It's Not Just Fun

Something my wife said yesterday got me thinking.

She was making an announcement for our new Yada Yada Prayer Group; which is loosely based on the book series of the same name. We are really excited to offer this opportunity for the women of our church and we are sure that the women who participate will not only enjoy themselves but discover new relationships with each other and with God.

So, Keri was inviting people to come to our first Yada Yada group and she ended up with this: "It will be fun." (Now, I have already talked with her about this so don't think for a second that I am talking behind her back.)

"It will be fun." Not, "It will bring us closer to God."

"It will be fun." And, I am sure it was (our first meeting was last night and we had a great group of women) and will be fun. But, I am pretty sure that is not the primary reason for having a Yada Yada group.

Why do we feel like we have to emphasize the "fun" part of our ministries and programs???

Are people that desperate to have fun?

Is "fun" the best drawing card we've got?

Are people still thinking that doing Christian stuff is sucking the life out of fun and the fun out of life???

Now, I have to hasten to say that I am more guilty than anyone about inviting people to our programs and ministries because they will have fun. But, I have decided to make a change. Instead, I want us to emphasize that what we do brings us closer to God.

"Come and hand out food with us...it will bring us closer to God."

"Come with us to lead a worship service at the county jail...it will bring us closer to God."

"Come to our Yada Yada Prayer Group, our worship services, our Bible studies, our Spiritual Formation Hour, our Elementary Fellowship night...it will bring us closer to God."

"Oh, and you'll have fun, too!"

I suspect that the greatest need of the folks in our community is not to find opportunities to have fun (though I am sure that many would disagree with me) but to find opportunities to come closer to God with other people who are on that journey as well.

But, why can't the things that bring you closer to God also be fun? Just ask the women that attended the Yada Yada group. Just ask the folks who do our Forgotten Man Ministry. Just ask the 50 or so volunteers that helped pass out food last month. Just ask the folks that worship with us on Sunday morning. Or our Stephen Ministers.

I am guessing that most of those folks will say that doing something that brings you closer to God and having fun are not mutually exclusive.

It just depends on the emphasis.

From Frustration to Freedom

I'm frustrated.

I have been frustrated for several years.

It seems like all the trade publications to which I subscribe and all the book catalogs I get have conspired to make me feel inadequate. These magazines tell me that I won't have a vital, missional, growing church unless I go to this seminar, or take that class, or go to such-and-such a conference. In fact, these magazine are now telling me that people will leave my church if I don't attend this or that. The books that the catalogs are hyping are telling me that unless I read this book I really don't understand ministry or culture.

And, then there are the books by the superpastors. These pastors and their minions write that I should start a new church and if I pray to God enough, and if I am faithful enough, then the new church will explode practically overnight and there will be no challenges, no wounds, no obstacles. God will provide a building and a parsonage and a great staff and top-rated musicians for your Praise Band even before you get started...all for free.

AUGH!!!

That may play in the silicon valley, or in Chicago, or Miami, but it doesn't play in Snover...or Flushing. I decided that a few years back.

I am tired of the church growth movement. I am tired of church and marketing used in the same sentence.

And, while I am at it...when did the church become a marketer for someone else's movie or T-shirts or bobble-head Jesuses??? Now I have to rent out a movie theater and give away tickets and t-shirts and key-rings and show someone's movie that portrays the gospel in a way that will reach our culture. If I don't, I am behind the times, and behind the eight-ball and behind several other things that, I'm sure, aren't good.

AUGH!!

This cannot be happening!

Yeah, yeah...I know...the church has to remain relevant to the culture. The church has to speak to the culture. The church has to remain relevant. But, what does that mean? Does that mean we have to wear certain clothes, or tattoo our arms, or show movies, or sell DVD's, or give away iPhones? Or does it mean that we need to meet people with intelligent and loving responses to life's questions that point toward Jesus Christ (or at least provide a safe place for those questions to be asked and explored)? Does it mean that we become a strip mall offering a bookstore, a movie theater, a coffee shop, a free clinic, and twenty-seven different worship services with twenty-seven different worship styles each with their own pastor, staff and musical group? Or, does it mean that we are willing to journey with people and help them find God and Christ and grace and justice in the midst of whatever it is they find themselves in at any given time in their life?

When did pastors stop being spiritual role models and start becoming and rock stars an CEO's? When did the church stop being the people of God on a journey and start becoming a destination?

But, my frustration doesn't stop there, my friends...oh no.

For all of my career, and for years before it began, I have had a desire that non-believers and those who have been wounded and disillusioned by a church would enjoy a new or renewed relationship with God in Christ and with Christ's church. That desire has become more intense over the years. But, I have not been given the gift of evangelism. But, I have been given other gifts that help me share my faith in Jesus Christ and help me to organize and administrate ministries that help the congregations I have served witness their faith and invite people into a relationship with God and his church.

I/we have had some moderate success.

I know I have this desire for the non-believer and the dis-churched. I know that many of my congregation share that desire. Unfortunately, the non-believers and the dis-churched don't seem to know that we have this desire - and they are staying away in droves.

Back to the magazines and catalogs.

They tell me that if I do this or that then people will be beating down my door.

I don't believe it. I don't believe it because I don't believe that God is a cosmic vending machine and if I put the right amount of change in and push the right buttons in the right order then my congregation will grow. I don't believe that God works only within the bounds of a formula.

So, I have come to a decision.

I will lead our church to be the church that I believe God is imagining us to be. I have begun talking and praying with my team about what that might look like. And, I have been inspired, challenged and stretched. But, I am firmly convinced that this is by God's Spirit and God's grace. You couldn't talk me out of that. I am being freed from the need to be approved of by my peers and by the super-rock-star pastors. I am being freed from the need to have my congregation triple in one week...okay that wasn't really a need...more of a dream (I blame the super-rock-star pastors).

But, more than anything else, I am being freed from the frustration.

Freedom feels good.

And, I am excited - really excited - about the possibilities and potentials that God is revealing to me as I live into my decisions and my freedoms.

Excitement is good.

The War of the Guys In Me

This will be an intensely personal blog so feel free to skip it if you want. I don't imagine it will be intensely personal because I will be writing about myself through it all, but because I will be writing about a raw nerve in my own being an perhaps yours as well.

I am a recovering perfectionist. Which is to say that that I am a perfectionist and that has often messed with my sense of self, many of my relationships and sometimes my ministry. Mostly, though, it messes with my own sense of self. I am my own worst critic and my own worst enemy. And, I am trying not to live in that framework. However, I am usually at war within myself - the holiness guy in me insists that, until I get my life more perfectly aligned with Christ, I am not entirely acceptable to God. The mystic in me tells me that God loves and accepts me perfectly and completely and unreservedly just as I am - flaws and imperfections and poor choices and all. The holiness guy fires back that the mystic guy is all about sloppy agape and cheap grace and whatever happened to becoming more like Jesus (read: perfect)? The mystic guy tells me that the holiness guy is a legalist with unrealistic standards that not even God demands. Holiness guy insist that sin and grace cannot co-exist in the same person. Mystic guy says, "They can and they do, dummy. Look in the mirror!" And, they end up making rude gestures at each other as they fight for dominance.

I am reading a book by Brennan Manning that is not really helping out the holiness guy in me. Father Manning writes about the furious grace of God - furious not in the sense of anger but in the sense of powerful and driven. God's grace is furious in the sense that God wants to pour it out liberally on everyone...soak us in it. But, like the people of the Gulf Coast who (rightly so) nail boards to their windows to keep out the hurricane's wind and rain, perfectionists often erect barriers (not rightly so) against God's grace.

Father Manning re-tells the story at the end of the gospel of John where Jesus meets Peter and the other disciples on the beach with breakfast. This is after Peter had denied Jesus three times in the courtyard of the high priest. Sometime during or after that meal Jesus asks Peter three times, "Peter, do you love me?" and Peter answers three times, "You know I love you, Lord." And, in reply, each time Jesus tells Peter "Feed my sheep/tend my lambs."

Here's what was new for me: the idea that Jesus knew that Peter loved him, even as he denied Jesus in the courtyard. Jesus knew Peter's denial was an act of self-preservation and not a deliberate attempt to hurt Jesus. So, Jesus gives Peter the opportunity to reiterate his love for Jesus for each of the times Peter denied him. It was not so much an act of "atonement" as I had always thought, but an act of compassion for Peter. Let me 'splain...

If I were Peter (and I am pretty sure there is a Peter that runs around in me somewhere) I would be beating myself up for having denied Jesus when the chips were down. I would have talked myself into a downward spiral of how bad a person I am and how Jesus would never forgive me and how I was not fit to be in a relationship with God and how my footsteps stain this earth and so on. But, Jesus was not thinking that. Jesus knew my heart. Jesus knew that I really do love him, I was just thinking more about my own hide than his that night. (Thank God that every mistake we make does not mean an ending.) So, Jesus leads me into an opportunity to re-affirm my love and he re-affirms his.

But, that's not all. Jesus then gives Peter a commission: "Feed my sheep. Tend my lambs." This was perhaps John's way of telling how Peter became a leader in the early church. Brennan Manning writes, "Jesus didn't say anything more, what he said was enough. Do you love me? Can you allow my love to touch you in your weakness, and set you free there, and empower you? So that when Peter went out from then on empowered by Jesus, the only power he had was Jesus' love for him and his love for the Lord. That's the only power he had."

In my call to ministry I had a similar commission as Peter - in a kind of a shepherd motif. And, I have the same empowerment - though I didn't know it until now. I have been thinking that my empowerment came from my seminary degree (it doesn't) or from my ordination (it doesn't) or from my keen mind and powerful sermons and gifts for organization and administration (yeah...right!) My empowerment comes solely from God's love for me and my love for God. And, the rub is that even when I don't exactly love God, God still loves me and that empowers me to be the guy I was created and redeemed to be.

So, holiness guy in me is retreating and mystic guy in me is smiling smugly. Mystic guy isn't winning - I like to think it is God in me who is winning. May that be for all the recovering and not yet recovering perfectionists out there.

Maybe John Lennon was right: all you need is love.

Balance and Rhythm

We talk a lot today about finding balance in our lives.

I think of the woman who works a full time job, taxis her kids to soccer games, cooks supper and volunteers at her daughter's elementary school PTO. And, at some moment, maybe during a PTO meeting, or maybe at soccer practice, or during her coffee break, she takes her mind off the meeting, or off the practice or away from the office politics long enough to think to herself, "When did my life spin out of control?" Or, I think of the guy who works a lot of over time, coaches his son's baseball team and is an officer in his local lodge. Maybe while he is driving between work and the lodge meeting he thinks to himself, "When do I get a little 'me time?'"

Now, the contemporary prescription for those questions is to find balance. But, I wonder, balance between what? Work and family? Work and rest? Work and volunteerism? The physical and the emotional? The physical and the spiritual? All of the above? None of the above? More than the above?

Where is the fulcrum??? Do we work 40 hours and spend time with our family for forty hours? Or is ten enough? Or two? Do we spend an hour in prayer every week, along with an hour of worship, work 35 hours, play six hours, relax three hours, read for an hour, and spend the remainder with our family? Which family? My wife and kids? My in-laws? My brothers and their family? Is this balance?

I am thinking that balance is an elusive if not an illusory thing.

The ancient, and I believe Biblical, response to the needs of the woman and man above is not to find balance, but to discover a rhythm in their lives. I believe that God built a certain rhythm into the universe: breath out - breath in, the beating of a healthy heart, work - rest, sunrise - sunset (if you are now thinking of the song from Fiddler on the Roof you are both corny and old. But, then again, I thought of the song from Fiddler on the Roof, so maybe that makes you a well-rounded individual with good taste in musicals.)

Only within the last hundred years or so have we scientifically discovered what the church has been singing for much longer: that there is a song in creation. At an atomic and even a sub-atomic level, everything is vibrating. Physicists tell us that the vibration of the electron shell of a carbon atom vibrate at a perfect tone scale of C,D,E,F,G, A - a perfect Gregorian chant hexachord. Marching soldiers who come to a bridge must break step because their cadence gives off a frequency that could destroy the bridge. It is forbidden for the crowd at the Clemson football stadium to sing, Louie, Louie because the song gives off frequencies that are the same as the frequency of the stadium and causes it to fall apart - seriously. I wonder of that was one of the ways God used to bring down the walls of Jericho?

So, if there is music and rhythm built into the universe, perhaps we can find what we are looking for in our frenetic lives by finding rhythm rather than balance?

John and Charles Wesley were ridiculed harshly by their classmates at Oxford University for having a rhythm. Charles had rhythm, that's why he wrote so many hymns - but John and Charles and the rest of the "Holy Club" had a rhythm, or a schedule. They would get up every morning at a certain time, pray, read the Bible, eat breakfast, go to class, study, eat lunch, go to class, pray, go to a prison or a hospital or an orphanage and help people, eat dinner, do homework, read the Bible and go to bed. This more or less repeated itself every day. And, for this rhythm John and Charles were derogatorily called "Methodists." They had a method, a schedule, a rhythm. And, WOW, what an impact they had for the kingdom of God!

Now, personally, I think John was way too anal about his rhythm. And, I am not suggesting that we all follow John Wesley's rhythm. But, I am suggesting that we find our God-given rhythm. As a person who is recovering from a nervous break-down I can testify to the importance of finding your God-given rhythm.

I don't know what that will mean for you, but I know for me it means looking at rest and exercise as if they were appointments I have to keep rather than things I can do if I have time. It means I have to be more intentional about the things that are important, and intentional about discerning between the important and the urgent.

I guess at the end of the day, if you want to waltz through life you have to live in three-quarter time.

Turning the World Right-Side Up

In the beginning God spoke the universe into being. (Scientists have yet to reveal what caused the big bang or where the matter came from that scattered to form the boundaries of the universe and all that dwell therein.) God spoke the word and what God spoke came into being. And, at some point God decided that what had been created was "very good." It was just the way God had intended it to be.

Then came the moment when evil an sin entered the world. This was not part of God's "very good" world. This was not God's intention. Evil and sin took root - in creation, but more importantly in the inner self of all of humankind. In other words, when push comes to shove and sometimes when it doesn't, or when we are up against a wall and sometimes when we are not, we tend to choose self over everything else. We tend to choose what feels good for us, what seems to benefit us the most and we tend not to think of what our choices and actions and words can do to someone else. I believe that this really clobbered God's "very good" world; and turned it upside down.

One of the main jobs of the church is to participate with God in turning the world right-side up again.

That's not an incredibly popular thing to do. Most folks are pleased with the world as it is, thank you very much. They have learned to live and prosper in an upside down world. It feels good because it is what they know, and how dare we threaten what they know and what they have come to depend on!

There is an interesting scene in the book of Acts where Paul and Silas come to the city of Thessalonica and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ in the synagogue. Some of the synagogue folks were upset so naturally they started a riot. When the police came the charge against Paul and Silas was that they were the guys who were "turning the world upside down." It would be interesting to see the legal briefs on that one.

The world they were turning "upside down" (or right-side up depending on how you look at it) was a world of sin and corruption, injustice and inequality, idolatry and vice of every kind.

I am pretty sure that turning that kind of world upside down is a good thing. It isn't a popular thing, but a good thing. Turning the world right-side up means change and change is threatening to some people because change means going from what is known to what is unknown. But, it seems to me that if evil, injustice and corruption are the status quo, it is a good thing to overturn them in favor of what is just and good and right.

Sin and evil are indeed the status quo for the most part. Do I really need to illustrate from current headlines??? The church is called to be the prophetic voice for what is good and right and just and Godly in this world. But, if all we have are words, then we join the ranks of the crystal ball-gazers and snake oil salesmen that all seem to have an alternative suggestion for how this world should run. We MUST put action to our voice. We must be agents of change, even if that simply means changing our little corner of the world.

After Apartheid was thrown out as the official policy of South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The idea was that anyone who had committed a human rights crime could come forward, reveal the truth and find some sense of forgiveness for participating in a world truly upside down. How well that worked is up for debate, but it was a Godly step that reflected the values of the Kingdom of God - thus it was a step toward turning the world right-side up. Desmond Tutu told audiences that maybe God was using his little country to model a part of the Kingdom to the rest of the world.

Maybe we aren't going to set up any kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (on the other hand the church is supposed to be a kind of Truth and Reconciliation place anyway), but we CAN model part of the Kingdom of God through our words and actions; we can do things that help God turn the world right-side up again.