Category Archives: Building community

Development: Will we help or hurt the Philly region?

Building community, , , , ,

Development happens. Sometimes it is for the good. Much of the time it is the same old injustice in new clothes. Regardless, the church needs to develop along with it.

All weekend I talked about development — and I am not just talking about the in-town retreat the Leadership Team held with the discerning group to map out 2011 for Circle of Hope! No, I live in the Philadelphia region and we talk about development all the time: what’s happening in the casino district in Fishtown — the amazing speculation going on from Washington to Wharton in Point Breeze — the big ideas happening in southwest Germantown exemplified by the Kroc Center and the eviction notices given  to the people in the tower at Queen Lane — the changes on 52nd St. with the influx of new home owners pushing out from University City. What’s more: south of Temple is not what it used to be! — the Riverfront Prison site in Camden might get used well! — the South St. bridge reopened! It is exciting.

Church development

I was talking to a new friend in the Kimball St. Garden this weekend who said visiting St. Peter’s in Rome was the straw that broke the camel’s back of his faith. He gave it up when he saw that piece of church “development.” I understood. When I was there a few years ago I asked God for an earthquake to take care of what must be the worst piece of advertising for Jesus in history. God becomes a baby to meet us person to person and the church advertises him with an overwhelming building designed to make you feel small and powerless in the presence of God (and the pope)!

In most of Philly’s neighborhoods there are further shrines to the church’s pride and power housing congregations who are trying to figure out how to stay afloat and become useful in their developing neighborhoods. I told the man I was getting to know that he could come see us in our room over a check-cashing store if he ever felt like experiencing an alternative. He said he might show up. But I am not too heartened that Circle of Hope’s big contribution might be to provide a corrective for something done in 1626! We have our own development to consider!

This weekend we were considering our development in our developing region, and it wasn’t that easy. The pastors put out some ideas that seemed to come from the best parts of our discernment process including slight changes to our basic identity statements. We needed a lot of dialogue! Change is not easy! There were two ideas aired, in particular, that must feel like tearing down the Queen Lane public housing tower feels for some people. They want it gone, but they aren’t sure it doesn’t mean something important is going to be lost.

Being a developer

I guess I am like a “developer,” God help me. I don’t need change for change’s sake, but I think things can improve. When it comes to developing Circle of Hope, for instance, I think we should admit that we are diverse in race, class, background and location and stop talking about ourselves as if we are trying to become that. We became that. We can always become more, but we became that. Now let’s keep the heart of who we are and move on to what is next. Personally, I am not going to give up on any aspect of the work of reconciliation until I die. I want to keep overcoming the racist divides of our country (as were easily seen in the last election when Obama got his white backlash, even if no one will admit that), and I will keep being a proactive peacemaker (the need for such was also evident after the election when not one candidate on election eve mentioned the war in Afghanistan as a big deal to them). I think reconciliation is basic Christianity and I am not aspiring to it, I am it. I think we worked reconciliation into our DNA; we have it in our proverbs and mission teams. Let’s not talk about doing it as if it is still in question. Lets be it.

For another less tangible thing, I think we, as Circle of Hope, should admit that we met all our goals for development as an institution and now we should act like we are developed. We are four congregations, nearly 50 cells, four pastors, lead by  20-person leadership team, served by three staff people. We have two profitable thrift stores and a counseling center. We have compassion teams that many people consider radical. We need to get our minds around that and imagine what is next as that new entity. Let’s express ourselves as who we are now and stop dragging ourselves back into some nostalgic small thing. For anyone who just tuned in, we are just about what we were dreaming about becoming when we were a small thing. Let’s have the dreams of what a Circle of Hope that exists now would dream! This requires some maturity, of course. It is easier to just keep doing whatever was happening before. The people getting pushed out of North Philly into the lower Northeast and out of West Philly and South Philly into Southwest are just moving with the flow. They don’t create much flow. A lot of churches in town (like some churches on the street with BW) seem to be holding on as long as they can to what used to be great as the world changes around them. We were not created for that.

I am not up for not developing. Jesus is the source of a renewed imagination. Jesus continually renews our strength so we can face what is, now. I think he finds it exciting to work for redemption in the latest thing that has developed with the latest church he has developed. Let’s keep up.

I doubt that a secularized cell would help: Living with people who lose faith

Building community, ,

Jewish people, at different levels of intensity, are in the middle of the High Holy Days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur. So reporters are scouring the countryside looking for interesting articles to post about interesting Jews. Such people are not hard to find. The Inquirer discovered a group in South Jersey who are consciously working out what I think a lot of Christians are unconsciously working out. So they caught my attention too.

Secular Jews in the Inquirer

Secular Jews

During the High Holy Days, Jews are religious. They can celebrate Passover, Hanukkah and other feast days without being religious because those days are rooted in historical events (they are like the Fourth of July). But the High Holy Days are about repentance and God. So Arnold Barnett’s wife often went to the religious observances alone because Arnold wasn’t into God, even though he was into Judaism. Now they celebrate with members of the South Jersey Secular Jews – “a group of people who may or may not believe in God, but do believe in caring about the world and one another, respecting and understanding Jewish history, and celebrating a culture that has meaning and emotional pull.” (Inquirer, 9-6-10)

People estimate that 40,000 of the 6 million Jews in the U.S. are “out” as secular (as compared to 44% in Israel – a figure some people say is, for most practical purposes, much higher).  One might even expect the number to be even more, since traditional religions have been experiencing secularization since the Renaissance — once God got removed from the government, people went with secular norms instead of religious ones. Speaking for Jews who have secularized their religion, Cary Hillebrand, of Cherry Hill, says, “We are not in any way antireligious. We hold the belief that we are responsible for what happens to ourselves and to the world. And to us, that’s the essence of what religion is, and should be.”

Translating into a godless framework

I would not want to argue with Cary, since she was probably misinterpreted by the reporter, anyway. But I am reacting to Cary-like people almost every day. They are often listening to my speeches and quietly reading my blog, translating what I say into their God-less philosophical framework – and being very tolerant of me as they do.

I was walking with the grandchildren the other day and a friend who used to be in covenant with me as Circle of Hope stopped the car (and held up the one behind him) to smile out the window and make a pleasant comment. As he sped off I wondered what to do about the loss I felt. I know, in his world view, I had no right to my loss, since he was just being responsible for what happens to himself. But I still felt it.

I have an increasing roster of friends (maybe because I keep collecting them on Facebook, that great illusion of community) who love me, who love the Circle of Hope community, who love that we are trying to be socially responsible but who don’t love Jesus. They don’t really even want to hear about Jesus because it makes them feel guilty and they are done with guilt. They don’t want to hear about meetings and why they should have attended because they are done with those obligations. They tried commitment to something other than their own path and it didn’t work for them – and they don’t want any more convincing. But they still want the love and they still want the parts of the morality they like; they even want the holidays. They just don’t want to be subject to God.

It makes for awkward relationships. I still feel obligated to be nice while my supposed friends gut my faith. I get the cold shoulder when I talk about my soul, while they want the freedom to talk about their “freedom” as if it were not a submission to another god —  since we aren’t allowed to talk about God, not a real one, anyway. They show up at parties, want to be included in the family, want to be included in the cause, but they don’t want to feel responsible for undermining the foundation of it all.

Maybe I shouldn’t have called the relationships awkward and then immediately sounded kind of bitter. It is more than awkward. Being secularized by your loved one is a bitter pill to keep swallowing. I’ve been working at covenantal, selfless love. Being reduced down to “nice” is painful. And I usually don’t think my newly-merely-nice friends are really that nice, anyway. I miss the need for forgiveness.

Would a secularized cell help?

What to do? Maybe we should advocate that former Circle of Hopers who have adopted unbelief should have some secular cells for themselves like the Jews in New Jersey. There are so many pre-believing  people going the opposite direction of them who are in our cells and who are being welcomed into our community every day, it might be better if the pre-believers could identify people going the other way before they run into them at the bridal shower — put them in their own kind of cells rather than keeping their unbelief a secret with them where faith is crucial.

I almost hate to bring this up when Tea Party people are rallying on government steps all over the country, drawing lines, trying to “take the nation back for God” (and white people).  But Jesus says, “[The one] who is not with me is against me, and [the one] who does not gather with me scatters (Matt 12:30).  In the Message paraphrase, Petersen puts the contest for loyalty like this: “This is war, and there is no neutral ground. If you’re not on my side, you’re the enemy; if you’re not helping, you’re making things worse.” I’m not trying to draw lines. But the fact is, a lot of pre-believing people are actually helping Jesus. A lot of people who have lost the faith that did not save them are not. I am at least going to say that.

For the most part, even when the secularizing folks want to divide off and divide up, I am going to let it all play out and trust God to do his work however he can – even using me to help. When frustrated people have spoken to me about the dilemma of the formerly-committed continuing to dwell in the community, I have to offer something else Jesus says:

“Jesus told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
“The owner’s servants came to him and said, ‘Sir, didn’t you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?’
“‘An enemy did this,’ he replied.
“The servants asked him, ‘Do you want us to go and pull them up?’
“‘No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’” (Matthew 13:24-30)

I apologize to anyone who feels insulted by possibly being alluded to as a “tare.” But your lack of helping is making things worse – for me, anyway. I’ll be OK, since I am NOT, ultimately, responsible for what happens to myself and the world, God is – and I’m good with God. If I’m conscious enough when we meet, you won’t get burned by me, even if feel a bit singed myself.

Under the Umbrella or Not

Building community, Leadership, ,

Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.  They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.   But you have an anointing from the Holy One, and all of you know the truth. (1 John 2:18-20) As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.( 2 John 1:6)

John’s letters are great for sorting out the intricacies of relationships in the body of Christ. He seems to be having a tough time with people who push the boundaries – they say they don’t sin, they leave the fellowship to start communities based on the perverse understandings they call the truth, they don’t walk in love. Things have not changed that much, have they? We are still having trouble dealing with people who brazenly sin. We are never sure what to do with beloved friends who decide to set up shop just outside the boundaries of our church. We are not always sure whether they or us are not walking in love – or even if we like thinking about they or us. We are always sorting things out.

Under someone’s umbrella

An image I have been pondering is about being “under the umbrella” of someone. In John’s terms that would be under the “anointing from the Holy One,” of course, and showing that one “belonged to us.” He is writing to “dear children” so he undoubtedly thinks of them as under the protection of his authority and love. When you have someone sharing your umbrella they have a special, intimate place you provide for them.

The other night we had an intense discussion (that is not code for “argument”) among some leaders about how certain people seemed to function “under the umbrella” of a leader (particularly people who seemed to be buds with a pastor). We were sorting that idea out. Some people seem to get special treatment — when they sin (sometimes repeatedly), the patience shown them looks like it is too patient. It is like they get a “bye,” when other people get opposed. Some people even get elevated into leadership through less-than-typical ways because another leader facilitates that and one has to wonder how that happened when others go through a lot of scrutiny and function with a lot more accountability.

It was an important discussion. I had a couple of immediate reactions:

1) When the church is not having a vibrant mission — including new people who need to be fed with truth and love, they turn to the niceties of their structure and start wondering about injustices. When the “umbrella” is not expanding, people begin to squabble about getting wet.

2) Pastors and other leaders in the church are allowed personal choices and preferences about who shares their limited umbrella space. Intimacy is not unlimited and is usually subjective. It is not necessarily something one can demand. A leader might have a special interest in someone, have a history with them, or have a deeper knowledge of them than they have of others. They should not show favoritism, but certain people might be under their “protection” in a deeper way than others. It is a blessing that we all care for one another, and we have many leaders, not just one pastor.

As I thought about the conversations some more, I felt more sympathy:

1) I really feel for people who feel subject to the whims of inconsistent leaders. Leaders can often be so blind and we can so often be oppressed by their blindness. They forget that what they do usually teaches more than what they say or write. When their friends get special, even undeserved treatment, the rest of the people they oversee don’t feel much like friends.

2) I also feel for leaders who get monitored for any hint of injustice by people who never do the difficult things they are doing. Before one can criticize someone for protecting someone in a perverse way, they should have someone under their umbrella. John called people “dear children”  — the people he has nurtured in faith are like family to him, so of course he is concerned for their protection. Such care is a beautiful thing; we wouldn’t want to turn it in to a commodity that should be equally available from the “pastor store.” We should all be producing that love ourselves, not just demanding it.

It is no wonder that people have deserted the capital-C-Church in droves in the last ten years. In general, the leadership is likely to be inept, unconscious or experimenting with things John would call antichrist. It is no wonder that people who manage to stay connected often resort to being nice but a bit remote, lest they have to deal with the intricacies of love in a missional community. John knows it take the anointing of the Holy Spirit to do that.

I hope we stick with it. The deep-level discussion among the leaders encouraged me. It’s not like it is typical for regular people to worry about how to help the person needing discipline while attending to the desires of people who need someone to be disciplined. Our quarterly Love Feast encouraged me even more. It was such a celebration of what John names belonging and remaining! It was so not antichrist. Though our relationships can get so sick, they are also the place we get so well. I hope we keep praying, with John, that the Holy Spirit enables us to walk in love.

Seriously. Watch Your Tongue

Building community, ,

Last night we had what we call “Rabbi Time.” It is an attempt to learn in a fashion that Jesus seemed to use. It is dialogical. It is full of questions. It allowed good minds to develop and strengthened our tools for mission. We centered around the word “identity” – how the world uses that word/concept/reality, the politics of it, the fracturing of it and our version of its formation — if we even want to use the word. I’m not ready to write about all we were thinking. It was a lot.

It is serious

What is on my mind this morning is how serious it was. Rabbi Time was not without laughter, but people focused on important things: they did not feel the need to be ironic, when they laughed it was from joy or recognition, there were tears, too. I need to be with serious people like that. I think I feel about the people together for Rabbi Time like Paul felt when he wrote to the Philippians:

I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Phil 1:3-6)

Having serious partners in whom one is confident is irreplaceable. Knowing that they are going to stick with God as God sticks with them is life giving.

It was not serious enough

I was also at the Brethren in Christ Conference over the weekend. It was also full of serious partners. I came away inspired; revved up and eager to give the best I’ve got to serve Jesus. We BIC, as a people, are securely focused on our mission. That is a very good thing – and we are succeeding in it in significant ways. If the conference was about anything, it was about telling encouraging stories about our mission.

But I was disturbed to keep running into a strange jocularity among our leaders that undermined how serious we are. They seem to share a common sense of self-deprecating humor (or maybe low self-esteem) that leaks out into others-deprecating. The banter between two of the leaders on the platform at one point in the conference was a good example of what ended up coloring a lot of the deep things we were talking about.

At one point one of them spoke about our Manual of Doctrine and Government (the plan for how we operate as a family) and he said something like, “I’m sure you have this by your bedside for nighttime reading” in a mocking way, as if no one would ever take us that seriously. It was like John Stewart on the Daily Show, only it did not point at something that needed taking down. It was humor ruling, not serving. I thought we were being taught to be ashamed if we were too serious about the BIC. Since I know none of my leaders intended to do that, I am inspired to watch my tongue. I can only imagine how many times I have given unintended messages that undermined what I was shooting for.

Pre-emptive attacks

A similar thing happened during Rabbi Time. Someone pointed out something about Circle of Hope and said something like, “It seems like it is of the Holy Spirit, but I would not want to call it that.” It was as if they were afraid they would be mocked, so before they spoke they did a pre-emptive attack on what might shame them. Such things have me ruminating on being serious. I think I need to be less ashamed of Jesus and his work in me (and us), and more ashamed that I would make him less than he is, even doubting for others that I was witnessing his Spirit at work before they had a chance to doubt it!

The world will tear us down and mock us enough, let’s not help it. It is important to be able to laugh at oneself, let’s not lose that capability. But even our humor should build up. If we mock one another, our community or ourselves, we could make someone ashamed to take us and our Lord seriously. I need to watch my tongue. Seriously.

It’s a Depression: How to face poverty

Building community, , , , , ,

The story goes that one of the young brothers among the desert monks went to an elder and asked, “Would it be right if I kept a little money in my possession, in case I should get sick?”

The elder, seeing that he wanted to keep the money, said, “Keep it.”

The brother went back to his place and began to wrestle with his thoughts, saying “I wonder if the elder really gave me his blessing. So he went back and asked him, “In the Lord’s name, tell me the truth, because I am upset over this money.”

The elder told him, “Since I saw your thoughts and your desire to keep the money, I told you to keep it. But it is not good to keep more than we need for our body. Now this money is your hope. If it should be lost, would God not care for you?”

 That’s the question, isn’t it? “Will God care for me?” In a depression that is even more difficult to believe.

The gift of poverty 

We sometimes talk about the spiritual gift of poverty that is implied in 1 Corinthians 13:3: “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing” and spoken of in 2 Corinthians 8:9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich.”

If you have the gift of voluntary poverty (like the monks in the quote above were working out), then maybe the economic depression we are in feels like an opportunity to trust God and you are excited to see what happens. For most of us, however, we are more likely to be slogging it out in our more typical spiritual capacity. No doubt we long for greater gifts. But, for now, we are trying to do what we must do in the face of difficult circumstances.

poverty
MoMA | Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. 1936

What to do when we face poverty

It is a good time to revisit what we are called to do when we face poverty. There are some basic ways we typical believers are taught to live:

1) All believers are called to live free from the bondage of materialism and undue attention to personal comfort (Matt. 6:19-24, Luke 12:33-34, 14:33). The goal is to never be burdened with material things and never to be a burden (1 Thess. 2:9). This does not mean individualism or self-reliance, but it does mean personal responsibility.

2) Some people may be called to special divestment of wealth because possessions are a stumbling block to them (Mark 10:17-23). This does not mean that having possessions is wrong. But it does mean that possessiveness can control us. We may also be called to divest ourselves of our high expectations for our wealth and success and reduce ourselves to following what God has for us rather than what the “invisible hand” promises. This expectation may be more controlling than the possessions themselves.

3) Not all giving and not all poverty are examples of the gift of voluntary poverty (2 Cor. 8:1-4, Rev. 2:9). We may need to admit that we need help – that we are involuntarily poor. The greatest antidote to poverty in our society is sharing, and sharing is probably the antidote we are most reluctant to use. Share housing. Share incomes. Come up with joint projects to make money. Individually, we may not all have enough to live on. But, chances are, as a church we have more than enough to live on.

Rely on one another

If we do not help one another, we may not get a more miraculous act of help from God. We often rely on God to move the godless mechanism of the “economy” to help us, instead of relying on his own body – and we are upset that we are not helped. Likewise, the body often has very little imagination for how we are connected financially and we end up sending people to “the world” for help, relying on people/powers who don’t care about Jesus to care like Jesus! In this era of reduced circumstances, we will need to return to a Biblical view of ourselves. For that necessity we can give thanks for the depression.

I think we need to seek a dramatic filling of God’s Spirit in our church, so we can meet the challenges of this day. The first Christians are a good example of how this can happen in a group of people. When the Holy Spirit filled them they followed the Lord’s example of

  • owning nothing that tied them to this time and place and
  • distributing what they had to relieve the burdens or meet the needs of others (Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-37).

Right now, we are seeing an increased call upon our compassion fund for food and shelter; I am delighted that we store up money for that use. Many of us already share housing and even incomes – that’s good. Our convictions and skills may be even more necessary this year – because it is an economic depression.

I believe God will help us. Even if we don’t obey him, for our sake he becomes as poor as we are. But to be blessed, we must become poor in ourselves to be rich in Him.

Agree to Reconcile

Building community, Life as the church, ,
Abba Agathon of Egypt.

Abba Agatho used to say: “If one is able to revive the dead, but is not willing to be reconciled to his neighbor – it is better to leave the dead in the grave.”

Paul said about the same thing as Abba Agatho in 1 Corinthians 13, but most people have  domesticated Paul’s lines into something we’d find in a fortune cookie. So let’s stick with Agatho.

Hopefully, what he said will stick with us. Because the thing that kills churches most effectively is the unwillingness of Christians to reconcile. We should stop agreeing to disagree, and start agreeing to agree. We should have our potentially church-killing conflicts, but use them to learn to reconcile. It seems to me that Christians, in general, have regularly decided to follow the command of Jesus/Paul/Agatho by just avoiding conflict, altogether. As a result, we either explode from pent up frustration or implode from the pretence that we would never explode. I think many of us were relieved when the ethic of “tolerance” took over the moral vacuum left by our unreconciling churches so we could at least feel like we could be as “nice” as everyone else by avoiding conflict, or making it illegal!

I have been talking to several of our leaders lately (and we have 50-plus cell leaders, along with everyone else in our leader-intensive system). Some of them are having a tough time with the thought that they might start a conflict — and leading can often seem like it is perpetually on the verge of starting a conflict. Even when a leader is merely saying, “I would like us to proceed in the way we all decided we want to go,” it could seem like starting a fight. Just providing encouragement in the name of the whole, since it might appear to be at the expense of the individual, could feel so much like prospective conflict a new leader won’t do it. They are quite afraid (and possibly legitimately so) that someone will say, “Who died and made you king?’ or “So now you work for the man!” or “I’m just nor feeling that anymore,” or who knows what else? What are we supposed to do when we feel conflict is coming? We feel these fears when we relate with parents, co-workers and neighbors, too, not just fellow-followers.

The Jesus way of reconciliation

We need to live by faith. The key work of faith is following the example of God in the person of Jesus, who does whatever it takes to be reconciled with a clueless, broken-down creation. Jesus did not explode all over people and coerce them and he did not dismiss them by pretending they weren’t in conflict with him. He called them to a new way to relate to God and others and then demonstrated just how one does that. He told the truth, acted in love and then kept acting.

Conflict is not merely about the conflict. It is about faith. Having good conflict may take converting someone so they have the wherewithal to have a decent relationship that includes coming to mutual agreement about living together in love. If you can raise the dead, it is not more powerfully Christian than being reconciled. For those of us willing to follow Jesus as completely as reconciliation requires, we may need to start with our own faith. We should avoid starting with the lack of faith we note in others. It is rather easy to point out that, “They not only can’t fight well, they can’t reconcile!” We need to watch ourselves watching others who do not reconcile and watch ourselves looking down on them for messing up our beautiful church. That’s not where Jesus started. Don’t judge; convert.

Do you want the church to live? Nurture agreement among us that we will reconcile with God and others before we get into our inevitable fights. Have that conflict. Don’t wait to be offended by what someone does or does to you, or wait to be offended by how incompletely they are reconciling with others. Proactively work toward a culture of reconciliation. Get a positive agreement about forming a reconciling environment with each other – an environment in which conflicted people need to reconcile is accepted. It is something worth fighting about. Someone told me the other day that they actually experienced, in their own church, the cliché church-split over the color of the carpet! Before that happens in our own backyard, let’s note the possibility and help each other prepare not to perpetrate that soul-numbing behavior. It would be good for someone to quote us after we’re dead like people quote Abba Agatho. He used to say, “If one is able to revive the dead, but is not willing to be reconciled to her neighbor – it is better to leave the dead in the grave.”

[A later version]

Stop Eating that Damned Apple (Please)

Building community, Doing Theology, , ,

I want you to know…that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any human, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ. Galatians 1:11-12

I have been talking to several cell leaders who feel like their cells are drowning in discussion fomented by people who would probably kick people out of their “Bible study” if they said something like Paul said to the Galatians, above. A lot of these dear complainees formerly attended rationalistic churches that started them down the road to seeing their faith as an exercise in thinking the right thoughts and organizing their lives around them.

Learning to listen

So what do they want to do in their cell, now that they have moved out of the church of their youth and are thinking their own thoughts in the big city? They come to the cell meeting, the discussion is left open to see what God has been revealing, and what do they do with the kind people who are leaning in to listen? They lead them to continually scratch their heads over some conundrum. They keep coming up against the imponderables that rationalistic Christianity leads to. They keep bumping up against atonement theories that they haven’t thought through. They want to re-discuss the trinity. They love the topic of predestination. If you bring out the Bible they’ll start channeling some professor debunking its historicity or consistency and they’ll want to compare it to the latest Buddhist tidbit their yoga teacher passed on.

Their faith is an argument, not a relationship. And most of the time they didn’t really understand the argument to begin with and never really bought it. I, for one, love all these discussions — when they are open-hearted and part of a real struggle for faith they can be beautiful. But they can be hard on a cell leader. Because when they are just the dark side of someone resisting Jesus, they are tiresome, even dangerous. When they are merely an unconscious, stuck person floundering around in the mire that bad teaching created for them, they can be pitiful and sad.

Paul is speaking out of his experience with God (and I am too), THEN he makes an argument. He is worried that the Galatians will begin with the Spirit and then return to the teachings of mere people. He is afraid that Jesus has not really been born in them and so they are easily duped into returning to mere religion. The cell leaders to which I am referring feel his pain. The prison doors have been opened and certain friends won’t walk out — they rebel against being imprisoned, but they are still discussing the terms of their sentence, post-parole.

The original argument over the apple

Ironically, while pondering the theories of Bible interpretation, many Christians we meet have missed main messages of the Bible. For instance, they eat the apple every day:

Rembrandt Adam and Eve

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
            When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked… Genesis 3:4-7

When the goal of faith has been reduced to knowing stuff, when faith is about feeling the security and power of knowing the secrets and explaining everything perfectly; it is easy to feel naked all day. People come to our cells from parts of the kingdom of God where folks are trying to stay covered up all day and the main pursuit of fellowship is all about collecting another piece of data to add to their wardrobe. They are always trying to look right. They only trust people who seem to know it all. And they tend to try to be know-it-alls themselves, even though everyone can see that the data is not covering their human parts. Did God tell them they didn’t know enough? I don’t think so.

The Bible repeatedly says that knowing anything begins with knowing God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Eat Jesus, not the apple again. Then we can talk about faith.

Devising Ways for Reconciliation

Building community, , ,

Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die.
But God does not take away life;
instead, he devises ways so that a banished person may not remain estranged from him.
2 Samuel 14

I was happy to speak to a great “audience” on Sunday at the Madison Street Church. One of their great gifts to the world is to accept someone as they are and envelope them  in their long love for each other. I was happy to have been there at the beginning of that love and to still be included, though living far from the wind-swept skies of California.

Pains and losses of long loves

I had a great weekend. The weather was spectacular; the celebration was moving; the time for renewed friendship was precious. But lurking in the background of the joy and love was the pain and losses of long lives, long loves and long mission. The same background was threaded through the scripture I used for my Sunday message. I am still pondering the reality.

I am especially interested in how hard it was for David to let go of his losses and let Absalom return to the kingdom. He lost the integrity of his family when his son Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar. He lost his son Amnon to murder. He lost his son Absalom to banishment. He would not let go of his losses and let Absalom return, even though his holding on to them created new loss, as he continually mourned the absence of his son.

Do you unconsciously hold on to your loss, sometimes, like I do? It is like we feel it would be unjust of us to not hold on to the losses we carry – the lost virginity, the lost integrity, the lost love, the lost health, the lost opportunity, the lost years. We own our losses them like they form our identity. Our lives can be so threaded with what we’ve lost, the feelings twine around our hearts and strangle us.

Lost friendships

I am especially thinking about the lost friendships that weigh on us. I was in my home town this weekend and I couldn’t help but feel sorry about the dear friends of our youth that we couldn’t even locate anymore. And I couldn’t help but hear about the losses incurred among families and between parents and children. The scripture above implies that such feelings are inevitable, since we are like spilled water on the ground. What has happened has happened. Our life is moving to death, so every day has some death in it.

But since we have God on our side we have life to hold on to. I have often experienced him breaking the hold of loss on me that I am holding on to. We know so well that in Jesus God brings us eternal life. Grasping that in the middle of our dying is the secret to our joy in Christ, isn’t it? Especially when it comes to the losses we experience in our relationships, we really need to go with God’s eternal strategy and devise ways for loves that can be renewed to be renewed. If the banished can return, we need to help with the process, not just mourn. God has gone to great lengths to reverse my self-banishment. I need to follow his example. Whether I have been so hurt I banished someone, or I hurt someone so badly they banished themselves, or whether we were both just stupid and we got unwittingly banished, I need to devise a way to reconciliation. What’s more, for all the people who are self-banished from God, I need to work with Jesus on God’s great plan for reconciliation.

It is a season of reconciliation among the Circle of Hope. I have been glad to see hearts softening and banishments ended. I doubt we will get it all done during Lent. Some people have been driven far away from us and from God. Some devices will be hard to invent and harder to implement. It could take years. But if we are close to the heart of God, I don’t see how own hearts would become adept at much that is better than strategizing for reconciliation.

Nineteen Flame-tending Women, to Start

Building community, Leadership, , ,

February 1 is Ibolc. It marks the first stirrings of spring in Ireland. St. Brigid’s Day is attached to it. Candlemas is also attached to it, marking the 40 days after Christmas when Mary went to the Temple, with baby Jesus in tow, to honor the rules for being ritually purified after giving birth, and thus meeting Simeon and Anna. It’s the Candle Mass in the old days because everyone in Ireland brought their special, home-use beeswax candle to the meeting for a blessing. Those candles symbolized the presence of God, the flame of the Spirit with them. As with all the big days of the Christian year, Brigid’s Day is all mixed up with legend, the seasons of paganism, and arguments over what is the best way to honor her memory.

I’m not bothering with the controversies too much. I feel free to strain out good things from not-so-good things whenever I can. I’m into “testing everything and holding on to what is good” as Paul instructs the Thessalonians to do. Using Jesus’ metaphor another way, I think we should strain out the gnat of good and not swallow the camel of nonsense when we need to.

The site of the perpetual flame and a flame keeper at Kildare ca 1780

I like to remember the Brigids of my own era on Brigid’s Day. As the church was first forming, brilliantly, in Ireland, Brigid was a great leader (see last year’s blog about it, if you like). At the site of the community she founded and lead in Kildare, we visited the enclosure for the perpetual flame that Brigid tended and which burned for over a thousand years before Protestants doused it. The flame was a sign of the presence of Jesus in the heart of Ireland. The guide told us that the flame’s keepers were on a twenty-day cycle. Nineteen women were selected to keep the fire going and on the twentieth night Brigid kept it herself.

I like the idea of nineteen women keeping the flame of faith going. I know several sets of those kind of women, and so do you. They are keeping faith alive in a time when there are a lot more than Protestants trying to douse it! I collected my own roster, just to celebrate the idea that women are still courageously tending the flame. I listed the first nineteen who randomly came to my mind, below, and resisted listing nineteen more. I know many women who keep the flame burning among the Circle of Hope. I thought you might like to add one or two to the list, as well.

Brigid’s Day is a good day to celebrate what burns with the fire of Jesus. It is a good day to celebrate faithful women who tend the flame and to imagine all the good they are causing to stir up springtime in the winter of the world. By selecting nineteen I did not mean to deselect all the rest, of course — this is not the Grammy Awards of spirituality! I just want us to look around on Brigid’s Day and note the spark of the perpetual flame in each one, celebrate what God has done, and anticipate what God  might do.

Here’s my random nineteen.

Gwen – spiritual director, promoter of mental health, flame-builder in children
Sarah – leader of cells and cell leaders and network builder
Rachel – pastor to many and group leader for those in need
Marquita – homemaker, daring leader, student
Aubrey –vision keeper, compassionate teacher
Jen – risk taker, church planter
Martha – business maker, fearless leader
Tracey – tenacious servant, overcomer
Megan – hardworking environment maker
Katie – hospitable faith builder
Christina – business builder, evangelist, mother to many
Kelly – ambitious talent user, seeker of the deep
Angie – teacher in song, empath
Missy – missional organizer, persistent servant
Mimi – peacemaker, missional educator and fire builder
Emily – visionary organizer, risk taker, networker
Melissa – consistent caregiver, safety net sewer
Brittney – visionary outreacher, passionate leader
Courtney – multi-talented creator, brave life developer

If you feel like contributing to the formation of another nineteen flame-tenders (or more!), add a comment!

Answering those Who Teeter…again

Building community, , , ,

Peter answered him, “We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?”  Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.  And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.  Matthew 19:27-30

The philosophers and scientists of our time have applied a lot of brainpower to finding out as much as they can about the natural proclivities of the rest of us. We are analyzed and tracked exhaustively so that what we want to consume will be delivered on demand. The Egyptian slaves of old built pyramids, we buy things. All this year the nation has breathlessly watched the statistics to see whether the big American consumption behemoth will start to eat ravenously again and so propel the stockholder’s profits and create those elusive jobs. The wise men of the age nervously watch to see if their predictions about what we want are right.

You can tell that I resent their science, can’t you? I resent big, powerful, faceless entities relentlessly using data collected on me to create products that are the images of my inmost desires. Essentially, they keep trying to get me to buy myself! – or at least some grainy image me or faint whiff of my desire. As much as they work on it, they’ll get more adept. Really, doesn’t it seem like the powers don’t even sell products anymore, they just sell just the hope of having the experience of being ourselves? We have fallen into a weird self-consumption; every day we get tempted to take a bite out of “ourselves.” We seem to be trying to get a self by eating ourselves. If you don’t notice you aren’t full yet – the advertisers do.

The recent Jeep commercial we were subjected to before Young Victoria (or was it Nine?) is a good example. I live. I ride. I am. Jeep. I wonder why the powers can afford to spend a bazillion dollars on that nonsense. It must be because it speaks to what a lot of us believe, and so brings a return. I think it feeds us our own delusions and sin and then gives us a Jeep to assuage the insatiable hunger for something  — we buy things that can’t satisfy, but we’re used to accepting the sensation of momentary fullness as something. It is like eating a diet of candy canes. We seem to generally like that.

Teetering on the edge of desire

As you can see in the scripture, Jesus feeds us what we don’t know we want. He does not base his actions on data he collects from us. He has an entirely different idea of consumerism. Jesus feeds us what we aren’t. It means transformation. When Jesus says, “Give up all your nonsense and come make sense with me, in every sense of the phrase,” it might initially seem like a bad deal. A Jeep seems like it might be worth it, in comparison. But, the Jeep only looks like it is all about wind in our perfect hair. One can’t buy freedom like that. Even if more elementary school teachers brainwash more children into thinking freedom can be paid for with our lives, it still will not be true. Jesus is better than the Jeep. He says, “Make a total allegiance to me and you will not miss anything you desire. Love turns to LOVE.  Family to FAMILY.

I am not sure we believe that allegiance to Jesus will transform our stuck-in-the-mud desires into fully human desires. A lot of us spend a whole life teetering, twittering and vacillating between Jeep and Jesus. I’m not denigrating the process of decision as I hope you will see, nor am I even saying that the way to Jesus can’t be through Jeep. But I am lamenting whatever pain teetering may bring to us. (If you’re not experiencing teetering, this may just irritate you, beware).

I think teetering makes forming community hard. I felt like writing this note to you because I watched some brilliant people trying to do some brilliant community formation the other day and they ran right into some people who just couldn’t get out of their Jeeps to do it. To be a part of the mission, their recruits had to leave what they were already doing to join in with a new brilliant thing that was being formed. They just could not do it. They could not heed the call the whole way; they wanted to adapt the call to match what they were feeling. They wanted to compromise and “sort of” be a part. When they heard someone suspect that the community was too radical, they backed away. They pondered and pondered until the window of opportunity passed and they had slid into some other pursuit.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The recruits might have just as well been considering becoming a Christian, or making a covenant with the others of Circle of Hope, or just coming to a meeting in a regular fashion. (Or, to be honest, it would be the same thing on the antichirst side — they could have been called to not be a Christian, not commit to some “system,” or never be “in or out” of the boundaries of some meeting). Or maybe it sounds familiar because someone went through a similar experience when someone who loved them would not marry them. Or maybe you’ve read Matthew 19 before and felt with Jesus as he struggled.

No doubt you felt with yourself as you struggled, just like the first followers of Jesus. Transformation is hard. I don’t think we should underestimate how hard the change from unreconciled to reconciled with God is – especially since sin has retrained our hearts!. Reconciliation with others – even sticking with people we love, much less dealing with those we hate, is hard. Making a covenant, racial reconciliation, peacemaking! – we aren’t always feeling it. We feel like getting a Jeep, or at least like having wind in our hair — and if we follow the training of the people who apply the science around here, that is about all we will feel. It is amazing how often we trade Jesus in for a desire that is undeveloped. But it is not so amazing that we can’t have sympathy for those who asked Jesus, “What then will there be for us?” People are  always wondering that. And Jesus doesn’t mind answering the question….and answering it again.