yet often get no insight I recognize as divine. The truth is that a sermon is always a starting point, not an ending one. Pastors create it through hours of research, and prayer, but that does not mean it is ready to just believe and apply without thought.

To truly be the word of God to a community, it needs to be thought about, discussed, and digested by that community and not just by one or two people up front. We do most of the research, but the true value of a message comes from the people discussing the passage themselves. Think about it, the services that have mattered to you the most are probably the ones you talked about with other people soon after you heard them. It takes that discussion and thought on your part to absorb the truth and discard the garbage that all pastors bring with them. Because like everyone else, we start out with an empty page on our desk, and work from there. God rarely puts words on the page for us.

Silence

2008-01-29T18:02:00.000-08:00

Walking to get the church’s mail today, listening to music on my Zune, I began to think about what my day had looked like. I got up, and turned on the music on my computer. Then I went downstairs to the office and listened to air1 radio online. At lunch I watched TV on my computer, and then went back to listening to music. I only stopped listening to plug in my Zune and start back up with music.

It struck me as I was planning my “quiet time” that my entire day, and almost every day, has been spent with constant noise. I surround myself with music, shows, talking, noise. And even when those things are silent I still have the hum of electronics, the noise of the street, people coming by, washing machines, and dishwashers. I think most of us live like that.

We don’t even have silence if we want it, and most of the time we don’t want it. We seek out anything to distract us from silence and fill the void. But here’s the thing, we usually hear God the best when we still ourselves and listen into the silence for the Holy Spirit’s small voice. But when was the last time living in the city any of us have gotten true silence?

The people in the Bible lived before iPods and electronics. They didn’t have cars and lived outside of cities for the most part. They could go outside and within a few minutes could get true silence. In the desert they did not even have the rustling of trees or the calls of animals. And it was to these deserts that the early Christians retreated to when they wanted to hear from God.

True silence. We run from that, don’t we? If there is quiet in our lives we will do almost anything to fill it with noise. Even with God, we try to fill any silence with our own conversations. We fear silence, are terrified of it, but historically that true silence is where we hear God the best, removed from all distractions.

Can we face that sort of terror? Can we face silence to hear God? Do we even care enough to try? It goes against so much of how we live our lives, how our lives are built. But for centuries that is how people have heard God the best, in silence. Perhaps we have changed enough that silence is no longer the primary way we hear God, but it certainly is an important one.

The Nail we Make

2008-01-21T18:11:00.001-08:00

I have heard about Jesus’ sacrifice my entire life. I grew up hearing people talk about how Jesus died for us, and everything that went along with it. I have seen the movies, heard the stories, and read the accounts of how Jesus died. But it never really tied together for me until a few months ago. Let me tell you the story.

I love to work with my hands, and forging metal has been a hobby of mine for almost ten years. One of the simplest things to make, in fact the first thing anyone learns to make, is a nail. In older times, an apprentice would make 10, 20 thousand nails before they would be allowed to move on to anything else.

Somehow I skipped making nails when I was beginning to learn to forge. But three months ago, I finally got a chance again. I heated up the steel, hammered it out hot, and continued to reheat it until I had made a nail. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, I was just glad I got the chance to forge again.

But when I got home and was holding it in my hand I began to feel a little funny about it. Something about the nail I had made was very familiar to me. I did some research, and I was right. The nail I made is nearly an exact copy of a Roman crucifixion nail.

I had made a nail that could have killed Christ with my own hands, and for fun. That is exactly what we do, but I had never seen it so physically before. I do that every day with my sins. I casually do something because it seems fun at the moment, but in the end we are really making something that will kill. And suddenly we look down and realize it. We press the nail against our wrist and realize that we made it just for that purpose. Our deeds have killed us.

But instead of letting what we made do us in, Christ takes it and lets our sins kill him. I have known that for years, but when you have held the nail you made in your own hand, and felt it pressed against your wrist, and imagine in piercing through Jesus’ this whole salvation thing becomes so much more real.

What we made without even thinking about it, what should have killed us, Jesus took on himself. It’s as real as the nail I made, and even more deadly.

Slowing Down the Current

2008-01-15T19:46:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago I was at retreat with my church. It was a wonderful time of worship, conversation, games, and the forest. I am a woods nut and the times I spent hiking around where some of the best. The places where I hiked weren’t exactly secluded, but they were nice. It was odd to hear trucks roar by just out of sight, or see a cabin through the trees, or a street sign.

And if I slowed down and looked around I could see beer cans, water bottles, scraps of cloth and paper scattered all around. I found myself walking faster when all of these distractions were the worst. And it worked. If I walked fast enough I only saw the creek running past me, and the lovely trees around me. I didn’t hear all of the cars through my heavy breathing, or see the things that were blemishes on the land around me. Everything was shooting past me too fast for me to see the details.

As I sat by the side of the creek for a while I noticed that it did the same thing. I sat watching a single piece of water and leaves just floated by me, pure untainted water. Then a bottle floated down the water and into my view. But it almost seemed like the water was embarrassed or offended by the bottle and it picked up speed to carry the bottle past its human admirer as quickly as possible.

I realized that’s how I often live my Christian life, and how I have even encouraged people to do that in their lives as well. We live in a screwed up world, and there is trash all around us, both literally and figuratively. We have struggles with co-workers, there is poverty on the streets, someone died, drugs are coming into our neighborhood, we’re depressed, a friend killed themselves, we’re questioning aspects of our faith, whatever it is there is garbage all around us. And so often the Christian response is not to pick it up, but to fill our lives even fuller with “Christian” stuff so that we’re moving so quickly through life we only see the good things.

I’ve done that. I’ve encouraged people who are struggling to get involved in a couple more programs, listen to specific music, read more of the Bible and more books, and go to more services and programs. In short, I tell them to make their life rush past them so fast that they don’t have time to notice what is going on in and around it. Make it so that they only have just enough time in their day to survive, and if everything that sucks up their time is Christian, then we’ve succeeded, and the trash is gone.

But the trash isn’t gone, we just swept past it. And when we’re not talking about a trail we can leave but are talking about our lives that means the trash is just piling up somewhere out of sight until no matter how fast we run we’ll have no choice but to face it. And when that day comes, there will be so much garbage from so many years that we can’t do anything but crack under the weight of years of personal neglect. Like the stream rushing its garbage past anyone watching, we push our junk out of our lives by sheer quantity of other stuff we fill its place with. But also like the stream, the garbage never really leaves

So what happens when we stop? What happens if we slow our lives down enough that the garbage can hang around long enough for us to pick it up? Well, first if will hurt. We’ll have to deal with our flaws, our imperfections, our troubles, instead of pretending we’re perfect. We’ll actually have to admit that we aren’t perfect, that our lives aren’t perfect. And that hurts, because we’ll have to also admit that all of the filling up of our lives and running at full tilt haven’t done what we were hoping it would.

But it would also mean we can deal with this stuff. It means that instead of running fast, avoiding our troubles, and thanking God for helping us, we can actually let God work in our lives and help us not just to avoid seeing what is keeping us down, but to actually fix it. It means we can be healed, but we have to slow down enough that we can see what is around us and in us.

I stopped that weekend, just for a moment, and the first thing I wanted to do is start running again. I don’t like having to see the garbage that is in my life, my relationships, my block, my town, my world. I want to pretend it’s all been taken care of. I want to fill up my life with so full of good things I can convince myself there isn’t anything bad in me anymore.

But if we just stop, and let God work in the garbage we find around us as we slow down, we can stop pretending we’re whole and truly become whole. We can stop trying to sweep bottles down our river and instead take them out. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big thing to you, but it is. When we are not afraid of our own lives, when we are so caught up on our baggage that we can deal with things as they come up instead of running, it makes all the difference in the world. We were made to be pristine environments for God to dwell in. we were not meant to push all our junk behind us or pretend we’re perfect when in reality the rivers of our life are poisoned downstream from all our pollution.

But it means we have to stop, and that is scary. It is scary to actually trust God instead of just claiming we trust God. It is scary to deal with our past instead of pretending that we have. But it’s worth it. I encourage you to slow down, and let your garbage catch up with you for a little while, so God and you can pick up that trash together and make you clean.

To be scared. To be Christian.

2008-01-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

This has been an interesting and stressful week. Our ant problem came back, and apparently some mice came in from the storm and are sheltering in our house now. On top of that, I had to take my wife into the hospital last night for premature contractions. I’m worried. I’m worried we won’t be able to afford to live if my wife can’t work for a while. I am worried that we won’t get this place healthy and safe before the baby comes. I am worried that I won’t be a good dad. I’m terrified something will happen to my wife or our child. I’m scared I’ll fail as a pastor, that I’ll miss an event or a crisis in someone’s life I’m worried that I will just be teaching people to lie about their faith and no one will come to God through my service. And all of that is a problem, because I’ve been told as a Christian, and especially as a pastor, I shouldn’t ever be afraid. Somehow to have fears is not to have faith to many believers today.

Should a Christian ever be afraid? Does being afraid mean we don't have faith? The Bible talks about not fearing, but most of those verses appear to be talking about when something amazing happens but people overreact to it, like the angels appearing throughout Jesus’ birth story. People are encouraged to fear God throughout the Old Testament. But the Psalms are pretty specific about not being afraid of anything that comes our way because God is on our side. Even so, Job mentions that he had been afraid and he was as near to perfect as someone can get. So which is it? We are fearful, or never afraid?

Part of the problem is that the Hebrew term for fear is such a vague word. It can be a wide range of stuff from outright terror to respect and reverence. But that doesn’t really solve everything. If anything, it just makes the problem more difficult. And am I seriously supposed to be able to walk into a gang fight in the Tenderloin without being worried? I don’t think so. An absence of fear doesn’t seem to be the issue. In fact, the Bible recognizes that we can even be afraid of God. We are worried about stuff all the time.

But to the early Hebrews everything was action oriented. Nothing was abstract. We can’t fear without it affecting our actions. If we are supposed to remember something it doesn’t just mean in our mind but with our actions. If we worship God it isn’t just with our mouths but with our actions too. The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, assume that our actions and our words are connected. If we say something then we’re also acting out of that, and vice versa. The idea that we can say something without it affecting us would be lost on them.

So perhaps what the Bible is saying is not that we should never experience fear, but that we should never act out of that fear. We act from our trust and fear of God, we don’t act based on our fear of what might happen. It’s like a bunch of sailors who throw out an anchor in the storm. They trust the anchor will keep them stable, but that doesn’t mean they don’t get scared when the storm comes. It just means that they don’t panic and try to sail out of it.

I am scared to death, but won’t change how I act. As a Christian, I have an anchor. Does that mean I won’t be freaked out? No. Does that mean I’m not freaked out already? No. But it means that I will trust that my anchor will hold. Not being afraid, in a very ancient sense, is a choice not to let your fear influence you, affect you, take over. That is a choice I have to make every day.

Too often we are told we are supposed to be super people, and if we have any negative emotion we have failed to be Christian, to have failed to have faith. If we think that, the guilt itself can overcome us because we all have emotions. Keeping them bottled up forever is not the answer. The answer is to permit ourselves to be worried, afraid, terrified even if the situation calls for it, but not let that terror dictate our actions. Our actions should be rooted in our anchor, Jesus.

Barbara Taylor Brown, in her book "Leaving Church" puts it very well when she says "I discovered that faith did not have the least thing to do with certainty. Insofar as I had any faith at all, that faith consisted of trusting God in the face of my vastly painful ignorance." Faith is not found in being certain of what will happen, or lost in the face of fear. Faith is found and kept when even though we are uncertain of the future and fearful of what may happen were are still choosing to trust God with our lives.

Power and Ego

2008-01-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

Well the subtext of this blog is “glimpses from a pastor’s journey” and so it’s only fair to live up to that title. I just got back from a retreat with my church and it was awesome. Check out this link to check out some of what people thought about it. I loved it, but it was a learning experience for me in a lot of ways. You see, I came on board with this church long after the retreat was already planned out and organized. So my role at the retreat was to pray occasionally and hang out with people. I was marginalized, and that’s ok. I have been preaching for years (months in this church) about wanting to bring equality to the church. And yet this retreat is really the first time I experienced it.

Sitting with everyone else as someone else spoke, helping serve communion instead of serving it myself, watching people choose to speak with others about spiritual matters before me, all of that was difficult to me on some level. I found out how much my ego is really tied into this church thing, and especially tied into being a pastor in the traditional sense. That needs to change.

It’s really easy to “give up” power to people as long as it’s temporary, or as long as I can grab it right back from them whenever I want. But if I am trying to give away power to the people of God and not holding all the power myself, then I need to be willing to let it go for good. I can’t hold onto it just enough that I can retain my ego, and retain most of my power.

What I learned this retreat was about putting myself in positions where I can be intentionally marginalized. Not forced into it, but choosing to be on the sidelines, choosing to let others lead and others direct, and submitting to that direction myself. That’s when my ego wants to rebel and say “but I’m the pastor.”

My ego doesn’t want to be a servant, it doesn’t want to be marginalized, even if I have been asking for others to take over and lead. It wants power, and I have a million ways to rationalize it too, so that I can hold onto enough of my power to stay in control. That’s really the root fear, losing control. But I wonder if that really isn’t the goal of the Christian life, to give control of our lives to God and to be a servant, intentionally marginalized.

In America, Christians have been seeking as much power as we can get. We’re trying to get music, money, movies, politics (especially politics) and we’re doing everything we can to hold onto that power. But Christians don’t tend to do well with a lot of power. It tends to corrupt us. Perhaps that is why the Beatitudes in Luke concentrate so much on the poor, the powerless, the weak. They are teaching us that God’s way is not to horde power, but to give it away.

That goes against so much of my training, and my culture, that it makes me shudder. But if I have been preaching and teaching that we are all equal with God then I truly do need to be able to let go of power completely, not just let it out on a leash and a loan. And that means that I won’t be center stage, I won’t get the spotlight and the attention. That’s tougher on my ego than I’d like to admit, but it’s important.

I don’t think we can truly claim to be following Christ if we are hoarding our power and clutching our leadership around us. We need to divest ourselves of whatever power we gather, investing it in others and in giving it back to God. Jesus did not even consider the power that is equality with God important enough to clutch tightly, but took on the very nature of a servant. If Christ was willing to be powerless and marginalized to serve others, how can we not be willing to do the same?

Repaintng Your Nativity Set

2007-12-26T15:05:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas everyone. As I have been sitting here and waiting for my turkey to burn I’ve also been thinking about the story of Christmas. We almost always seem to interpret the story so that Jesus comes as close to being like us as possible. Upper middle class Christians tend to talk more about the wise men than the shepherds, or interpret the shepherds as being like king David.

Other people concentrate on how Jesus came to the unfortunate and the poor in the shepherds. Some people concentrate on Mary, or interpret the angels as singing because that is such an important idea in their faith.

If you want to know how someone thinks about the birth story ask them to draw or make a nativity set, or describe their favorite one. My wife and I got a very lovely ceramic nativity set this Christmas that quite dramatically shows how much we interpret the birth of Christ. First, you might notice from the picture that this nativity is supposed to be native American. There is an eagle on a cactus, a tepee in the background, a wolf as a pet, and stereotypically-traditional clothing being worn. But there is also a shepherds crook (out of frame) and a woman with a sheep over her shoulders, which is quite odd because North America did not have sheep until quite recently, let alone shepherds canes.

You might also notice that not only are the wise men included in the birth story here (they came a year or so later) all the shepherds and wise men are women. There are no “braves” here. In fact, there is no Joseph in the nativity, nor any angels, though there are wise women. Perhaps most striking of all, however, is that everyone in this nativity is glaringly white. I am nearly clear and yet these figures make me look tan. Not one of them looks either Native Israeli or Native American.

What the maker of this nativity set did was try to make it fit another culture (Native American) without actually removing it from how it had already been affected by our own culture (they’re still white). The thing is, this isn’t that unusual of an event. We all do this quite often. We interpret the Bible and our faith in ways that make it most relevant to us, by concentrating on those few elements in every story that speak to us the loudest. That’s fine, the problem is when we think that what we concentrate on is all there is.

The maker of this nativity set seriously missed a lot of the story, and changed some more of it. But it was to make it significant to them. I’m glad they found something meaningful from the story, but we can easily see how much more there is to Jesus’ birth than just what this nativity tells us. The same is true with all of us and our faith. I might concentrate on grace, while someone else might prefer salvation, or holiness, service, love, etc.

We each find those things that matter the most to us and interpret everything else in light of those things. To put it another way, we all dress us, rearrange and color our faith nativity sets. But please, don’t think that your nativity set is the only way it can be set up.

Marry Her or Die?

2007-12-17T18:13:00.000-08:00

I am finding more and more than as a Christian I cannot just listen to myself and my own ideas. All Christians need to get fed as well as feed others. Because of this I have become a huge fan of podcasted services from other churches. My favorite site to find worship services on is www.hotworship.com which is a portal to a whole bunch of churches that either stream or post their services online. Out of those, I regularly listen to Mark Driscoll from The Mars Hill Church in Seattle. You can find his messages at media.marshillchurch.org. I don’t agree with his take on a lot of stuff, and he is definitely from a different theological stream than I am, but he’s great to get me to look at a passage differently and to start me thinking. He is a brother in Christ, of that I have no doubt, and I have never left one of his messages without having something to think about.

I was listening to one of his sermons on John and he gave a perfect metaphor for modern evangelism. I hope he will forgive me if I borrow it here. Imagine that you are sitting at home, a single young man sitting in your house when there is a knock at the door. Someone you’ve never met is there waiting for you. He says that he has the perfect woman for you to marry. She’s beautiful, intelligent, just the right age, with a great sense of humor, and everything else you could want. The man at your door looks at you and says that she is really interested in marrying you. The only catch is you have to decide right now, will you marry her or not, sight unseen?

So what do you do? The guy tells you she’s awesome, absolutely perfect for you, but you have to decide while she’s still in there car. If you are like most of us, you’d slam the door in that guy’s face and tell him to bugger off forever. No one wants to enter into a lifetime commitment with someone you’ve never met before just because someone knocked on your door. So you tell the guy to stay away from you or you’ll get a restraining order, right?

But instead of immediately leaving you alone, the strange guy at your door tells you that while he understands your worry, the lady in the car has a loaded pistol and if you don’t marry her, she’s going to shoot you in the head. So either marry her or she’ll kill you. What do you decide? Most of us would still tell the guy to get out of our lives just because that’s really scary and frankly very creepy.

That’s what we do so often with people when we evangelize. We tell them God loves them and wants to have a relationship with them forever, but they need to decide right now, and if they don’t decide they will be sentenced to hell forever. Is it really any wonder we’re scaring people away from us in droves?

What a difference it would make if a good friend showed up at your door and invited you to a party with some of his and your friends. Your friend tells you that there is a really awesome lady there he wants you to meet. He describes her, but invites you to get to know her and her friends first, have a good time, see what other people think about her. Which would you prefer? If we are really inviting people to fall in love with God shouldn’t we do it the same kind, loving way that we would help two people to fall in love in the flesh? Not domineering, not through threats or trickery, but by inviting them to get to know the person, find out what they’re like from other people that know them, and make their own decisions? God is awesome, and if we let people see it they’ll think God is awesome too. But we can’t force love and devotion on someone.

Divine Judgement

2007-12-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

When New Orleans got hit by Katrina do you remember the reaction that conservative Christians had? They celebrated that God had cleansed this land of a plague because New Orleans is known for Mardi Gras and the immorality that happens there. Not everyone believed that answer, but enough did that it became a cry throughout churches all over the US. People praised God because God had decided to wipe out idolatry and wickedness in the US.

So many Christians forgot that people aren’t just classified into “wicked” or “saint” and we certainly aren’t segregated into separate cities of the holy and the evil. Along with those sinners every city has, countless innocents lost their lives, their homes, their families. Christians by the tens of thousands lost everything when that hurricane rolled through town. Yet instead of helping them, some of the most powerful Christian leaders and churches cheered and thanked God for the destruction of fellow believers because they saw the hurricane as the punishment of God on a wicked city.
Lately it has struck me that I am waiting for the exact same thing to happen to me. I am a pastor in San Francisco, and every time I tell other Christians where I am, they have an almost viscerally negative reaction just to the name. If one day I and my entire congregation died in a horrible earthquake not only some, but the vast majority, of Christians all around this country will cheer at my death and the deaths of those I love. They will cheer at my death, because the great plague of San Francisco will have been wiped out. Yet I, and thousands of believers striving to follow God, will have been killed.

San Francisco’s reputation makes New Orleans look like the city of God itself. Christians refer to “going to San Francisco” as a synonym for falling morality and “going to hell”. Far more Christians would see our destruction as a sign from God than even the destruction of New Orleans. There might even be dancing in the streets over my death and the potential deaths of thousands of believers, hundreds of thousands of people that God loves.

I suppose I could ask how a religion of love and acceptance became so laced with hate that the deaths of our own would prompt cheers. I could question how Christians have grown so twisted that they could relish death and praise God for the suffering of others. I could spend this time trying to figure out why so many believers want to see death of a troubled city instead of redemption.

But instead, I want to think about what we, who are the ones others will cheer to see dead, will do about this. Do we give up on them like they have given up on us? Do we spend our time ranting against those who would thank God to see us dead? No. It does not matter what others say or think about us. Whether they want us to die or succeed, it should not keep us from serving God.

The best thing we can do is not to return fire with fire, but to love and serve people regardless. Let’s not complain that people “don’t get us” and “don’t like us.” Let’s not use other believers’ fear and hatred as an excuse for why we can’t change the world. God has placed us here for a reason. The best thing we can do is serve each other and love people in a way that makes this city a place where no person, Christian or unchristian, would be glad to see destroyed.

We cannot hate back. We have to love anyway, and prove them wrong through our caring for others.

The Struggle With Prayer Pt. 4: Sacred Spaces

2007-12-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

I firmly believe that God is with us whether we are in a cathedral, out in the woods, or sitting in front of our TV. However, our sense of God’s presence and our confidence that God is listening is often very contingent on our location. What I mean by that is that there are some places where we feel more connected to God than others. We each have places and spaces where we sense the sacred more than others. I grew up in the woods and on the beach, and when I am in the wilderness I feel much closer to God than when I walk down the street here in San Francisco. For others, the reverse is true because they are very connected to seeing God in the lives of those around them. Some people feel connected to God in churches, or with loved ones.

We each have different things that make us feel connected to God and help to draw our attention to God’s presence in our lives. These are the sacred spaces in our lives, those places and things that help us connect with God. It is important that we use these things in our prayer life. If you feel closest to God among people, then perhaps you should consider making prayer walks part of your routine, where you purposefully go out among people to pray. If you feel closest to God while among nature, then try to regularly get out among nature. For myself, though, it is hard to bring the Redwoods and mountains to San Francisco. My sacred spaces are too far away to help me in my daily prayer life. So instead of going to them, I set up a small sacred space in my home, using images, sights, and smells from my bigger sacred space to help me connect with God. You can see a picture of a sacred space I set up in my apartment a few years ago to the right.

As I connect to God through nature, my sacred space has a lot of nature images that I took, as well as pictures of loved one and other religious images. I use candles to remind me of the nights spent reading the Bible by firelight, and use incense to remind me of the scent of nature. This spot in my house is holy, set aside for no other use than to pray with God. Perhaps you don’t have a spot where you can do that, but we all can find ways of using our big sacred spaces in our daily prayer life. Maybe you can have a scented candle to remind you of the smells of getting together with family. Perhaps you can buy a photo album and put your sacred images in that.

Regardless of what your sacred space is, make sure to find ways of incorporating it into your prayer life on a regular basis. I find this is especially helpful when I am having a hard time connecting with God. Having a specific place, a routine, images, music, or smells, that are associated with God and set aside as holy and sacred help me to connect with God much easier.

Throughout Christian history people have believed that, while God is everywhere, if we set aside particular things or places as holy and sacred we can train ourselves to recognize God’s presence in those locations better. That is what we do when we treat the sanctuary of a church different than other parts of a church. We have set aside the sanctuary for holy use only, and when we are in the sanctuary we are preparing ourselves to meet with God. We can do the exact same thing in our own homes and lives, by setting aside as sacred places those objects, images, places, music, that personally help us connect with God. It doesn’t have to be huge to be significant.

Discipleship Group

2007-11-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

This really only applies to those who go to New Start Ministries, but for those of you who are part of my church, here is some information for you.

Friday Night Discipleship Group
With readings from “Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups” edited by Richard Foster and James Smith.

Background
This Friday was going to be the beginning of the discipleship group. However, Naomi’s grandfather died on Thanksgiving Day so I will be in eastern Washington for the funeral instead of here in San Francisco. So the first actual gathering of the discipleship group will be delayed by two weeks.

However, the first gathering was going to be an introduction to what the discipleship group is, with the actual discussions beginning the next meeting. So this letter is designed to be a replacement to that introduction so that the next time we meet everyone will be caught up to speed already.

The reason why we need a discipleship group at all is that we all know that what the Bible calls us to is not who we are or what we have been doing. We try our best to follow God, but on our own we almost invariably water things down until we convince ourselves that who we are and what we’re doing is all there is to life. We reinterpret the Bible so that it fits with what we are already doing, instead of allowing the Bible to encourage us to grow.

But that is the whole point of why Jesus came and died for us, so that we can be reunited with God and reformed back to the image of God we were created to look like. Salvation is only the beginning, but it is so easy to forget that on our own. We need to see different perspectives on what we as Christians can become to see where we have personally let ourselves water down the gospel.

Fortunately we are not along in this journey. Millions of people have traveled this road before us. And while only Jesus has fully shown the image of God, many different people have mastered individual aspects of it. Some of these people have written down their insights and the things that helped them the most. It is those insights on following God and being transformed that we are going to look at in this discipleship group.

The book that we will be looking at is an anthology of excerpts from many Christian writers spanning five continents and the last 1800 years of Christian history. Most of these authors come from various traditions emphasizing different parts of the Christian life. These generally focus on different aspects of what are known as the spiritual disciplines. Over the course of this group we’ll look at a variety of different perspectives and traditions. Some of these I can guarantee you will disagree with, possibly quite strongly, but almost all of them will stretch you, and me.

Discipleship Group Outline
We will be meeting every other week on Friday’s during the normal time of Friday Night Fellowships. The group itself will mainly be discussion based. Before each meeting, we’ll each read the next two sections of the book, and when we get together we’ll discuss those two chapters of the book as a group. If there is something that you want to talk about that is important to you, we can talk about it. Nothing is off-topic if you need to talk about it. Generally, however, the discussion will attempt to be centered around what we agree or disagree with about the readings for the week and how we can apply the same ideas to our own life.

The goal is to get exposed to different flavors of Christianity that can each help us to grow closer to Christ. There are 52 readings and with meeting every other week this is designed to be a yearlong course. Each section is only a few pages long, and is followed by suggested reflection questions and ideas to ponder. These are only suggestions, however, and we will first talk about any insights, problems, or applications that any of us personally got from the reading. However, feel free to use the discussion questions to start your thinking on your own if they help.

Accountability
Understanding how we have watered down the gospel is only the first step, however. We have all heard great insights that we have completely neglected to put into practice. The new knowledge and insights is only the beginning, we need to put these insights into practice as well. That is where accountability comes in.

Just as each of us has our own special strengths we also have our own weaknesses. Whether it is prayer, Bible, anger, fear, issues with appropriate sexuality, or any number of other things, we all have weaknesses. And we know that already, but we can’t seem to do anything about it on our own or we would have already taken care of it.

Along with the larger group, part of the discipleship program is also to have a personal accountability partner. This is someone that you will meet with one on one at least once every other week (once a week would be preferable) to talk about stretching points from the week and areas that you are trying to grow in.

The idea is to find someone that you trust and can be honest with. Whether this is someone in the group or not, or even whether it is mutual accountability or just them holding you accountable is up to you. Share what is going on in your life, pray together, and especially share what areas you are struggling with and what areas you are trying to grow in. As we journey through the book, you will hopefully find more ideas to work on and try out. Have your partner keep you accountable to these new things so that they are not forgotten with the next chapter of the book.

If you have never participated in accountability before, or want some sample things to talk about with an accountability partner let me know. There are many sample lists of questions and ideas that I can supply you with, including those used quite successfully by John Wesley several centuries ago.

The Struggle with Prayer Pt. 3: Time

2007-11-26T08:51:00.000-08:00

This has been a hard week. Thanksgiving Day my grandfather in-law died, so we are preparing to go to his funeral. On top of that I have two new groups at church starting soon, my normal church duties, my master’s class picking up speed, and general life insanity. It feels like my entire world has picked up speed and the world is spinning just that much faster than normal. Maybe you’ve had times like that too. It’s harder to concentrate, and there’s just so much on your plate that sitting down to do anything for an extended period of time is hard, and praying for a while at a time just seems impossible.

At times like this I usually end up praying for about two minutes and thinking it is an hour. My mind is just racing so fast and I feel so rushed that I run out of things to pray about almost immediately. I almost immediately feel like I hit a dead end in my prayers and then stop. But just like I don’t really get to sharing deep things with my wife for the first half an hour or so of a normal conversation, it takes time to get to truly talking deeply with God. And that’s time which right now I just can’t sit still long enough to give if I try and pray.

Fortunately, this is a common problem. The Roman Catholic Church has for centuries recognized that people need structure to help them concentrate in prayer, and so they use a rosary when they pray. The feel of the beads sliding through your hands as you pray gives you a feeling of progress, while also keeping your mind more focused and helping you to recognize that you haven’t been praying for an hour, it’s been three beads.

If you don’t have a rosary, almost anything will work that is something you can hold and has increments. Some people finger their necklaces, others more small pebbles down a pre-marked path with each prayer. Still other people make what they call “prayer shawls” or something similar where with each stitch you make you say a prayer. The ever increasing shawl gives you a sense of progress with your prayers, and also keeps you focused because with each stitch you seek to find someone or something else to pray over. This helps you from just dealing with the standard stuff you always pray about and actually move into the realm of needs around you and people you normally wouldn’t think to pray for.

I don’t knit or crochet, so this method doesn’t work too well for me. However, I do make chain maille armour. And so I have modified the prayer shawl method for chain maille. With each link that I put in, I say a prayer. This helps me to stay focused on prayer and not just run off when I run out of things to say. It also gives me something physical to hold and do with my hands so I am not as fidgety. Using the sense of touch in prayer has really helped me personally, and helped me to move beyond surface level greetings and into prayer that is about what really matters to me and those around me.

In short, if you have trouble concentrating in prayer, or sticking with it for a significant amount of time, or just fidget a lot, try some form of tactile prayer. It can be a rope, a necklace, a rosary, even a stick with notches on it. If you can, making something as you pray can be even more significant. Whittle, knit, carve, build (Lego’s work great, actually) or anything else you can do to help concentrate on God and keep your hands busy. It might sound weird, but give it a try, you might be surprised at how it helps your prayer life.

The Struggle With Prayer Pt 2: Fear

2007-11-21T16:03:00.001-08:00

Last week I started a series of posts about prayer, and prayer techniques. But before we prayer better, we had better start praying at all. It is so easy to talk about prayer, but actually praying is often hard. How often have you told someone that you’ll pray for them but never done it? I’m a pastor and yet I find myself doing that sometimes. It’s really sad, but true. Why do we talk about prayer so much and yet do it so little?

I have a thousand excuses about why I don’t spend more time with God in prayer. I am too busy. I talk to God more than I talk to my family already. I chat with God subconsciously so prayer is not needed. God knows my thoughts so I don’t have to direct them at God to pray. I am waiting to pray until I have the time to do it right. I don’t want to bore God with my minor issues. But in reality those are all excuses, not reasons.

The real reason I don’t pray more is that I am afraid. I am afraid that if I actually pray about what is going on in my life then I won’t have any excuses if I fail. You see, if I don’t pray, then I always can say “well I should have prayed about that more” as an excuse. But what does it mean if I pray about something and still fail?

And even more than that, I am afraid that if I do pray I won’t like the answers to my prayers if I do pray. It isn’t a conscious fear, but to some extent I keep trying to keep prayer as a reserve chute in case I am plummeting to my death, and am afraid that if I pull the chute too soon it won’t be there when I need it, if at all.

I know I’m not alone with some of these fears, and probably many more that I haven’t recognized in myself yet. The question, however, is what are we going to do about them? I can believe that prayer is important all I want, but if I don’t put that belief into practice its’ useless.

The problem, though, is that there are no magic solutions to make fear disappear. Only by trying out our fears and putting them to the test can we realize how foolish they are. We gain nothing by flinching away from God because we’re afraid. If you’re like me, right now you’re wishing there was another way. Perhaps you’re even certain that there is and have already decided to put off prayer until you have conquered your fears.

But there isn’t another way, which again scares me because these fears are my fears too. To conquer them we have to face them, prove them wrong, and that means we have to actually pray. Over the next several weeks I’ll be blogging about ways of making prayer easier, but in the end we still have to sit down and do it.

So right now, step away from the computer, go somewhere private, and pray. Not when you’re done with your email, go now. I will too.

The Struggle with Prayer Pt 1: Is God Listening?

2007-11-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

Each person has their strengths and weaknesses. One of the areas that I constantly struggle with is prayer. I know some people can pray for days without trouble, but not me. I start out well, but unless I am careful, within a few minutes my mind has wandered off to something else, I run out of things to say, and pretty soon I give up or completely forget I was praying at all. However, I also recognize a difference in who I am when I do not spend regular time in prayer. I am shorter with my wife. I can’t concentrate as easily. I have a harder time reading scripture or trusting in God. I lack the joy and sense of peace. I know I need prayer, but I have a really hard time achieving that sometimes.

Because of this, over the years I have consciously sought out ideas and ways to pray better. Some of them have really helped me with my own prayer life. And so for the next several weeks I’m going to be posting on some of my favorite prayer techniques.

These aren’t ways to coerce God into listening to us, nor are they ways we can “guarantee” that God will answer our prayers exactly like we want them to be answered. No, these are some ways that I have found that help me to better connect with God in a meaningful conversation. Perhaps some of what has helped me might be able to help you as well. Perhaps you have some ideas about prayer you can share with me.

The first thing that usually hinders me from talking with God is that I have a hard time believing that out of all the people in this world, God actually listens to me and will answer me. This irrational worry almost always crops up when I try to prayer. And if you don’t think the other person is listening it’s really hard to have a conversation.

The way I finally found to deal with this was to write down everything I was praying for in a book. Then as each request gets answered just write down the date next to it. It’s kind of scary starting to do this because at least my fear was that I would find out that God actually wasn’t listening to me at all. But after several years of doing this I have about a third of a notebook filled with prayer requests, and page after page of them have all been answered.

So now whenever I start to pray I flip open the notebook, and as I flip past page after page of answered prayers I don’t worry as much anymore whether God is listening. I see the evidence right in front of me that God does listen. And that makes all the difference to me. I can pray with confidence, and actually believe that God is hearing me and interested in what I say. I know it sounds simple, and it takes some trust to begin, but if you don’t have a prayer journal, try it. It has made a huge impact in my life.

Who Do We Listen to?

2007-11-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of talk recently in the news about the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas. In case you haven’t heard, they believe that God has called Christians to be prophetic in pointing out the problems of the world. However, they believe that God has everything so planned out that no one can actually change from their evil ways. In short, they believe that the world is doomed by God and that they need to point this out to everyone. This church’s most famous act is regularly picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with signs like those shown in the picture to the right.

Now we can write these people off as complete nut jobs pretty easily. But doing that doesn’t take seriously that this used to be a perfectly orthodox church. What happened to make them become so unloving, so hateful, and crass? Unfortunately there isn’t an easy single answer. Instead, it’s a whole host of reasons that over time led to the entire church going off the deep end.

First, every Christian has a circle of influence that includes those people they allow to teach and influence them. These are the people we will listen to about spiritual things. For this church, that circle probably started out with anyone calling themselves Christians. But as homosexuality began to dominate their thinking, they stopped listening to most mainline churches. Then even the evangelical churches began to be too “tame” for Westboro. Eventually, that circle tightened to close that if you go to their website they say that only their one church is the remnant of God’s chosen people.

Many Christians turn off their brains when they come to church, and listen to whatever their pastor tells them to listen to. This is a problem, because any one of us has the capacity to be carried off into heresy and into becoming a cult instead of a church. If the circle of who we listen to shrinks to the point there we only listen to a few people it is almost inevitable that we will be led astray, even if the leader has the best of intentions.

What keeps us safe from heresy is staying in constant conversation with other parts of Christianity, even those parts we disagree with. Turning off our brains to other ideas is the beginning of heresy. If it is God’s truth, it can stand up to conversation and seeking. If I start going off the deep end, and you only listen to me, then you will go off the deep end as well. But if we are both listening to other people as well, we can recognize when we are being swept away, and can come back from the brink.

We should not write Westboro Baptist off as an isolated instance of insanity. It isn’t a random occurrence, it’s a result that we all can expect to see in ourselves to some degree if we turn off our brains and follow one person wherever they go. And you know what’s really scary to me? I know there are people in my church who are just accepting my word on stuff too. In fact, that is what many pastors encourage. But whatever your pastor says, whatever I say, don’t shut off your mind, and don’t stop listening to people just because you disagree with them.

Slow Down, Brian

2007-10-29T12:15:00.001-07:00

Every have one of those days when you feel like a complete idiot? I appear to have those quite often. Today was one of them. As I finish up my second master’s degree I of course need to pay for my schooling. So today I called my university to pay the amount due on my account. I called their 800 number, had a lovely chat with switchboard, and got transferred to the right people. I gave them my ID number and they couldn’t find me. I gave them my name, and they couldn’t find me. I gave them everything, and they couldn’t find me.

After 20 minutes I asked them to transfer me to someone in my department, they couldn’t find that person, at all. Or her husband. At that point, 30 minutes into the telephone call, I asked what university I had called. Sure enough, it was the University of Manitoba. I go the Northwest Nazarene University. Turns out that I called the right 800 number, the problem is that my university has an 877 number. Let’s just say that I immediately told them I would take care of it, thank you very much, and hung up.

It’s funny how looking back so many things could have clued me in that I was at the wrong place. They tried to convince me that my student ID was too short. They didn’t patch me through to the person I usually talk with. I hadn’t looked up the phone number. The people’s accents were slightly off. One of them swore mildly, and another referenced some new age spiritual thoughts.

But none of that clued me in. I just blundered ahead without even thinking. It’s amazing how easy it is in life to ignore a whole host of signs that tell us we’re heading in the wrong direction. If we notice any one of them, we can change our direction, but if we close our eyes to it all we can walk straight into a nightmare far worse than the simple embarrassment I got today. This is especially true in our spiritual lives, when we are going down a path and ignore everything that God tries to use to show us it’s the wrong way. I’ve been there too, and it’s not any fun.

So how do we avoid it? To some extent I think we’ll always mess up occasionally and go down wrong turns. But the key thing is exactly what I forgot to do. Pause, check ourselves, and listen. Let me put it this way; someone walking can be stopped with a gentle hand to their chest, someone charging can’t be stopped with anything less than a baseball bat. If we want to be guided by God, it hurts a lot less when we don’t force God to use a baseball bat just to get our attention and show us where we’re supposed to be heading.

Pedestals and Pastors

2007-10-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

What is the role of a pastor? For that matter what is the role of laypeople in the Church? As I start out my time in New Start these are critical questions, not just abstract musings. The popular model right now seems to say that the pastors are the ones with a special calling, the ones who know everything, the ones who do ministry and the CEO’s of the Church. Laypeople are to give money to the pastors so that we can do the real work of the Church. This gives a huge amount of power to the pastor, power that we can use to do almost whatever we want.

Now I like power as much as the next hooligan, but I don’t think this is what Christ intended his Church to look like. Hebrews Chapter Five talks about how Jesus is our High Priest, and we are all priests under him. The Reformation took up this call as the “Priesthood of all Believers. ” What this means is that all of us are equal in the eyes of God, the pastor is not better than everyone else, nor does the pastor have some unique connection with God that no one else has. After all, most English translations have “pastor” appear only twice in the entire Bible. So how we manage to grab all the power in the Church for ourselves is a mystery.

Pastors today have allowed ourselves to be given all the power in the Church, and to be placed on pedestals. The only problem is that pastors do not have a unique connection with God, or a special right to power. By taking those places we have lifted ourselves up by pushing down everyone else, which is not right.

Instead, I believe that every person has a calling by God and every person can participate in ministry simply by following God. The pastorate is not here to tell everyone what to do, but to help everyone to grow close enough to God to hear what their own ministry will be, and then to help those same people to succeed at the ministry God has called them to through training, support, administration, discipleship, mentoring etc.

Many pastors give lip service to other ministries as a way of getting volunteers to follow through on the pastor’s pet projects, but for the most part the Priesthood of all Believers has been lost today. The idea that all believers can follow God equally, serve equally but in different ways, is almost completely ignored. We need to recover this concept for today. That is one of the reasons I am so excited and so nervous about New Start.

The people here have claimed the ministries of the Church as their own. That means I can help them succeed better and let them run on with what God has called them. However, it also means that together we will be forging ahead in areas few churches get to. And while that is a wonderful, it is also scary.

But as God leads us, I trust and pray that God will keep us all humble enough to work together to further Christ’s work and not get fixated on our own ideas. May God grant us all the grace, peace, and wisdom needed to walk together on this journey without trying to claim we’re the only ones on it.

My Identity

2007-10-18T17:15:00.000-07:00

Well, the insanity of moving has given way to the sleepiness that comes from stress suddenly lifting. We made it to San Francisco yesterday after driving 1850 miles in less than 48 hours. That was a marathon I am not ready to repeat anytime soon, and I was glad to spend much of today on the phone walking around, just for a change. It is wonderful to finally be here permanently, though it would be nice to have our stuff here as well.

As any new beginning, the first question upon finishing up a task is “now what?” I have been taught and trained to be a pastor, but there is still a doubt that says “what do I have to offer these people, what makes me think they will listen to me.” Before coming here I can’t remember how many times I heard comments about how people were confused I was going to an “Asian” church (once they managed to force me to talk about ethnicity at all), or people making sure I knew I would be living in an “ethnic” neighborhood, or how wild Californians, people in the West, or San Franciscans are.

And somewhere in my mind, like in all of our minds I think, those doubts linger. Can I really do this? Will I be able to fit in and minister in San Francisco? But doubts will always be with us, what matters is that we push through them anyway, and that we recognize that we have more that brings us together than pulls us apart.

Coming from Kansas to California, we went through quite a few states. In order, they were: Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. Each place was very different, each with its’ own cultural identity. When someone asked us where we were from we told them our state, and that person’s opinion of us was based on whether they thought Kansas was impressive or not (most did not, obviously). These people’s primary identity was with their state, or sometime with their city. They were Americans, yes, but Nebraskans first.

We also have an identity we share, one that pulls us together far more powerfully than state lines, country divisions, race, or sports teams. We love the same God. And just as people are drawn together by the love of their sports’ teams or state, we too are drawn together by the love wee share for our God.

The question, though, is whether this love is going to be our primary identity or not. I was alienated from some people when they found out I was from Kansas, and yet other people placed higher value on my being an America, or liking football, or sadly even the color of my skin. What these people defined themselves as changed what drew them to people.

If I am a white, young, middle class, Oregonian/Alaskan/Kansan, American, then there is little reason for anyone to listen to me that does not also fit that bill. But if I am a Christian first, and everything else second, then I can be drawn together with people who have nothing else in common with me, and together we can draw closer to the God we all are seeking.

Identify ourselves as Christians first, everything else second, and we will never be alone in this world again. No matter who we are with or where in the world we go, brothers and sisters will be waiting.

"God is With You" and Other Platitudes

2007-10-10T21:10:00.000-07:00

Life is rather crazy at the moment. Naomi’s grandfather is in the hospital and not expected to leave it. We are moving in less than a week and are still not sure if we have enough cash to do so. Our apartment is a complete mess, I still have major class work to do (including a research paper that is taking a ton of time) and packing still needs to be done in heaps and piles. The pictures here of our apartment’s living room at the moment could be a picture of my life. A mixture of chaos and organization, a whole host of common elements thrown together so closely that it is almost impossible to make out what they are all. This is far from the worst or craziest time in my life, but it is enough to have shown me a troubling pattern.

Almost invariably, when life starts to look like my living room, the most interesting pieces of advice will come out of people’s mouths. The most common and heartfelt comment is that “God is with you.” Now I can testify to this being true, God has truly been seen in this move and how everything has worked out, and I trust in how everything will continue to work out. However, like so often in the Old Testament, God is easiest to see after the fact. During the storm we do not often have the blessing of seeing God with us, we just see the wind tearing through our lives.

How we see God working through the storms of our lives is usually through other believers. So when we say “God be with you” to someone in trouble we had better recognize that if we truly want these people to see God, we need to be willing to show God to them through ourselves. I have had many well-meaning believers tell me that “God is with me” when I have struggled at times throughout my life, and then they have walked away. They, and I so often, used God’s presence as an excuse for neglecting to help these hurting people ourselves. That doesn’t show God to them, it just hurts them because at that moment they cannot see God, but can only see their own trouble.

When you can’t see God through your troubles, but desperately need to know God is there, God’s people are the only sight of the divine you have. And simple platitudes only show a God who doesn’t care. Those people who have told me “God will be with you” and walked away have not shown me anything of God that I care to acknowledge, not love, support, guidance, empowerment, or even true encouragement.

Where I have seen God through this time is through those people who have been willing to act as God’s hands and feet for me. I had a great friend recently fly from Oregon to Kansas City to help me pack and be an encouragement for two and a half days. I could see God’s love for me shining through him. As he passed me in my hallway with another box he had packed for me I knew God was with me in a way that whole hosts of people saying those words could never convey to me.

If you want to see God in my life right now look to the wonderful people of my church in San Francisco who spent two months tirelessly going to open house after open house, trying to hunt down a place for us to live so that we wouldn’t have to worry about that too. Look to the family who paid for our first month’s rent and deposit themselves after only meeting us once, just so that we could have the house a few days earlier than if we had to mail a check to the rental place. Those people shine a little part of God’s love and presence into our lives right now. Through their actions and compassion we can see God shining out at us.

Next time you’re reading the Bible, just keep a tally of how often God works through people versus how often God just breaks into our world unaided. Most often it’s through people who are willing to act as God’s representatives for others. So next time you find yourself reminding people that God is with them, make sure that you are willing not only to say the nice words, but to show God’s love to them yourself. Because when people are in the midst of a storm, even a little one, you might be the only clear image of God that they see.

I Cannot Agree

2007-10-01T21:07:00.000-07:00

I love my Lord, and His Church, and I truly dislike abortion. I am an expectant father right now, and just today I got to see my unborn baby daughter on an ultrasound for the first time. Watching her wiggle around and kick, hearing her heartbeat and seeing her little feet and hands, I cannot imagine how it is good that today we could have walked out of the ultrasound after seeing this picture and still have “terminated” the pregnancy. So please understand that what I say now I do not say as an atheist, or as someone who supports abortion, but as someone who is very worried about the direction the Church is taking.

Recently, a splinter group of some of the most powerful evangelical Christian leaders in the US met in secret as they usually do (which is a scary concept, that Christian leaders meet in secret on a regular basis, not only secret about their discussions but also their very identities. Google “Council for National Policy” to learn more) and they were so distressed that Giuliani is the Republican frontrunner that they passed a resolution saying, and I quote “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

At first when I read this it didn’t bother me, until I started thinking about it a bit more. These Christian leaders were making this statement in particular about Giuliani, and yet their primary concern was not his multiple affairs while in office, or a disagreement over his faith, or even the questions of whether he has faith in God at all. No, the primary thing that they brought up was that if someone who is pro-choice is nominated for the Republican party they will think about starting a new party.

Apparently one single issue, albeit an important one, is more important to these Christian leaders than faith itself. I want someone in office who matches my view on abortion, yes, but more than that I want a person who follows God and acts as he/she believes God is leading them. Following Christ with their whole life is far more important to me than abortion alone, or any other single issue. And yet these leaders of our faith are willing to support or oppose a candidate for office without even mentioning faith, and relying solely on one issue. Not even adultery sways these men as much as this one thing.

In another article it mentions that some of those same bastions of conservative Christianity are willing to support Mitt Romney for president, even though he is LDS and most of these men do not believe that the LDS Church is part of the Christian faith. So these people are willing to vote someone they do not even believe to be a Christian into office just because that person’s stance on abortion and homosexuality is “right.”

While Dobson was talking about Sen. Fred Thompson Dobson recently, Dobson said that he did not think the man was a Christian. It turns out that Thompson is, and when questioned, a Focus on the Family spokesman said “we use that term- Christian- to refer to people who are evangelical Christians.” So now, according to Focus on the Family, Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and many more are no longer Christians. I find this extremely disturbing.

Another disturbing thing about this group’s statement about a pro-choice Republican candidate is that they are assuming that only the Republican party is an option for Christian voters. One of the dissenting members of the group advised against creating a third party by saying that “I can’t think of a bigger disaster… than Hillary Clinton in the White House.” Apparently, anything is better than a Democrat in office.

Even in Dr. Dobson’s recent letter where he criticized Giuliani, he quotes Popeye the Sailor but not the Bible. He mentions Abortion first, then homosexuality, then comes adultery as reasons for why Giuliani is not a good fit. Faith, God, or anything else that is the province of the Christian is not even mentioned.

I don’t really care about all the politics that much, but what bothers me is that Christianity has somehow become associated with such a narrow view of life. How has Christianity become so narrow that only Evangelicals can be Christian? How has it become so small that only abortion, divorce, and homosexuality matter, with abortion winning every time? What happened to the commands that Jesus gave us? What happened to evangelism, discipleship, loving and serving others? What happened to being transformed into the image of Christ? How have we gotten to the point where our supposed leaders can talk for pages and pages about what is “important to Christians” without ever mentioning the Bible, faith, Jesus, or even God himself?

There are important issues, and then there are essential issues. How has Christianity become so mired in the important issues that we have neglected the essentials? Jesus told us to love God, love our neighbor, and make disciples for Christ all over the world. So where did we get so turned around that we can ignore those things, ignore the poor, the hurting, the underprivileged in favor of two small but important issues? How did we go from leading everyone to God and becoming like God, to Christians being narrowed down to only a small spectrum of Christ’s followers, almost all American, and to being defined by our political stance more than by our faith?

As Christians we cannot let ourselves be bullied into going along with the flow, even from important leaders of our faith, if where they are going is taking us away from the essentials of the Christian faith. And I am sorry, but I cannot follow a group of men who meet in secret, cloaking their decisions and identities in shadow, who decide that Christians belong only in one party and that abortion and homosexuality should be more important issues than faith, evangelism, or a relationship with God.

Authenticity

2007-09-24T16:22:00.000-07:00

I had a most interesting experience this past Sunday. A very well-meaning Christian lady came up to me and started talking about how lovely San Francisco was, and how much she loved visiting there. But then she immediately went on with how hard ministry must be in San Francisco and how everyone speaks their minds there and does so many crazy things, and how horrible that was. Then she ended with “you do know there’s a gay community there, right?”

I really didn’t know what to say to all of this. Yes there are a lot of people doing things and living in ways that much of the rest of the country would find to be crazy. So what? Those people, whether liberal, conservative, environmental, Buddhist, or homosexual, are not putting on a show (usually) for people, they are simply living what they believe to be true, and living it out in the open, but what’s wrong with being true to yourself?

Of course this is a scary idea for some Christians because much of American Christianity, I hate to say, involves putting on a show and a mask. Christianity is presented as “don’t you want people to think you’re like this?” without anyone actually becoming anything other than what they started as. Of course a city that does not need or wants masks, a city where people are willing to be authentic about what they believe and who they are, would be dangerous to this way of “Christian” living that relies on people pretending to be something they aren’t.

But I don’t find that concept scary at all, because I truly believe that Christ can and will change our lives if we let him. And if people are authentic in San Francisco, then wonderful, because that just means we have to be real as well. It means that perhaps like no other place in this nation Christians actually have to live what they preach instead of just assuming people want a disguise to hide their real face from the world and pretend everything is perfect.

I certainly hope that San Francisco can teach Christians all over the nation to be honest about what they believe and who they are instead of merely pretending to be who they are “supposed” to be. I believe Christ died to save us from ourselves and change us, but that change takes a lifetime and we shouldn’t hide our struggles when we have them, we shouldn’t pretend to have something we don’t, and we certainly shouldn’t put on a show only so more people will come through our doors.

We should live our lives, together, authentically, in service to God as best we know how. And if that makes me crazy too, then I suppose I’m glad we’re heading to San Francisco.

God Will Guide

2007-09-21T00:51:00.000-07:00

I am a young pastor, and while I have been associate pastor for several years, and an interim senior pastor for a while too, I have never before held a full time senior pastor position. I should be quaking in my boots, but I’m not.

We don’t have a place to live yet, we don’t know the area, and we don’t have a way of getting our stuff to San Francisco. And we leave in a month. Yet I am completely ok with that. Before we leave I need to finish a year-long animation project, pack our apartment, clean, finish a master’s class, and prepare for the new church. But I am completely sure that God will lead me through this insanity I like to call a life.

Maybe if you knew how I came to this church you’d understand. When I first applied for churches I really felt that the ones San Fran and Sacramento are in were the ones I needed to apply for first. I also hedged my bets and applied to some 30 other districts, though. Before I sent out a single application I prayed that God would not leave me hanging without any options, but would lead me to where I was supposed to be, and I felt that God would do that.

When I got the call from the District Superintendent (high mucky muck) for the San Fran (Northern California District Church of the Nazarene, technically, but San Fran Dist is so much easier to type) I was told of three churches that were open and without praying, immediately wrote off New Start (where I am the pastor of now). I didn’t pray, didn’t think, just wrote it off as a bad fit.

And so another door opened up, with a decent church, but not the right fit for me. Then another option opened and immediately the first one closed. This continued for five months, with each church a better fit, but still not that good, and right before one possibility ended another would begin.

Then one day I was sitting waiting for a different DS to call with the vote of a church board when Dr. Calhoun (DS of Northern California…. Etc) called with the idea that perhaps I should take another look at New Start. I knew that another door was opening up and 15 minutes later the first DS called and before he said a word I told him the church voted close, but just barely against me and he agreed (though he was quite shocked I knew that).

After going to meet these people and interviewing with them and talking with them I cannot imagine a better church for me. The people are awesome, the situation is good, the setting is nice, the theology and culture are things I am comfortable with, it’s just amazing. And I am sure that God provided one opportunity after another until I finally came back around to where I was supposed to have been in the first place. And if God can keep my hopes up and lead me for six months because of my stubbornness, I am sure God can help arrange a simple move across country.

Why the Title?

2007-09-19T14:23:00.000-07:00

I figured that the title of this blog is odd enough that it deserves some explanation before I do anything else. For the last year now I have had the tag line of this blog as my MSN Messenger tag line as well. And yes, that is Koine (Biblical) Greek that you should be seeing it in up top. There is such depth to this simple saying that I find myself returning over and over to think and meditate on what is means.

"Lord" in Greek is a direct appeal to God through Jesus Christ. We do not have to go through anyone or anything else. When I am feeling like my prayer are hitting a brick wall or when I am am just hearing other Christian leaders talk about their special way of reaching God, their plan that ever good believer should follow, I think back to this simple word. I do not have to talk about God, I do not have to go through anyone else. I can speak simply and straight to my Lord, me God.

"have mercy" in Greek is an appeal, a request. And the way it is formed it is a request for mercy over everything. I have such a hard time occasionally remembering that I am really completely forgiven. There aren't little pieces of my life that God refuses to forgive, that God won't heal me from. When I ask for mercy, for forgiveness, I get it, and I get it on everything I ask for. This is request, "Lord have mercy" is a prayer directly to God asking for forgiveness, love, and peace over everything we have done. It is asking for God to be kind to our failings, forgive us, and love us anyway, even though we know we have been morons. And God will grant that request.

"on us". So often I lose sight that while I can know and love God, and be known and loved by God, in a personal way, I am not walking this path alone. My sins are not unique, my troubles are not unique, not even my successes are unique. We are walking this path together, and the troubles of my brother and sister should bring me to prayer as quickly as my own. We are in this together.

"Your children" is the final phrase and what a phrase it is. There is this idea floating around Christianity that God is out to get us, that we are indentured servants who work off our sins to God through serving God during our lives. That is not true. We become God's children, loved and cared for as any child. We do not earn this gift of love and mercy. Instead, it is freely given and what we do is not out of trying to pay God back, but is because those we love we try to serve.

There is almost always some part of this saying that I need to remember, and believe. And so as this blog is mainly the spiritual musings of a young pastor I thought it was appropriate to title it one of the sayings that I most frequently muse on. That way I don't have to post on it every other day when some part of it makes me think or reminds me of something I have forgotten.