My Church!

We tend to be quick to share what we don't like about things so I just wanted to make note of what I really like and appreciate about my church. I know it is not perfect, and there are plenty of other good churches around but today I am giving my church props. Maybe I'll send it to my pastor and it can be a bit of sunshine between letters people may send him about not liking the casual clothes he wears or saying he does not do altar calls often enough or whatever the complaints of the day are.


Our pastor is an incredible communicator. His messages are not overly deep, but if you dare to apply the message you will find the application is incredibly deep. Love your enemies is a simply statement, but a hard one to live out.

We have a very cool environment to invite people to, with a lot of great volunteers to make it all run smoothly.

The church has great facilities for kids, and has quality, innovative programming for kids.

I like having a simple purpose and vision that I can get my head and hands around.
1) Our goal is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.
2) We aim for intimacy with God, community with insiders, and influence with outsiders. We get really good teaching on all aspects of this statement.

The aim really is about changed lives. Rarely do we talk about numbers. We talk about how serving anywhere or giving anywhere is done because we buy into the vision of the church and want to be a part of that.

The music rocks. I loved kicking off the Easter service last year with a great rendition of "It's A Beautiful Day."

Everything that is done is done with absolute professional quality that rivals anything out in the marketplace.

Baptisms are done frequently and provide a good opportunity for us to see how real lives are being changed. Baptisms are done live, but what the person being baptized wants to share as a testimony is videotaped and shown right before the live baptism.

The church reimburses us for childcare when we have to hire a babysitter to go to small group. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is. They talk about the high value they place on small groups, and they back it up by providing money for childcare.


Having said what I appreicate about my church, I wonder how that measures up with what is the purpose of the church? Maybe that will be next week.

Heart of the Gospel

If I were to ask you what the gospel is, if you have been in church for the last several years you would probably say something like "The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ" or "The gospel is God offering Jesus as our Lord and Savior" or something like that. While those responses are true, I ran into a debate this week that made me think through what the gospel is and how does it play out in real life.

In the debate that was shared with me, one person said the gospel above all else is revealed, propositional truth. It is such a common thought to me that it slips by my mind without even questioning or thinking about it. "The Bible is God in verbal propositional form" was drilled into my head in college and I have come to accept it. However, my friend who heard that phrase shuttered. He argued that to leave the gospel at propositional truth is to sell it short. He'd rather us say that the gospel above all else in an invitation to a redeemed relationship with your creator. Hmmm…now I am going to have to think a minute.

If I were to say the gospel boils down to revealed propositional truth I would be intending that to mean that the gospel shares and affirms Christ's life, death, the human story, humanities need for a savior and the solution Christ provided. The gospel is a statement of what has happened, as well as directions for living and for salvation. I know many would take the definition farther and say the gospel is the truth of what has happened historically, and is the true story of how humanity is separated from God and Christ's offer to bridge that gap. Great stuff, but I can see how my friend would see this as something less than the whole story. In fact, my friend said, " To leave the Gospel at propositional truth is, in my opinion, to sell it short. I don’t believe that God heaped the sin of the world on his son so that we would believe something was true but to restore a relationship between creator and creation. We don’t give God glory by saying we believe something, we give him glory by letting him love us to the point where we are changed from the inside out and begin to reflect his glory in the way we live our lives." Wow - that really strikes a chord with me. I would not say I disagree with it, but I would admit it makes me uncomfortable (and I show my moderness). Haven't we been taught all of our lives that to accept Christ all one has to do is believe that he died on the cross for our sins, and accept his sacrificial gift for us? That is definitely belief based. Where in my friends definition does it call us to make a willful choice to submit to God as Lord and Savior? Does he really intend to do away with the modern way of approaching salvation so completely?

At the heart of it, the question arises - so what? Why does it matter what we view as the heart of the gospel? Two immediate answers come to mind. 1) How are lives transformed? Are lives transformed because they hear something and believe it to be true or are lives transformed as they enter into a relationship and experience that relationship within the guardrails of Truth? So many pastors and teachers are out there teaching that belief/education leads to a change in actions. If you know how bad partially hydrogenated oil is for you, then you will not partake of foods containing that, or if you know your body is Christ's temple then you will take care of it, etc? There is a whole lot that I intellectually know but do not do. Personally I think lives are changed as we interact with God, and with God's people. Try describing God. You can list his attributes and that is a valid description of God, or you can describe God by telling who has been to you in different times of life and that will have a richer meaning. Not to say that God's attributes are not valid, but rather that how we experience God shapes how we view God even more than the truth we know about God. I know this gets into a touchy area, because we have to remember to keep our experiences of God within the context of what we know to be true about God. Point being, I think we have greater opportunity to see transformed lives through sharing the gospel as an invitation to connect with our creator, rather than presenting the gospel mainly as propositional truth. As I mentioned earlier, I want to see that relationship evaluated within what we know to be truth, but I'll trust that if we are truly in relationship with Christ that he will bring us back to those core truths.

The second reason our answer to the question matters so much is, how do we structure the church? If we believe the heart of the gospel is propositional truth then we will create environments accordingly and if we believe the heart of the gospel is relationship we will structure our church environments differently. I trust that by being intentional, we can do both!

Rules...

I am blessed with a rich heritage. My dad grew up as an eigth generation PK (pastor's kid.) They were truly good Christian people who served the Lord well, but that generation and denomination, had a whole lot of rules! "Remember no baseball on the Lord's day, face cards are evil and Christian do not go to the movies." I doubt my dad kept all of the rules, but he did keep his faith and grew up to be a ninth generation pastor, making me a PK. My parents resolved to create a home environment that was not as rules oriented as the homes they had grown up in. I very much appreciate my parents resolve, but there is still something about being raised by Christians, among Christians, with church on Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night that breeds rules into a person. Being a Christian becomes synonomous with (among other things) I don't drink, I don't cuss, I don't smoke, I don't watch R rated movies, etc.

I moved on from my parents home to a Christian university with lots of rules. I knew about the rules going in and decided that whether I agreed with them or not, I could obey the rules for the given length of two years. I had freely chosen to go to a Christian school and so I was willing to abide by those rules. I sensed, in most of the rules, the purpose for the rules and so it was not too hard to live within those rules.

However, I did not bother to think through whether I believed in those rules or not, I just knew I had agreed to obey them and I would. I am kind of stubborn like that. Not a bad policy for the school, but when I graduated I did not have any of my own rules, which brought me to ask - in this age of freedom - do we need rules? I searched my Bible high and low and asked God for his discernment on rules and found many things to be permissible, and even was comfortable that I could do them to the glory of God. I am not sure if I could go back to college and agree to live by the old rules.

My friends seemed to be arriving at the same conclusions and we have enjoyed that freedom for the last 10 years or so, but now I find myself asking the question, "Hey shouldn't we have a higher code of conduct than the world? Whatever happened to whatever is pure, whatever is noble…?" The pendulum has swung from excessive rules to very few hard set rules. I have been guided by the philosophy John Ortberg presents when he encourages Christians to be known by their love. He comments that Christians seem to be known by what they don't do rather than what they do, because it is so much easier to be known for what we don't do than to be known for our love. I totally agree with Ortberg, but if one is not intentional this can be taken too far. I am all for grace and I am all for Truth. I do not want to go back to the days where holiness is judged by rule keeping , but I do want to get back to being intentional. If I can intentionally take in a PG - 13 movie and think through the worldview it portrayed, the parts it left out, and maybe even consider what it says about my culture then great, but I don't want to fall into the trap of taking in whatever comes across the screen unevaluated and I want to keep in mind that permissible is not necessarily beneficial.

Perhaps it all comes down to being right with God. If we are truly right with God then we can agree with St. Francis (I think it was) in his statement "Love God and do as you please," but I do think we need to be diligent in being intentional about what we partake in. I know without a doubt, I can break all the rules and God will love me just as much as He did before I broke all the rules, so there is nothing in my behavior that I can do to earn God's love or salvation - He has already taken care of that. But having said that, I also want to make sure that I choose to walk a path that brings the most glory to God. My path may engage me in my culture and I may see things that are not edifying, but hopefully that will be an evaluated experience that speaks to me about the brokenness in our culture and provides a good background from which to be able to present the good news that we can experience wholeness, forgiveness and connectedness with our creator through Jesus Christ. Partaking in such activities will require extra emergence in the Scriptures and a well - developed spirit that helps with discernment. Of course, I hope the majority of what we, as Christian, take in is thoroughly wholesome, but I believe we have to balance that with the opportunity we have to be connected with our culture and the ability and freedom God gives us to experience a wide variety of things with discernment

TONE

I'm still studying the idea of "blessings" but it is more multi-faceted than I would have guessed. In the meantime, let me share a little observation that hit me last week. A speakers TONE really does matter. I guess the idea should not be a surprise to any of us. I remember being told as a kid, "It is not so much what you said, as it is the tone with which you said it" and that tone usually conveyed disdain, anger, or something unpleasant.

Recently, I read about how important the tone of a discussion or attitude of a teacher is to Emergents, even to the point that the tone may be more important than the actual content being communicated. The idea shocked me because while I value the tone with which a speaker shares his or her message, I did not consider it anywhere near as important as the content. I still agree with that, however I had an interesting experience this week that made me start thinking about it again.

Last Sunday I sat home with a sick little boy and a sick mother-in-law. One of them, I'll let you guess which one, wanted to watch the Sunday morning preachers, so I obliged. We watched one particular well-known pastor. He preached about the decline of American culture and I am not sure what else. His content was absolutely solid but I was so uncomfortable listening to him. It reminded me of Len Sweet's book (great book by the way) "Out of the Question Into the Mystery" where he talked about us being so caught up in being right, and valuing being right over valuing relationships. The pastor's content was unassailable, but I, a Christian, was offended by the vehemence with which it was delivered, the absolute assuredness that his take was the right take on the issues of the day. There is nothing wrong with being confident in your beliefs but the confidence and strong tone somehow seemed to combine to discredit him in my eyes as just another far right, fire and brom stone preacher. I am sure he is an upstanding Christian seeking to bring glory to God but I had to wonder if I was uncomfortable, how would this appear to someone not yet a follower of Christ?

I am not advocating having a particularly seeker sensitive church service, but I think there has to be a better way to communicate. I have to believe there is a way to hold fast to Truth and be unashamed to share it, but in a manner that exudes grace, and values and respects other people and their conclusions.

Not Another Purpose Sermon

I know God uniquely created me with special gifts, which I should utilize to His glory, but if I hear another sermon or lecture on living a life of purpose I may gag. I happen to work in an environment where I often hear speakers giving "talks." Some of the "talks" are sermons, some are lectures and some are purely motivational, but lately many of these talks are on finding your purpose in life and going for it. Surprisingly, I agree with all they say, but what offends me is what they do not say. It does not seem fair to get your audience excited and encourage them to go for it without sharing the rest of the story. Thinking through and getting oneself in alignment with ones purpose is great, but the bills still have to be paid, time still has to be put in, and skills still have to be honed. Shouldn't they mention it may take you a while to get to the point where God can use your special gifts, maybe throw in something about still being responsible while seeking to fulfill your life vision, or how about the fact that going for it may be costly? I am reminded of Joseph. Joseph went through an awful lot before he could be used by God to fulfill his God given mission. I have to think that if Joseph's jail cell had been visited by today's purpose preachers, Joseph would have assumed he needed to figure out His role and place in this world just as soon as he got out of the joint.

While I think it is valuable to live intentionally in a way that allows us to fulfill our God given role, I think maybe we are missing the boat in the way we are communicating this. My encouragement would be to seek God and earnestly seek to find your passions, gifts, skills and purpose, but if it does not match with where you are in life, pray about it. God may tell you clearly what to do - take the risk and go for it, go back to school, take the pay cut to work in your field, connect with so and so, but God may also be silent on the matter and say nothing more than "keep seeking me."

I have a friend who used to teach that wherever you were, you could always be doing something to be working towards preparing yourself for who you think God would have you be. At the time I was working in a field that was totally unrelated to my passions or life purpose, so upon hearing my friends advice I made a goal of reading a book a month on the subject of my passion and I subscribed to a few periodicals that would keep me current in the field. When my big opportunity comes I want to be prepared, but in the meantime I am content to seek God and follow his path, even when I do not see how it is working towards my goal for my life. Queen Esther, "For such a time as this" ring any bells?

I've got to agree with John Maxwell here, in that success is not a destination but rather a journey. I appreciate the purpose preachers wanting us all to live fulfilled lives for God's glory and our joy, but I wish they'd share the rest of the story so those not there yet would not leave disillusioned. I'm grateful that they get us thinking and started on the journey, but for a journey to be successful we need a realistic road map.