Category Archives: Leadership

Build a trust system: Whether trials or Trump it starts with safety

Building community, Leadership

It is a tough era for building a trust system. When that idea first got going with us, maybe it was not really much of “a thing” because people wanted it and thought it was possible. Now trust has almost disappeared and building a trust system might be “THE thing” because it seems so impossible. Many people are wondering if we can believe in trust again, much less build it. But trust is the basis of Christian relationships, with God and others. How can we do without it?

trust artwork
Bruno Mangyoku

David Odom executive director of Leadership Education at Duke Divinity, wrote a blog post about trust a week or so ago that is still making us think.

Maybe it makes me think because Gwen and I started watching The Honorable Woman from the BBC on Netflix, upon the advice of someone we trust. It is a series whose stated premise is, “It’s no wonder we don’t trust anyone.” I DO NOT recommend this series — we can turn on the news for lies, unfortunately. But it did make me wonder if we can build the trust system we desire if most people have a traumatized trust center in their soul.

The entire United States is having trust issues, and experience what troubles everyone. Donald Trump is a big tip, but he is not the whole iceberg of mistrust waiting to sink our love. The president’s lies are just so well documented (by what he deftly labels “fake news” outlets), they are hard to avoid. People are no longer mincing words about them. Journalists regularly point out the authoritarian tactic labeled the  “Big Lie.” Telling the big lie is a technique dictators use to gain power. After WW2 the agency that preceded the CIA warned the U.S. population against dictator tactics. They actually issued a report that outlined the primary rules evil people follow for lying big:

Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

This sounds familiar, right? It is now well established that the President is an inveterate liar, a lesson first learned during his decades as a businessman and reality star, then re-affirmed during his presidential campaign, and then reiterated once again with his inauguration, starting with his Big Lie about the size of the crowd on that day. At the moment, Trump’s favorite lie is that the whole Russia situation is a hoax. For instance, last Thursday, just hours after high-ranking members of his administration confirmed that Russia is meddling (and has meddled) in U.S. elections, Trump made this declaration before a rally crowd in right here in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania:

In Helsinki, I had a great meeting with Putin. We discussed everything…We got along really well. By the way, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Now we’re being hindered by the Russian hoax — it’s a hoax, OK?

This is not just “political talk.” Trump greatly contributes to the cloud of mistrust in which we wander every day. When the Leadership Team of Circle of Hope started talking about some momentous  next steps for the church last month, a few people automatically assumed they were going to receive poor treatment from faceless leaders somewhere (even though they were sharing their fears with members of our Leadership Team face to face!). Even though we say we are building a trust system, there are a lot of people who are finding that dubious prospect in this disappointing era of U.S. history.

So the article from David Odom was timely, if irritating. We need to think about building trust, right now! It is irritating to have to do it, since we have already been doing it. But as soon as we build some trust, some emissary from the world comes along and plants a bomb in it. So we are always REbuilding shattered trust. And for increasing numbers people, we are not rebuilding, we are building from scratch, since they never had much trust to begin with.

Trust begins with safety

Odom says, “To cultivate trust, leaders must contribute to a sense of safety, commit themselves to listening, empower others to act, learn from their mistakes, and promise only what they can deliver.” The leaders of our church definitely think they are doing these things until someone hints they are not — which someone usually does.

What Odom discovered in his consultations with churches is that the low trust among congregants exhibited before hiring him as a consultant transformed into remarkably high trust in him as soon they shared stories of pain and loss. Once people had a chance to tell their stories, even to a stranger, they began to discover what was really important to them.

His work was to figure out how to get people to listen to each other, across their dividing lines. For all the therapists listening, this probably sounds just like marriage counseling. And in the church, building trust is like marriage counseling because we share a love covenant as members of the body of  Christ. That covenant comes complete with all the passions we bring to relationships with our lovers.

Odom laments that today many people in the United States don’t remember a time when they were heard. Some feel that the American economy and society have left them far behind. Others have been silenced for generations, their stories missing from history books and media coverage. As a result, many increasingly believe that they can be understood only by people like themselves. So, by extension, people not like themselves feel dangerous. For protection, some people hide, while others lash out.

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The Honorable Woman in her safe room.

Building trust is a crucial task

In this moment, engendering trust is one of the Jesus follower’s most important and difficult tasks. This task is not only about one’s personal truthfulness and reliability but also about one’s leaders and entire community. We can start with a foundation of credibility and transparency. But before some people can even consider those things, they need a sense of safety.

We call ourselves a Circle of Hope, but we know that before people can get over how hopeless they feel, they need to feel safe.  We can do something about what they feel interpersonally, but factors (like Donald Trump) outside our influence can make everything feel dangerous. In the TV show I referenced above, the main character sleeps in a “safe room,” she has been so traumatized. After watching such a show (and they are legion), then listening to some news, we all feel the need for a safe room! The impact of systemic oppression that has kept people at the margins of organizations, communities and society is now being named more clearly for those in power. Marginalized people have always known they are not safe; now, more privileged people feel unsafe as well.

One would hope that if we provide opportunities for relationships, trust will be an inevitable product. But many people can’t get into relationship because they do not trust themselves, others or the system to allow love. The vulnerability is just too much for them. That’s why many people avoid cell groups, can’t stand a Sunday meeting of less than 50 people, and often feel the whole church is too demanding to be tolerated.

Odom gave an example how he discovered this preliminary step into safety on the way to trust when he was a “freshly minted” church consultant. After a long meeting, a church leader pulled him aside and said, “If you were assisting my company, I would fire you. We trust you more than we trust ourselves. Don’t promise what you cannot deliver. We need you to be dependable.”

He was trying to design a good process to help the congregation after it had been betrayed by its pastor. But he learned that before the people could buy into the process, they needed to feel safe with the leader of the process. They had to place their confidence in that person and experience the leader’s confidence in them. They did not trust themselves to have difficult conversations alone and needed the leader to bridge this gap of trust. In conflict situations all over the world, where trust is broken, Christians often make themselves the bridge. One mediator in South Africa taught me a long time ago that being a Christian is often allowing yourself to be the bridge on which both sides walk toward reconciliation.

There are some basic behaviors that can build trust

Even among our church, where we specialize in letting love rule, we face mistrust. Any action is subject to scrutiny. Any situation can become primarily about trust. We must admit how challenging this is. (I am trying to do that with this post). Plus we need to admit the emotional consequences of needing to build trust. At best, it feels irritating.

How can we all build trust – especially our leaders? Odom has important ideas (here elaborated for us):

  • Let safety-building be a priority, even if you think it should be a given. Analyze every situation through the lens of how its resolution will increase or decrease the sense of safety the weakest are longing to experience.
  • Listen, listen, listen. What is everyone saying? – not just the people with whom you feel safe. What feelings are underneath the words? What is the history behind the concern? Listen for systemic injustice that often goes unnamed. We are not necessarily agreeing with people by listening to them, but we are offering a key ingredient of safety: acceptance.
  • Empower people to solve their own problems. There is not some systemic tinkering that can be done to make every problem go away. We can’t have a meeting or pass a resolution and assume everything will be better — sometimes yes, often no. Given the multiple and deep causes of the challenges people face every day, the leader is not the only person who can or should act. We are all in the trust-building project together.
  • Name mistakes and lessons learned. This is one reason we often talk about our failures. People are deciding right now how to talk about our present situation – is it a time of failure? adjustment? growth? transition? All the above? There are many things to learn. We will keep collecting stories of our mistakes as well as our successes. We will apologize and we will celebrate.
  • Don’t promise what you cannot deliver. This is one reason we are serious about our covenant and determined to live according to our agreements, not according to whim of the leaders or the tyranny of the most recent majority. We want to keep naming our intentions and understand our limits. We’ll keep pushing on the limits, but we will know they are there. People often walk into one of our meetings looking for a safe place and run into the fact that we are new, we are surprising or disappointing, and they don’t fit in yet. Rather than fretting about that inevitable reaction, we will keep loving those strangers who also feel we are strange.

Cultivating trust requires consistent work over time. Maybe that’s why it often feels irritating. Trust often ebbs and flows and is influenced by personal, organizational and societal experiences. To keep building trust, we need to admit our daily responsibility to cultivate it – most of the time, cultivating trust would be a good first step when you greet your mate in the morning, when you enter your next cell meeting, or when you see who is at the Sunday meeting.

Helping each other recognize how important trust is may be critical to any claim we make to be authentic followers of Jesus — who has trusted us with His own Spirit!  Our future can take many good roads if there is trust. Many processes can work and and varying plans can come to fruit if there is trust in God and trust in others. But most processes will go nowhere and most plans will never get off runway if they are overloaded with the terrible cargo of mistrust. So as we navigate the stormy seas of Trump and our own turmoil, let’s keep steering toward safety in our Savior and cooperate as He creates a safe place for people to explore trust. Those are steps we can all take in building a trust system — thank God we can trust Jesus for what comes next!

Paul’s disasters: And those looming for us

Leadership, The Mission,
Tough day for Paul

The apostle Paul’s church planting project was definitely prone to disasters! When I was in Greece following him around, that fact I knew from the history in Acts became more and more evident.

  • In Philippi, the first main stop, he is attacked, flogged and thrown into prison!
  • In Thessalonica, jealous opponents round up ne’re-do-wells and start a riot. He escapes after dark.
  • In Berea, he is successful until agitators from Thessalonica show up. He escapes by sea
  • In Athens, he makes a great speech, but he is not too successful — not quite a disaster, but disappointing.
  • In Corinth, where he stays quite a while, he is thrown out of the synagogue and moves next door. The Jews eventually make a united attack and bring him before the authorities.

When you read Paul’s letters back to these church plants with a disaster lens, you realize that he was trying to prevent what was about to kill them! In Galatia, they are changing the gospel back to Judaism. In Corinth, there are factions which are each  reinventing the good news to support their power struggle. In Philippi, pillars of the church are unreconciled. In Thessalonica, people are freeloading off the community as they wait for Jesus to return.

Before we get too discouraged about humanity, Luke makes sure you understand that miracles ensue. [We need those.] I think he makes sure we see how difficult it was to plant the church so no one gets the idea it was not miraculous. His book should be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit, so we more human-centered types will not forget the Apostles were just like us. The big miracle is that the church not only survives, it appears to thrive on disaster, from the first martyrs and persecutions to the present day attacks on Indian believers associated with the Brethren in Christ.

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We are prone to disasters

Last week I reminded our Leadership Team Core of these historical facts as we started our meeting for a couple of important reasons.

First, we Americans think we are so powerful (rich, smart, better, etc.) that everything will and should work out. A traditional song of some American Christians is “Victory is mine!” Others go right along with “God bless USA!” as the camera pans the soldiers. That just goes to say, as the president says, that we think we are supposed to win. So we are easily disappointed. If something doesn’t work (like marriage or most of our electronics) we throw it out. People leave relationships (and so the church) at the drop of the hat, following their bliss. We almost never take the good given, because that offends our sense of what we deserve. We have a Christianity that looks almost nothing like Paul’s and so we cannot do disaster. We hardly ever take uncalculated risks, which he apparently did all day until Nero killed him.

Second, we are headed for any number of disasters

  • Trump may do us in [He’s like Nero].
  • We have bid farewell to a significant number of people in the past year and we might end up on a roll as people think we are less successful than we have been for the past 22 years. [Admit church planting failures]
  • We may buy another building in the Northwest that causes all sorts of trouble. [Do we need buildings?]
  • We are not sharing the amount of money people promised and we might need to make some radical adjustments to adapt. [Sharing is radical]
  • People keep sinning and you never know when the system gets too weak to endure it until it gets too weak.
  • We are transitioning from my former role to a whole new, better, structure. But it takes radicals to do it and we might not even be paying much attention  as (back to point one) we live in the Trump fog.

I must tell you, I think my dire warning about us met with the same reaction I had to Paul’s disasters in Greece and elsewhere. I was excited. I think our LTC was generally excited too. The fact is, we Jesus followers feel like we are really alive when we are on the edge of death in some way. How better to identify with Jesus? Paul said, “I want to share in the Lord’s suffering and so share in his resurrection!” Me too. I’m not going to be foolish in order to tease out a miracle — but I am foolish enough to require one.

I have often had some great solutions to problems, led by the Spirit. But I have to admit, I have persistently relied on miracles when it came to church planting. It is the only authentic and realistic thing to do. I may think I know a lot and think I should exercise a lot of power. But when it comes to church planting, it is an act of the Holy Spirit and we follow in the Lord’s wake to get anywhere at all. When we talk about being on the apostolic edge of what is next all the time (at least I hope you talk about that) it means being on the edge of disaster a lot, since we are also on the edge of the amazing next thing God is making us and making with us.

Wildness and worry: How Paul puts them together

Leadership, The Mission, , ,
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The ruins of the Council House in Philippi where Paul and Silas may have appeared before the Magistrates before they were thrown in prison.

A boring picture of rocks, then two pieces of the New Testament letters of Paul is not the most exciting way to begin this blog post. I hope it gets better for you.

I am trying to describe how wildness and worry go together in us.  And I mean both words in their best sense, since some of you may think both or either are not that attractive.

  • Wildness, when we are thinking of the Holy Spirit, is alluring — at least it is attractive in people who are free enough to experience and express God’s presence.
  • Worry, on the other hand, is usually seen as unattractive — and it should be when it is all about our fear. I am thinking of it as an inevitable feature of caring for others and for the redemption project, as you will see.

Here are the two Bible portions on my mind:

2 Corinthians 11:21-29

Whatever anyone else dares to boast about—I am speaking as a fool—I also dare to boast about. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they Abraham’s descendants? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? (I am out of my mind to talk like this.) I am more. I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?

Galatians 4:19-20…5:7-13

My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you! …The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

You were running a good race. Who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.” I am confident in the Lord that you will take no other view. The one who is throwing you into confusion, whoever that may be, will have to pay the penalty. Brothers and sisters, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished. As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.

When I was on my pilgrimage recently, following the Apostle Paul through Greece, I had a recurring fear: “If I tell anyone how much I identify with this man, will they label me a grandiose fool?” But last week I had to admit to my spiritual director that Paul has been my spiritual guide from day one of my faith. As I have the vantage point now to look back on many years, I can see how much that is true. I think the parts in bold, above, are key elements of his teaching, and I have tried to make them key to my life.

My new Paul icon from Berea

I identify with both Paul’s wildness and worry

You can decide if the Spirit speaks through Paul, or not, as he would heartily agree you should. So I offered two little portions of his letters today that demonstrate something I recently put together for myself, as well: There is a connection between his wildness and his worry.

My director was parsing out meaning in my deluge of storytelling the other day and he noted how I spoke with delight about how I stood before the “bema” in the ruins of Philippi, undoubtedly near where Paul stood himself, and loved the wildness of the whole scene. Then I was talking about my worries about the future of Circle of Hope and he noticed such a change in my demeanor that it was striking, “What are these two things? Do they go together?” I think he wanted me to stop worrying and move with my bliss.

I eventually told him, “It is all part of the same story.” I had been talking a lot about Paul so I said, “I think I can connect these two things to Paul, want to see me try?” He did. And I remembered today’s verses.

In our dialogue, I had been alluding to our Church Planting Summits last year, when we had all sorts of scenarios for the future of our movement. My director was surprised at how wild we are, since he has been a Presbyterian for a while. For instance, when Presbyterian pastors end their service in a local congregation (like I did in 2016), they are generally sent packing and have a strict no-contact clause in the ending agreement. Circle of Hope did not do that with me. So there I was last summer leading a discussion as Development Pastor about how we should connect as congregations (association, aggregation or composition?) and helping us consider combining congregations if they would be better together than struggling as small groups apart. He marveled at the flexibility! He could see the benefit of being one church in many locations. He said, “Most churches just try to survive and most of their energy goes toward protection, not freedom.” You are rather wild.

But I am also rather worried – quite often. I sometimes think I would rather buy a beach view and practice my well-earned inner peace apart from worries. But then I realize that I hooked my wagon to Jesus and God is very concerned about the earth. It is not so much that the Lord is just worrying over us like something shameful or terrible is going to happen to his creation – he knows the end. But he is worrying like a mother hen might brood over her eggs until they are hatched; and the Lord is fussing like a human mother whose children are just getting mature enough to drive a car.

The wildness of creation is at work. Re-creation has been set loose by Jesus. The sentient, loving beings who carry the heart of it all are yet to be fully revealed. Will they all make it to the good end? I am worried with that kind of worry.

Paul demonstrated both his wildness and worry when he wrote

You can see the complementary nature of wildness and worry in the Spirit in the verses I shared. The passages are often consigned to the “worry” category: “You dear Corinthians with whom I spent so much time. Are you really going to divide up and think you are more special than your teacher?” And “You dear Galatians who responded so favorably to the gospel, are you now going to listen to people who teach you need to be Jews first so you can be Christians?”

I can relate to the worry side. I often think it is wrong to worry — and mistrust in the end is probably wrong. But I might say, “Circle of Hope are you going to squander your community and alternativity now that it is so sorely needed? Will you really think about yourselves first and not imagine a future of mutual trust in Jesus?” Maybe we all relate more to anxiety, so when we see it in Paul we remember it.

But the wildness is also in these passages. I mean that very attractive Spirit-driven wildness that makes Paul such a notable and world-changing guy. I suppose if he walked into the Sunday meeting we’d either adore him or be scared to death by him. The way he makes his point to the Corinthians is to list all the wild things that have happened to him because of his calling in Jesus. Prison, floggings, shipwrecks, bandits, hunger, it goes on. When I was following his journey, just the amount of walking he did seemed daunting to me. The prospect of entering a new town in a car provoked enough anxiety in me! — when I was in Philippi, I was complaining that it was too hot and I was glad to get back to my air-conditioned vehicle! Paul was entering a new continent with a brand new message expecting God to work a wonder – and repeatedly that is just what the Spirit did.

To the Galatians he appeals to their highest, wildest selves in contradiction to teachers who had come in and appealed to their lowest and enslaved selves. He speaks so boldly people have been criticizing him for being too aggressive ever since. But Paul feels free and he speaks freely. And he thinks the Galatians can handle their freedom in the Spirit without being reduced to the Jewish law, which was just a tutor for their adulthood in the Spirit as the children of God. When I thought of Paul being hauled up in front of the magistrates, I was reminded of how much faith he had in the work of the Holy Spirit Jesus unleashed!

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A “celebration of what can be” by David M. Kessler

I can’t seem to have wildness without worry, either

I am not sure I convinced my director, but I began to convince myself that my wildness and worry went together. There is no way to take risks unless I hope they will make a difference. There is no way to exercise my freedom without hoping others experience the joy of it. There is no way to be part of a cell or team and not long for the fullness they represent or despair over the trials they face. There is no way to build the wild thing called the church and not worry over its future and brood over the fragile new birth springing up in it all the time. Paul was not just traveling around Greece for the sheer exhilaration of exercising his thrilling new freedom to do so! He was nurturing a people who would be set upon, almost immediately, by their own unprocessed sin and by people ready to redirect their movement into channels that suited themselves more than Jesus!

The movement of the good news in Jesus keeps on rolling in about the same way it did in Paul’s time. As I look back on how Jesus has led me, it makes me happy to think my mentor from the past was so influential. I wish I could be more like him, even now. But I am delighted the same Spirit who moved him made me like him at all! — intrinsically wild and often worried for good reasons.

Anything might work because nothing really works.

Leadership, The Mission, , ,

We had a sweetly earnest cell plan intensive the other night in the basement of 2212 S. Broad. All those couches reminded me of the youth group I used to lead! I suppose that’s why I remembered a lesson I learned very early in my life of mission.

Here’s the lesson: Anything might work because nothing really works. What I mean is: God works. I am just a vehicle, an opportunity, a marginally-capable participant. In the cause of redemption, God has used a lot more surprising partners than me to get things done.

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The cell leaders were mainly talking about how to make connections with people without seeming like Verizon trying to get someone to switch. [Hate this commercial]. They were lamenting those awkward conversations when they suspected someone felt weirdly pressured to sign on the dotted line when they were only being invited into a cell group — a group that would likely feel like a precious gift after a few minutes or meetings. “The ask” is always so hard.

So I told a story about being a youth pastor and feeling compelled to make new relationships with high school students. I used to somewhat-illegally go to Arlington High School and sit at one of the lunch tables hoping I would connect with someone. It was, of course, awkward enough to go to lunch when I was in high school. This was even more awkward. And more than a few kids let me know how weird it was, including the ones I already knew! But I also made some new friends, and many of them became friends just because they appreciated just how far I would go to get a chance to meet them [Love this commercial].

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I had learned a lesson from Jesus and I was just determined enough to apply it. Jesus also went to great lengths to get to know us. One time he found someone to heal in Jerusalem and the leaders were mad because he did it on the Sabbath. He told them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (John 5:17). Then they were mad that he said God was his father. Nothing worked with these people! He might have gone to a meeting in a basement and lamented that his healings resulted in too little and people responded poorly when he called on them! I would do that and have.

At the same time, I heard what he was saying and went out and tried again. Because the Holy Spirit has repeatedly made it plain that God couldn’t care less about the rejections and absurdities that people throw against Love and Truth. God is at work, so I can trust that. “My Father is still working” — and if that doesn’t work, then nothing works.

The fact is, I throw out a lot of resistance and nonsense myself! And what I come up with as a strategy is usually weak, at best. If I were basing my next move on my predicted effectiveness, I would certainly do nothing. I can demonstrate how ineffective I am (even when others think I’m successful!). Fortunately, God could not care less about my estimations of myself. He died for me when I was turned away and uses me in spite of myself, repeatedly.

That motley, beautiful crew in the basement had a shocking number of success stories to tell the other night — that is, if you consider God transforming lives to be success and you don’t restrict Jesus to making your plans for world redemption work out properly. You could tell we thought very little of our successes. The stories were told to encourage us not to give up, for the most part.

When we prayed, I silently hoped that we would see you at work, Lord. Anything we do is just for revealing you. If people don’t see you at work, what is there to do but heal them, or at least be at the table when they show up for lunch and provide the opportunity for living bread?

Nothing works. People will reject a healing done before their eyes by the Son of God! But anything can work: a prayer, a meeting, a note, a cold call, a random encounter, a song, because God is at work and Jesus is alive in his people. Why wouldn’t we just take the best shot we can according to whatever we have available at the moment? Stranger things have introduced people to eternity.

Why Five Congregations?: It is more than a strategy

Leadership, The Mission, , , , , , , , , ,

Becoming part of any organization, from a corporation to a little league can be very confusing for a while — a church, especially Circle of Hope,  is not that different. You can walk into all our meeting places, except Ridge Ave, when no one is there and any number of people who come in will ask, “This is a church?” Quite a few have looked at me about the same time and said, “You are a pastor?” If I explain, they say, “Most of you meetings are on Sunday night?” Once the high school kids from Pequea BIC in Lancaster Co. stopped by for a little visit. They predictably said, “You have other sites and pastors?” It can be very confusing.

Here is the main reason we are one church in five congregations: Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6). People need a lot of Jesus doorways in different forms.

  • We are wandering in the dark; we need the light of the world to guide us.
  • We are slaves to our own understanding; we need reconnected to what is beyond us.
  • We are sinful and broken; it is only by the work of Jesus and his merit that we can be forgiven, and restored.

We want to make Jesus accessible like he has made God accessible to us. That’s why we are five congregations in one church.

More directly, we have a great purpose and we are doing the best we can to live up to it. The Bible gives us a mission statement for our family business. It guides us. People call it “the great commission.” It is Jesus’ last words to his disciples.

“Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:18-20).

The essence of the Lords’ plan for redeeming and recreating the world is to draw together disciples who make disciples who make further disciples. We have planned our life together to do what we have been given to do, making the most of what we have to make an impact in our time and place.

More practically and specifically we are five congregations because it is an practical, radical, attractive strategy. Some people reading this might bristle as soon as the word “strategy” is used, but it is what it is. Strategy is just about getting from here to there in the best way we can imagine. We’re trying “to get to” making disciples who thrive, who make it to fifty with a vibrant, world-changing faith. It is at least possible that Jesus uses billboards, TV, airplane advertisements flying down the coast, charismatic talking heads on big screens and all that to call together disciples. But his main strategy is you and me and anyone else we can get to follow him telling someone else that he is our way, truth and life, now — and showing that in a way that can touch our hearts and minds, face to face. We might not be as desirous or patient as God, but the Lord has decided to need us, even if we have not decided to need Jesus, yet.

So our strategy is to go with Jesus on this, he is the way. His way is our way. He is the truth and the life; we want people to get to God and their true selves through his work. We also presume that you will hear and feel the great commission and be a follower who connects with others who will eventually follow the Lord you follow. You love God and you love them so you find ways to makes a connection just like God found a way to connect to you. If you don’t care about that, we are mostly out of business, because that is what our family business is.

Here is how we do it.

We make a cell. That is how Circle of Hope started, with the nucleus of one cell. And if you look at Jesus and the twelve disciples, that’s basically what he did, too. So we had one, then we had two and quickly three, and on we have gone over the years, multiplying cells and watching them live or them die on their own spiritual strength. That’s the basic body-life way we operate. The cells get together and form a congregation.

South Broad was the first congregation that formed (at 10th and Locust, then Broad and Washington). It drew from the entire region. We have always had a wide region in which we operate, and we still do. Marlton Pike also has a very wide region — all of South Jersey. North Broad also see themselves as having a wide pull, but mostly they are North Philly. Frankford and Norris draws from all over, but they are mostly Kensington and Fishtown. Our newest congregation on Ridge Ave tries to attend to all the Northwest. We used to have congregations in G’town and Frankford, but they dispersed.

Multiplying congregations is part of our strategy: When the congregations get over the 200 adult mark we start looking to see if they are going to have enough expansiveness to multiply. We think of it as bees in a hive — when the hive gets too big, it “hives off” into another hive. Right now, South Broad has about 130 adults after sending people off to the Northwest last year. If we had 230, we might think about sending off 50 or so to begin a new congregation. Better to have 270 and send 70, but that would be a judgment call we would have to make.

There are a lot of practical reasons for having multiple congregations instead of one big one, but our best reasons are about making disciples. We have a strategy for making authentic disciples of Jesus in the megalopolis. See if you think we are making the right decision.

Being one church in four congregations allows us to be big and small

We are as small as a cell, and as big as the whole church; as face-to-face as a congregation and as unknown as what the Spirit is doing next on the frontier of the constituency.

In terms of congregations, since that is theme of this post, we like the congregations to be relatively small. I say relatively because most churches in the United States are smaller than our typical size. Even though you see all those megachurches on TV, most churches are between 70-100 people. They are a big cell group with a very energetic leader, the pastor. It takes multiple leaders and multiple cells not to be a 100 person church; we think having multiple cells is more expansive. So for us, small means about 200, which is about the number social scientists say an interested member of a social group can hope to connect with in some meaningful way, like remembering names. We like to be face to face. Jesus had twelve, then the 70 and then there were 150 in the upper room on the day of Pentecost. It was personal.

But there are also advantages of scale, being five congregations in one church. In larger groups, one person or one clique has a tough time dominating, so there can be multiple centers of leadership and accountability. That’s why we like to have two Sunday meetings, so it is built into us that there are more people than just the ones who are in the room. One of the biggest advantages of scale is sharing resources. Circle of Hope has a common fund, so if one congregation has less money than they need, the others can help. We have one mutuality fund, so we can distribute it where there is most need. We have a common set of compassion teams that we all share. We have the covenant list and share list that are fruitful places to contact a lot of people. We draw from the whole network for our Leadership Team. Our pastors are not singular, but are a team, so they have less psychological issues with isolation and get a lot of stimulation.

Jonny Rashid sent over another image after this was published.

Being five congregations as one church allows us to be complex and simple, old and new

We are as complex as a network of cells, teams, businesses and events that have grown over time and as simple as the next new relationship we make.

On the complex side, it might be quite daunting to think that one congregation could come up with Circle Thrift and other good businesses. I am sure we would still have big ideas, but more complexity takes more time and staff and organization.

At the same time, we are quite simple. Our pastors do not run the one big church all day; they are mainly local pastors. We hope you feel like you can call up and talk to your pastor. I have a new friend with a 2000 person church in Delaware. People are on a three-month waiting list to get on his schedule, and he is their pastor. We want to know and be known, and that includes our leaders.

Being big and small also allows us to be old and new. At a Love Feast several years ago Gwen overheard someone saying, “Welcome to the covenant. I joined in three months ago.” So she chimed in, “Yes, welcome. I joined in 16 years ago.” Hiving off new congregations helps us stay new and attentive. Being a long-lasting network helps us have continuity and stabilizing lore.

Being five congregations as one church allows us to be in a neighborhood and also city/region-wide

We are fully part of our neighborhood and fully part of our whole city and region.

A few years ago we started naming our congregations after their addresses. We’re all identified with neighborhoods; our region likes things local. You may not do this, but quite a few people over the years have signed in on the welcome list as “Tony from 12th and Mifflin,” or some such address. We want to actually live, as congregations, in our neighborhoods. It is true we have cells in all sorts of neighborhoods, but the congregation has a home, too, in its neighborhood, and we like to think we are a vital part of it.

On the other hand, we don’t want to be just our neighborhood, because our region’s neighborhoods see themselves as so distinct they don’t even talk to each other sometimes. Broad St., right outside my door, was a demarcation line for 50-60 years until that began to break down lately. We thought it would be a good representation of Jesus to be in different neighborhoods, but actually be one church. We did not want to give in to the arbitrary dividing lines that keep people apart.  We even decided to cross the river, and that was no small deal. Tons of people work every day in Philly and cross the bridge, but when they think about doing that to be one church and it seems like a big deal. We like to push the boundaries of what seems possible.

It does not make any difference how we are structured if no one cares about the family business. It would break a lot of hearts if we actually did it, but I and the leaders are pretty much content to let the whole thing die if no one applies themselves to working the strategy. I think I should trust your passion to run the business, just like Jesus trusted his first disciples. You have to want the Lord, have the purpose, and do the strategy, or it is all just a lot of talk.

People do not move into eternity with mere talk. They need to make a relationship with God in the person of Jesus, who is the way, the truth and the life. For many people, each of us is the only Jesus-is-my-way kind of Christian they have ever met. It is not an easy business to be in, but it is our family business. I am doing my best to tend it with you.

The Spirit’s Impressive Church Planting Track Record

Leadership, The Mission

The South Broad stakeholders had a lot of good ideas on Saturday morning! I think we were just getting warmed up when our two hour time-allotment was over. I was impressed with the work of the Holy Spirit among us. We have gifts and vision – and the Lord has transformed lives in so many ways! People told stories to illustrate what they were saying over and over — transformation is so common among us we can use the instances as just another example. We should trust that Spirit.

We don’t make the body, Jesus does. We’re just working with the Spirit of God, here.

The Holy Spirit is just as ready to guide us as he guided all those people in the New Testament. The Lord is the ultimate church planter. The Spirit has never reduced church planting into a reproducible model. The everfresh work of church planting must be reduced into a loving, dependent relationship! Every cell, congregation and church is planted a unique way. So if you are called to plant the church (and you are) you need to develop an ever increasing, intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit and trust the Lord’s work.

Image result for upper darby to philadelphia view

Seeing how the Lord was working and seeing how we need to stop worrying, controlling and judging instead of trusting, made me want to remember how the Spirit is guiding us. So I have two things for us. First, I want to lay out how the Spirit planted the first churches on three continents and how that inspires us. Then I have one piece of advice for keeping up with Jesus as you plant with him.

Jerusalem

Jesus told his disciples to WAIT for the Spirit before beginning to make disciples in the city. As they obediently prayed, the Spirit showed up and empowered courageous witness that pierced the hearts of 3000 unbelievers. What a way to launch a church plant! It has never been done quite the same way since.

How did your church start? Do you even know? Or do you think it started when you showed up? It was probably impressive and it was probably so long ago that most people can’t even relate to it. It is interesting to look back and learn things. But the more important question that looking back usually begs, “How is the church starting NOW?”

Samaria

After this impressive start, what happened next? No doubt the disciples never predicted that persecution was the church planting strategy the Spirit would use. For instance, Philip was one of the Acts 6 leaders who were recognized as being “filled with the Holy Spirit and wisdom.” It seems the Spirit helped Philip stay on task rather than panic once persecution scattered him to Samaria. The Spirit empowered his message of Jesus there until there was “much joy in that city.”

Terrible things in the world, great failures in leaders and in communities are often just the new seedbed of the next church. Aren’t we experiencing that right now? The oddly-successful church planter Robert Schuller was fond of saying, “Turn your scars into stars.” We have some failure among us; don’t you? Do you think we can trust God to turn it all to good when we trust the Spirit?

Africa and Caesarea

Next, to plant churches in Africa, the Spirit inspired an encounter between an evangelist and a seeker. The Lord said to Philip, “Go toward the South…” Philip did his part, “he arose and went.” He came upon an Ethiopian court official reading Isaiah and the Spirit said, “Go over and join this chariot.” Philip and the Ethiopian discuss Jesus; the man asks to be baptized and continues his journey home to plant the church in Africa.

Stories like this pile up in Acts just like they pile up among us. In Caesarea and Joppa, both Peter and Cornelius received visions that brought them together to move the good news of Jesus into new territories. When Peter spoke about Jesus in Caesarea, “the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word.” The believers who had traveled with him were “amazed” that Jesus poured out such grace “even on the Gentiles.” The Holy Spirit was building quite a church planting resume: Jerusalem, Samaria, Africa, and now Caesarea.

Stories almost as strange were told this month among us. God spoke in dreams, through random encounters, through random acts of kindness and deliberate plans. Boundaries were crossed. We can trust the Holy Spirit to plant the church.

 

282 South Philly Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty-Free Images - iStock

Asia Minor

Next, we see “the hand of the Lord” was also simultaneously with the believers who were scattered by the persecution in Antioch, about 300 miles north of Jerusalem. During one of their meetings, “while they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said.…” As we know from experience and from looking at the story in Acts, the Holy Spirit was not dictating rules and regulations, Jesus was leading his body to ACT. Our job is always to “keep in step with the Spirit.”

The leaders in Antioch were reshuffled, much like we have done since we began our “second act” in 2015. Three leaders stayed in Antioch and two leaders, Paul and Barnabas, were sent out by the Holy Spirit on a great adventure to plant churches throughout Asia Minor. During their second visit to each city, they appointed elders in each church, because the Spirit had been at work calling, gifting, and guiding.

The Spirit at times says “GO” and sometimes says “NO” to our plans. Paul had the noble desire to go back on the road to strengthen the churches that had been planted. However, in the middle of that noble work, he was “forbidden by the Holy Spirit” to speak the word in Asia. Next, the Spirit of the Lord didn’t allow them to go to Bithynia. There are limits to what we can do.

The Holy Spirit is bigger than our imagination. We can only hope to appreciate our own slice of the mystery. We are always doing more than we are capable of doing; we are always given less than we think is necessary. When we look over our meager work and our troubled region we may respond with passion or despair. More deeply, we should respond with trust and gratitude. Our cup is half full. It is amazing there is living water constantly available at all!

Macedonia

When the Spirit says, “No,” we can often expect something better. In Paul’s case, the Spirit gave him a vision that sent him to a new continent. He ended up in Philippi to plant the church. The leading city of Macedonia had no synagogue, where he would expect to begin his work. He didn’t panic. He found a few God-fearing women meeting at the river. The Lord opened the hearts of Lydia and her household. The next core group members added to the church at Philippi were a freed slave girl with a spirit of divination and the jailer. The Spirit impressively planted a church in Philippi with an unlikely cast of characters and through an unpredictable series of events.

I know people are reading through Acts right now and are getting the rest of the story. It is impressive. The are anticipating new acts. It is time to move into the next territory and the Lord is leading us to do just that.

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We can trust the Holy Spirit

Each cell, each congregation, each church is special. Each challenge is unique. Each core group is unpredictable. It just takes the Holy Spirit’s guidance and the message of Jesus to successfully plant a church from its smallest form to the largest — not fabulous talent or charisma. The Holy Spirit goes before us and leads you every step of the way. Jesus is so impressive, we don’t have to be. You just have to trust Him.

Jesus has already been where we are going. When we look over the meeting room on Sunday or in the cell, Jesus is with us and in each of us. We don’t need to get people to do what they don’t want to do, we need to catalyze what the Spirit is already doing! We are cooperating. If we are creative at all, it is all about co-creating. We don’t need to feel over-responsible for what people do our don’t do; Jesus is with them. We don’t need to protect them from what they fear; Jesus will save them.

Following the Holy Spirit is about the character of our relationship with God, not the competence of our job performance. It’s about a relationship to be developed with the person of the Spirit, more than a technique to be mastered. Dallas Willard says it well: “Perhaps we don’t hear the voice of God because we don’t expect to hear it. But perhaps we don’t hear it because we know that we fully intend to run our lives on our own and never seriously considered anything else. The voice of God would be an unwelcome intrusion into our plans. By contrast, we expect the great ones in The Way of Christ to hear that voice just because we see their lives wholly given up to doing what God wants.”   

From the apostles in the upper room, to Phillip after the persecution, to the people worshiping and fasting in Antioch, they were all “wholly given up to doing what God wants.” They were done trying to run their own lives. Ray Ortlund Jr. says: If our purposes rise no higher than what we can attain by our own organizing and thinking, then we should change our churches into community centers. But if we are weary of ourselves and our own brilliance, if we are embarrassed by our own failures, then we are ready for the gift of power from on high”(The Gospel, 104-105).

When I look around us, I admit I see plenty of people who are not weary of themselves yet — and they are wearisome! But those people are far from the majority. Most of the people in our church did not get involved with our radical little group of subversives to look great. Like the stakeholders demonstrated the other day, they got involved to follow Jesus and plant the church. They got involved to give their gifts in love. And they can be trusted to give them, just as the Spirit can be trusted to use them.

The half time leader: Let’s understand and try to help

Building community, Leadership

Image result for caravaggio paintings thomas

We are fond of saying that we ARE the church, we don’t “go to it.” So why do I care whether people come to the Sunday meetings (and all the other meetings)? Why am I worried that our LEADERS are only at the Sunday meetings half the time?

The obvious answer is that it is hard to BE the church if one does not exist in real time as the church.  The meetings are an expression of our reality; we embody the Spirit; we have a location that is not just in our mind or in our belief system. Like Jesus showed his skeptical disciples: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (John 20:27). People doubt if there is no wounded side for their fingers.

What’s more, the Bible is pretty strong on the idea that we are what we do. So the writer of Hebrews teaches, “Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another,” (Heb. 10:24-5). S/he reminds me of NA folks repeatedly saying, “And keep coming back.” The meeting matters because I showed up, no matter what happens in it.

Why are people half-time when it comes to meetings?

Most of our attenders probably agree with what I just wrote, certainly most of our many leaders. But most of them miss plenty of meetings. Let’s consider a stereotypical married couple. Of the 52 Sundays a year, they could easily gather for worship 31 times and still think of themselves as deeply engaged. They lost 5 Sundays to vacation and weekend getaways. They lost 9 Sundays to the kids’ sports and art activities. They lost 3 Sundays to the diseases the kids brought home. They lost 2 Sundays to visiting relatives or friends. They lost 2 Sundays to Thanksgiving and post-Christmas. You can see how attendance can make a person’s commitment seem “spotty” if that is all you are measuring.

What do we do, let each other know we are watching how many times they miss the meeting? On one hand, yes, exactly. We’ve got a team sport going and it is hard to play if no one shows up for the game. On the other hand, no, obviously. Few people need a friend who has an equation in the back of their mind to apply to their schedule.

So why do people seem to be coming to church meetings, even ours, less these days?

  1. They are richer

Money gives people options. U.S. personal disposable income is at an all time high.

They have technology options, travel options, options for their kids. Do you think the richer people are the further away they are from a committed engagement to the mission of their congregation?

  1. If they have kids, their activities run the schedule

A growing number of kids are playing sports. And a growing number of kids are playing on teams that require travel. Many of those sports happen on weekends. Affluent parents are choose sports over church.

  1. They are travelling

Despite a wobbly economy, travel is on the rise, both for business and pleasure.

More and more families of various ages travel for leisure, even if it’s just out of town to go camping or to a friend’s place for the weekend or a weekend at the lake.

  1. Blended and single-parent families have less-reliable schedules

When custody is shared, “perfect” attendance might be 26 Sundays a year. A single parent has many challenges others don’t. Transportation can be harder, taking care of the house, balancing work and family time. If being part of the church does not help with those challenges, it is hard to get into the schedule.

  1. People can, and do, get better stuff online

Many churches have created a social media presence and many, like us, podcast their messages. Some churches with a strong online presence have seen it impact physical attendance. Anyone who attends our meetings has free access to the online resources of any church. Even my blog post on Monday was viewed by people form eight countries.

  1. They don’t feel guilty

People who grew up in church (and we have plenty of them) feel guilty when they don’t show up to the meeting because that was a major thing in their childhood. Going to church or not marked them as good or not. People don’t get that so much anymore. They don’t feel any more guilty about not being in church meetings than you do about not being at the mosque on Friday.

We tend to make it plain that we don’t really want anyone to come to a meeting involuntarily, as if coming to the meeting makes them something. People in meetings who are fulfilling an obligation wreck the spirit of the meetings. So maybe our lack of guilt-production contributes to irregular attendance which contributes to flabby faith that is susceptible to disease. I’m not sure.

  1. More people all the time have a self-directed spirituality

People are looking less to churches and leaders to help them grow spiritually, and more to other options. We live in a era in which no parent makes a visit to a doctor’s office without having first Googled the symptoms of a child’s illness and a recommended course  of treatment. I did it to my dermatologist this week, to her dismay. We research everything we buy online.

In an age where we have access to everything, more and more people are self-directing their spirituality…for better or for worse. They don’t trust institutions to do it for them and don’t feel obligated to them.

  1. They don’t sense there is something for them at the meeting

Even among people who say their love our church, their attendance might be spotty because they don’t see a direct benefit. They don’t see the value in being there week after week. That could be because the  meetings are held because we’re supposed to hold a meeting or because there is value that they simply don’t see. Either way, failure to see a direct benefit always results in declining engagement.

Image result for help each other

We could help each other, not just evaluate

Assuming these things are true and we care about BEING a visible church by means of having meetings where people can stick their hands into us, what might help people experience something that make the meetings relevant? Why would the leaders make the effort to make them relevant?

We embrace people where they are.

People are not ideas and they certainly are not machines that should perform on a schedule. Like Jesus, they have wounds; we can see them.

Maybe Thomas was sulky because he thought of Jesus’ death as a rejection. If someone doesn’t come to the meeting and I do, what does that say to me? Did they reject me? If you are an insecure church leader people can feel when you feel rejected.

Before the meetings stats make us feel rejected, we need to find out what’s really happening with people. Chances are they did not make a relationship with us on the basis of coming to a meeting. The relationship is bigger than the meeting. Jesus is with us always, even as you are reading this. We need some object permanence so we can embrace people who are somewhere else for a bit.

We separate the mission from the method

Our mission is to lead people into a life-changing, life-long relationship with Jesus, not just get them to come to our cell or Sunday meeting.

Our meetings are great vehicles for mission and there will not be much community for people to share if no one spends time building it face to face. But our mission is not to fill our empty chairs, it is to lead people to Jesus and stay there with Him. We should be obsessed with our mission, not with filling seats.

Some of us are more in love with the method than the mission. Circle of Hope has wonderful methods that have been very successful, but doing them perfectly and defending them from detractors is not our job. People who move into authentic relationship with Jesus Christ show up more regularly.

We use technology to help people not corral them

Social media and even email can help deepen someone’s journey with Christ. Communication tools are not just for “selling” our latest event. We use them to help people. I don’t think we can overestimate how much help everyone needs right now. It would be nice if they thought what we put in their inbox or on their newsfeed was about them and their needs and not about their attendance. We are an opportunity to serve and grow, not an opportunity to make the church succeed.

We consider output not just input

Church leaders, like most organization leaders, are programmed to measure inputs, not outputs. We measure how many people showed up, how much money they gave, who they brought and even online traffic. But we rarely measure outputs.

What if we developed ways to measure all we do? It would be interesting to know how much time people spend attending to God each day — according to a recent study, 57% of Americans read their Bible four times a year or less. What if we found out if people were better off a year after their covenant than they were before? What if we collected stats about the difference our attenders make in their workplaces and neighborhoods? Leaders tend to get passionate about what they measure. So we should watch what we measure.

You probably want to be part of a “bloody” church, like I do. It is kind of gross to think about Thomas putting his fingers in the Lord’s side. But it is kind of great to think about Jesus being that face-to-face about Thomas having trouble with showing up for the resurrection. Every time we have to BE someone who is different than our prevailing feelings or different from the ways of the culture, it is going to be hard for us. So building the church is full of hard things. Let’s help each other make a church, not assume it is already made and we’re just blowing it when it comes to participating.

Long obedience: Encouragement for not giving up

A life in the Spirit, Leadership, , , , , ,

I have been thinking about how wonderful it is that Circle of Hope has a few hundred people at the core who have been committed for a long time. Many of them will be at the Love Feast again recommitting their hearts to the long haul. Whatever success we have in meeting our goals is based, to a large degree, on their capacity to stick with it! In gratitude for them, I offer you a paraphrase of some parts of a good book on the subject of sticking with it: Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.

Instant or sustainable?

One aspect of the world I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired instantly. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by same-day delivery, instant messages and last-minute texts. Our sense of reality has been flattened by fifteen-second commercials and thirty-page abridgments.

It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in Jesus; it is terrifically difficult to sustain their interest, much more difficult to build the church, live as a missional community and gain the prize of maturity in Christ! It is hard to achieve our goal of nurturing fifty-year-old radical Christians.

Immediacy or patience?

Millions of people in our culture still make decisions to follow Jesus, but there is a huge attrition rate. Many claim to have been born again, but the evidence for mature Christian discipleship is slim. In our kind of culture, anything, even news about God, can be sold if it is packaged freshly [2018 retailer news]; but when something loses its novelty, it goes on the garbage heap [2015 novelty foods]. There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

Orlando’s Holyland Experience — click for website (it’s a real place)

Religion in our time has been captured by the tourist mindset. Religion is understood as a visit to an attractive site — a visit made when we have adequate leisure. For some, religion is a weekly jaunt to church, for others, occasional visits to special events. Some people, with a bent for religious entertainment and sacred diversion, plan their lives around special events like retreats, rallies and conferences [Joyce Meyer is still my favorite (Wiki page is not so nice to her)]. We go to see a new personality, to hear a new truth, to get a new experience and so somehow expand our otherwise humdrum lives [KLOVE fan awards]. The religious life is defined as the latest and the newest: Zen or anything Eastern [9% of U.S. practices yoga], faith healing, Kabbalah, human potential, parapsychology, prosperity, choreography in the chancel, Armageddon. We’ll try anything–until something else comes along.

The aspect of the world that makes the work of leading Christians in the way of faith most difficult is what Gore Vidal has analyzed as “today’s passion for the immediate and the casual.”1 Everyone is in a hurry. They want shortcuts. They want church leaders to help them fill out the form that will get them instant credit (in eternity). They are impatient for results. They have adopted the lifestyle of a tourist and only want the high points. But the church is not a tour bus.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”2 It is this “long obedience in the same direction” which the mood of the world does so much to discourage.

For recognizing and resisting the stream of the world’s ways there are two biblical designations for people of faith that are extremely useful: disciple and pilgrim.

  • Disciples are people who spend their lives apprenticed to their master, Jesus Christ. We are in a growing-learning relationship, always. A disciple is a learner, but not in the academic setting of a schoolroom, rather at the work site of a craftsman. We do not acquire information about God but skills in faith.
  • Pilgrims are people who spend their lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ. We realize that “this world is not my home” and set out for “the Father’s house.” Abraham, who “went out,” is our archetype. Jesus, answering Thomas’s question “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?” gives us directions: “I am the Way, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me” (John 14:5-6). The letter to the Hebrews defines our program: “Do you see what this means–all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we’d better get on with it. Strip down, start running–and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in” (Hebrews 12:1-2).

Levelled or upward?

We are disciples on pilgrimage. The pilgrim songs from Pslams 120-134 are helpful encouragements along our way. These fifteen psalms were likely sung, possibly in sequence, by Hebrew pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem to the great worship festivals. Topographically Jerusalem was the highest city in Palestine, and so all who traveled there spent much of their time ascending. But the ascent was not only literal, it was also a metaphor: the trip to Jerusalem acted out a life lived upward toward God, an existence that advanced from one level to another in developing maturity–what Paul described as “the goal, where God is beckoning us onward–to Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

This picture of the Hebrews singing these fifteen psalms as they left their routines of discipleship and made their way from towns and villages, farms and cities, as pilgrims up to Jerusalem has become embedded in the Christian devotional imagination. It is our best background for understanding life as a faith-journey.

Meanwhile the world whispers, “Why bother? There is plenty to enjoy without involving yourself in all that. The past is a graveyard–ignore it; the future is a holocaust–avoid it. There is no payoff for discipleship, there is no destination for pilgrimage. Get God the quick way; buy instant charisma.” But other voices speak–if not more attractively, at least more truly. Thomas Szasz, in his therapy and writing, has attempted to revive respect for what he calls the “simplest and most ancient of human truths: namely, that life is an arduous and tragic struggle; that what we call ‘sanity,’ what we mean by ‘not being schizophrenic,’ has a great deal to do with competence, earned by struggling for excellence; with compassion, hard won by confronting conflict; and with modesty and patience, acquired through silence and suffering.”3 His testimony validates the decision of disciples who commit themselves to make the climb as pilgrims and look for their true selves on the journey home.

1 Gore Vidal, Matters of Fact and Fiction (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 86.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (London: 1907), sec. 188.
3 Thomas Szasz, Schizophrenia, the Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 72.

I’m still reading email while Trump can’t stop tweeting

Building community, Leadership, Music, , , , ,

One of my New Years resolutions this year was to write a letter each week to a significant person in my life. I mean a poorly-scribbled, pen-to-paper letter. (And you may be saying, “So where’s my letter?!”) I also use Facebook messenger, texting, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, and all sorts of other innovations. But, like so many people, social media is losing its lustre in my eyes. The platform seems to dull connection rather than heighten them. So I am trying to get more basic.  I have my own farm-to-table approach to communication; I want those I love to know who grew their note in a palpable way — I sign my letters with my own hand.

More devices, less communication

The more communication devices we have, the more distance there seems to be in the world. Some days the disconnection we experience in the church is palpable. We are getting forced apart by choices to connect at minimal levels with quick, minimal devices [old Sherry Turkle Ted talk]. As a church, we keep talking about this surplus-opportunity- yet-dearth of communication all the time. Because we are fully adapted to the devices and the  social networks that dominate them, and we wonder if they will quench the Spirit, if they haven’t already. The newness contained in one cell phone (which is probably giving you cancer) is downright terrifying. Facing the overwhelming pressure of rapacious capitalism applied to communication is hard to combat. But Trump’s tweets are sending people for the doors — he’s so bad we can’t miss how the systems are set up to abuse us.

Anza-Borrego State Park

Some people among Circle of Hope advocate severely restricting all use of machines to interact. They have a point. And I am not judging them when I note, “There are Amish in every age of the church.” Lord knows I often wish I were living off the grid in the Anza-Borrego desert somewhere collecting dew for my garden. And I am back to handwriting letters! So I relate to that application of “resist and restore.” Newness is usually suspicious and often frightening. The Amish said “enough” in about the 1880’s.  But I think we have to admit that the newest form of the same old evil is much scarier than the old evil to which we already conformed. For instance, the old school farming practices of the Amish pollute the Chesapeake Bay watershed. They might feel righteous for not adapting to new ways, but their old ways had some evil in them too.

I am usually more on the other side of the argument. I want the latest technology with which to communicate and to work. I can’t get it fast enough. I am even Google-ized now. I even downloaded (and used!) Venmo this week. I want to discern what evil the technology  carries and resist it. But I also want to seize the opportunity it gives me and use it. As a church, talking about technology is hard. We have been talking about coming up with a “theology of technology” for years. But we can’t quite get there. I suppose it is because we are like Asian carp — too busy adapting to our new environment to think about what it means to be an invasive species.

1) We’re too busy mastering the changing technology. We don’t have time to think about whether we have anything to say about it. That’s pretty scary since it means that the technology already runs us, we don’t run it. [Not over Smashing Pumpkins].
2) We are too small-minded to have a group project like coming up with our own thoughts about what new technology means to us. We are doing very individualized stuff and don’t see group thinking as possible. Our thoughts can be as small as our screens. If you wonder why we can’t connect and break up shortly after we do, don’t underestimate how technology has atomized us and how we have adapted to the illusion of togetherness the media perpetrates. We are sitting ducks for huge forces because we inept at getting together in real time.

Seven years ago, a 25-year old blogger from the East Village wrote down seven things a twentysomething can’t do. Now he’s 32, but I think things may have become even more pronounced. Six of his seven things had to do with building decent relationships, mostly about communicating. We’re all losing our capacity to connect. We want to do it. The many devices we are being sold to communicate could increase our ability to connect, and in some great ways, they have. For instance, I really like texting about where I am and when we are meeting, and about what laundry detergent to buy. But my experience is that people who fully commit to the phone screen for communicating are too small to really do it. They may be wired, but they are not always connected.

My “big” discipline: read email

The powers are determined to make us all rats in their cages. They dominate the devices and conform them to proper rat-usage. SO, I think we should sit down and read our email.

I admit, I don’t seem to know how to have this discussion yet. One time the Cell Leader Coordinators talked about it and they had what, for them, amounts to a spat. I said that I need to read my email on a big screen, which gives more honor to the writer and their art. I don’t think we should do major communicating as the body while we have ten seconds at a stoplight to scan an email or blog post.

I know, that mentality seems unrealistic, kind of Amish. Nevertheless, right now, part of my discipline of communicating is to read my properly filtered email, daily. As you know, I send quite a bit of it, as well. Circle of Hope feels like a major inbox loader for people who haven’t shut off notifications to their phone and feel like they are holding a pulsing, overstuffed screen in their hand. Some people unsubscribe from the Covenant List because they count it as clutter! Some of the cell leaders don’t even read the the info email from their pastor each week, or all the way through. Some of the Leadership Team don’t even take time to read emails they use to lead the church with some integrity and vision. It is a challenge to be that disciplined and committed, but it makes a difference as to whether we are knit together meaningfully.

These are four reasons I still read email and don’t  encourage people to use my cell phone for texting, even when I give them the number, unless it is a texting subject (like “tacos or pho?”).

1) I’m trying to communicate.

To me, communicating is about relating, not just data. I want to say something I actually thought about and receive a thoughtful reply. That seems more like love is growing in the world. I don’t want to merely pass out info and have data hogs sniff around to see if it is something they want to consume. Dialogue creates deeper community. When we can’t be face to face, heartfelt writing can be a decent replacement.

2) I want to hear more.

It is hard to keep up with my email. I would rather talk face to face or in a meeting or even over the phone (although I’m not always that great over the phone). But those ways of communicating are hard to keep up with too. Communicating is hard. But I still want to hear more and connect more with more people. To be the church, we need to listen to one another and listen to the Spirit in one another. That takes quite a bit of listening in quite a few ways.

[The opposite is also true, of course. If you are addicted to checking email because you think some life-altering message is in you inbox, that’s not so good. More is usually the enemy of something. Checking email more does not necessarily mean you are listening more. Here’s a link for the addicts.]

3) It is good to slow down and connect.

All this sounds kind of strange, I guess, coming from a person who was there when the original email was sent back in the 70’s. It was so amazingly fast then! Now, sitting down in front of a screen and composing something thoughtful and loving seems like it is kind of old fashioned. Maybe this is my nod to the “Amish” types. The new Amish-types are often people who still know how to write in a language other than textese.

Being alone, concentrating, and writing, are all good, meditative ways to be who we are in Christ and live a life of love. I am writing this with love, too. It takes time. Even as I write, I am facing the cost of acting this way — there seems to be so much to do! But the writing is helping me to be. The way you pause to read and respond is helping you to be, as well, I hope.

4) I am committed to good infrastructure that extends the kingdom.

At this point, email has been a great way to connect the disparate elements of Circle of Hope. Every year, as we grow larger and add more congregations, we have a big challenge to be one church. We are always pushed to be smaller units, if not just random individuals. Holding together by speaking the truth in love is a major counterattack on the powers that want to dominate us. Our cells and Sunday Meetings are the major ways we express our commitment to being an incarnation of Jesus. But by the time they are over they can instantly be run over my the next media avalanche. We need a daily means of togetherness. Our computers and email can help us if we think about what’s going on.

Hey, if you got this far in this blog post, I feel loved. Thanks. You honor me, like I have tried to honor you with my time and thinking. That is splendidly weird and Jesus-like, and it won’t go for nothing.

We are called to develop a trust system.

Building community, Leadership, , , ,

Relationships in the community, whether it is the church community or the city community take trust if they are to flourish. The proverb says:

One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin,
but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother — Proverbs 18:24 NIV

The proverbs are so honest about life! This one is drawing a contrast we all experience. On the one hand, there is wickedness and superficial gunk that messes up the togetherness we’d like to experience. There are friends who pretend to be friends; they fill up your time with a lie. There are companions who do nothing but chatter; they fill up conversation space but not your heart. There are acquaintances who remain superficial; they fill up on your affection and generosity but never attempt mutuality or sacrificially give. There are a lot of people who might share a drink with you in a noisy bar, but they don’t bind themselves.

On the other hand, there is a friend who is worthy of the title — it is possible! We are all looking for them, or despairing that we can’t seem to find one. There are people who will go deep, who will connect, who are real, who can be relied upon. Those are the kindred souls with whom we feel bound our whole lives. We want that.

Jesus is that kind of friend who sticks “closer than a brother” — the “friend of sinners” (Luke 7:34), the one who comes with the ancient promise of God: “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). People who have Jesus for a friend are blessed (see John 15:14). We can trust him. If we follow Jesus, we’ll see he is moving into the world to make friends and make more friends who can be a friend like him. He is restoring a trust system. We’re moving with him when we  dare to look at what the world is really like (and ourselves!) and try to figure out how to be like trustworthy brothers and sisters in the world.

Trust is shot down on the streets

The recent outbreak of consciousness about the proliferation and protection of automatic weapons has highlighted the level of mistrust in the United States. While hundreds of thousands rallied during the March for Our Lives, NRA allies in Congress pushed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. “Congress is currently considering bills that would force every state to recognize every other state’s concealed carry permits,” said Sen. Stanley Chang, D- Hawaii.  Ideological warfare and mutually assured destruction playing out on every block destroys friendship; Christian intellectuals lament the death of trust.

Violence from your neighbor: a teenager or mentally unglued person with a gun no one will regulate, a drug dealer with an automatic weapon, a soldier or insurgent with bombs and weapons in your neighborhood, a super-rich country flying drones overhead, none of it makes for trusting relationships. The proverb notes this.

A violent person entices their neighbor
and leads them down a path that is not good. — Proverbs 16:29

Philly.com keeps track of homicides and puts them on a map.  Periodically they dip into Camden. They try to tell the truth. The president has 75% of the population suspecting that news outlets broadcast “fake news.”  But they try. They also point out the valiant people who try to undo the violence.

Trust is the alternativity we crave

Many people have been “lead down a path that is not good.” We, the people of God, the Jesus-followers, the Church are called to be the alternative, the antidote to the poison, along with good people who would painstakingly make a murder map so we can see what is going on. The proverbs invite us to trust those who can be seen to deserve it, because they are the cement of society. Jesus invites us to develop a trust system so we can rebuild what is being torn down.

We can start by being trustworthy and daring to trust another. We can build cells, teams, congregations, and a network that is devoted to building a trust system. The Circle of Hope proverb in the title says we are convicted to do just that. What might that practically mean today? A few general ideas:

  1. Trust first. Life is too short to wait until someone proves trustworthy (as if you had that right, anyway). Let them prove untrustworthy and make it hard for them to do it. Treat them like Jesus treats you, who entrusts you with the Spirit of God.
  2. Tell the truth. The world is too messed up to hide (as if you could succeed in that). Let people know who you are. Speak the truth in love to them like Jesus speaks to you, who affirms your value and hopes for your best.
  3. Risk relying on people. The world is too dangerous to be alone (as if you ever are). Let people hurt you and recover. Submit to others out of reverence to Christ, who will save you, who lives with you in an eternal now.

One more proverb:

Deceit is in the hearts of those who plot evil,
but those who promote peace have joy. — Proverbs 12:20

There is no little deceit woven into our hearts and seeping into us from the troubled world around us. A few people reading this probably think that proverb is “fake.” But most of us know, since the Holy Spirit brings the conviction to life in us, that promoting peace is the way to joy, even if it is hard, disappointing or unaffirmed. We are called to develop a trust system. Just living in the alternativity of its promise is joy enough. When we taste more of its reality, it is that much better.