Category Archives: The Mission

The Golden Globes stoke my hope

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The embarrassing Ricky Gervais usually convinces me to skip the Golden Globes award show that aired last night. This time, Viola Davis looked so spectacular she was a good reason to tune in. As it turns out, there was another reason, as well. Did you notice a theme running through the nominated dramas?

CAROL
1950s married women find unexpected love and complications.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
Furiosa frees sex slaves.

THE REVENANT
Vengeance in the frozen north. Hugh Glass frees a native sex slave.

ROOM
Sex slave and her son escape.

SPOTLIGHT
Sexual abuse in the Catholic church is finally exposed.

I am not sure what is going on. But if the movies reflect our reality at all, we appear to be very angry and sex is not working out for us. We have been abused and our imaginations run to the most heinous of situations. Our master movie makers are creating stories that focus on the horrible. We are desperate for connection, but not that hopeful.

Continue reading The Golden Globes stoke my hope →

Aren’t people lying to you about Christianity?

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The pollsters are finding more people than ever who no longer feel connected to Christianity, even in the nominal way they used to. My Twitter feed introduced me to an interesting explanation of the trend in the Huffington Post: “Four Reasons for Decline of Religion.” It is another attempt to interpret the startling news from the latest Religious Landscape Study by the Pew Research Forum. That report says that Americans are still VERY religious, but it also shows that the percentage of Americans who believe in God, attend religious services and pray daily has declined significantly during the last eight years, especially among adolescents.

The blogger gives four reasons for this. They are all about how the “secular” environment is meeting needs better than religion, which may be true if all people do is follow their personal values around, as he purports. But I think there may be something else, too: the nominal Christians who no longer identify with Christianity may have made choices based on the lies people are telling about Jesus and the church. Every reason the blogger submits for the perceived decline is accompanied by a corresponding lie that seems to be helping people make new choices.

See if you think people believe these popular lies and so end up connected to a growing Jesus-free part of the population.

Lie one: “Spirituality” is the replacement for organized religion.

The lie is: If you join up with Jesus-followers you are joining up with a cult. Doing such a thing is infantile, undignified, abnormal and maybe unhealthy psychologically. These days faith is all about “spirituality,” which leaves believing up to your values and turns spirituality into an individual  collection of experiences, a commodity or an affinity group. That is the new normal and what the Christians try to get you to believe is abnormal.

The blogger said that “William James, whom some consider the ‘Father of American psychology,’ and psychiatrist Carl Jung, who developed the idea of the extrovert and introvert, were among those who embraced mysticism, or a sense of the Absolute, but had little use for organized religion.” They had good cause to desert the institutional church of their time as they looked for authentic encounter with God. Now their desertion is popular. More Americans than ever are saying that they are “spiritual, but not religious.”

But are they right about Christianity? I think authentic Christians are deeply connected to God within. They have a lot more going than a “sense of the Absolute” (or yes, Hillary, “the Force be with you,” too). They are not just into themselves, but they have a deep inner life built on all sorts of well-tested spiritual disciplines. Even the Christmas story can’t get far without: “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

Lie two: We’re all one human family and tribalism is anti-humanitarian.

The lie is that once you break the tribal taboos of the church (get divorced, have sex with the wrong person, break the Ten Commandments, get on the wrong side of the priest or of some conflict) you are out. Yes, some expressions of the church totally resemble that lie, but Jesus doesn’t. People think if you are one with Jesus you must hate everyone who is not!

The blogger notes that “Historically, loyalty to the tribe and clan has motivated participation in organized religion.” Philosophy and capitalism undermine that. Freud and Durkheim, in particular, philosophized that religion is the glue of the tribe as they studied “lesser” people from their European towers — their thoughts about unenlightened people are influential wherever Eurocentrism rules. At the same time, the global economy has broken down the “historical” tribal membranes and weakened most cultural auto-immune systems. So there is a great economic sameness spreading over the world. I went to Cinemark in Fairbanks, Alaska last week and did not know I was not in my Stroudsburg, PA theatre. As a result, many people apply this sameness to religion and are less inclined to think of people as Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Jews, and more inclined toward thinking of “people of faith” as wearing a similar brand.

But are Christians really just a behind-the-times remnant of some tribalistic, exclusionary past? I think Jesus and Paul connected to people of all faiths and nonfaiths who were seeking or avoiding God. They were not setting up another tribe, although good Christians are as tribal as the best of them. They knew the Holy Spirit would empower individual seekers who would form a tribe from all nations with the same new spiritual DNA.  From the beginning of the life of Jesus he was known as  ultimately expansive: “a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel”  (Luke 2). He’s the epitome of being humanitarian; no one is left out of the Kingdom of God.

Lie three: Being part of a nontraditional family is the latest improvement in freedom.

It is ironic to think that the never-married, often family-disrespecting Jesus, from the unusual “family” of the Trinity could somehow become the advocate for conservative, male-dominated, “traditional” (read ‘obsolete”) family. It is not true. He assumes family is elemental to creation, but he is not traditional in the least.

Historically, organized religions have relied heavily on the family to raise religious children and recruit new church members. That no longer works so well. The blogger notes that today we have a major restructuring of the family, with fewer than half of U.S. kids living in a traditional family. This change in family structure may be responsible for less successful religious training and recruitment of young people.

That seems very true. Of course the earliest church did not have any of these families with traditional Christian values around, so maybe the church can find its way without relying on them for recruitment. Perhaps now people can all reconnect with the family of God rather than just avoid displeasing Mom by enduring church services. The way much of the church has been for many years, the children of divorced parents, people who never marry, and LGBTQ folks all feel uncomfortable with the over-emphasis on getting a happy home out of following Jesus and with the implicit condemnation that comes with being “other.”

But do people become Christians just because it is part of their “background?” It is possible that the researchers missed something that also creates what we desire: guilt, the need for forgiveness, and the hope for transformation. Being “untraditional,” like many TV shows teach, is the new normal, but it is not the road to happiness, either. Refusing to feel “other,” outside the truth, sinful or guilty is not a solution to actually being those things. Feeling guilty about who we are or where we come from is not necessarily bad; guilt is good for us if it lasts just long enough to get us forgiven and to produce change. Our lack of needing forgiveness is creating what some people are naming an age of psychopaths.  Meanwhile, the Christmas story is all about dealing with the possibility that a little, nontraditional, problem-ridden family facing disaster where Christianity first began is where it still thrives best.

Lie four: Institutions cannot be trusted.

The lie is that Christianity is just another institution, that it is “religion” which breaks down into franchises that have different brands but still sell basically the same product. Sure, some Christians have worked the system like any other business or government and have been corrupted by money and power. OK. But the heart of trusting Jesus is hardly “institutional.” Very few people would say “I want to be part of the institutional church.” Neither does Jesus, does he? He is God born in a stable and quickly forced into refugee status, after all. He might use institutions, but he was not born of one.

The blogger noted how the internet age gives us unprecedented access to information about our institutions but doesn’t help us have a conversation about the realities of their darker sides. Confidence in many of our institutions, from business to schools to government, is below historical norms. Confidence in religion, in particular, is at an all-time low, partly because of religious scandals in the Catholic Church and elsewhere.

I am hardly an advocate of blindly following institutions. Does anyone really think that is what Jesus has in mind for his followers? I think Jesus wants to build a church that can do what it should do. I think the church has blown it so bad in the past that it is no surprise that people deconstruct it and take the parts of it they like (like love, community, tolerance, spirituality, art) and cobble together a hypermodern improvement of it. They settle for faux Christianity. Nevertheless, Jesus shows up as real as ever during Advent every year.

He keeps speaking back to the lies, just like he talked back to people who doubted him to his face. “Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to…the father of lies”(John 8). I am glad the present trends of our culture are bringing up some good lies to talk about. We need to talk back with respect, hope, love. The blogger du jour I am reacting to is right: a lot of people just don’t get Christianity anymore. But they are still looking for important things. It would be great if they could see that Jesus has always offered what they need.

Six reasons to be part of the Sunday Meeting

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A lot of our church is not in the meetings on Sundays. It is good that there is more to us than what is happening in the meeting. But…what’s with that? I am not sure what. You may be able to tell me.

I was talking to Rachel the other day and we realized how many people never meet with us on Sunday nights — at the wonder-filled meeting when the church makes itself visible to the world (and to the unseen world, as well). A lot DO come, of course. I took a video last night and managed to upload 15 seconds of it to youtube — this was before everyone got there!

The nice meeting last night notwithstanding, there are a lot of people in the church who have NEVER been to a Sunday meeting yet. For instance, we have teens meeting in the afternoons and they never come to the meeting (this happens in NJ, too!), We have a cell based at UArts and most of the students have never been to a Sunday meeting. Rachel’s cell is full of people who are devoted to their AA meetings but not to our Sunday meetings. Play groups, game night, Circle Thrift friends – the list goes on of vital places that don’t connect with Sunday night much, or at all. With about 40-50 more people we think we’d be ready to multiply the congregation – and I just located more than fifty in these various other meetings! What do you make of that? If people are not part of the weekly meeting are they a part of the church yet? We have an expansive group that never gets into the group! What’s with that?

There are more Pew-identified unaffiliated people than ever. Maybe that’s what’s up.

It is possible that we just haven’t reminded ourselves lately why we have a Sunday meeting at all. After all, the church has met on Sunday for a couple of thousand years — it’s a habit, and a lot of people stopped thinking about why about a 1000 years ago. The meeting can and does go on without any particular need to have an explanation because it is just what Christians do. Some weeks I am finished with the meeting and I say to myself, “What was that about?” No one told me, no one apparently needed to even care why it happened. It seemed like people thought the meeting had a right to be served rather than the meeting having an obligation to serve the purposes of the people who showed up.

So why do it at all? Why imply that these 50 otherwise-connected people ought to show up? I’ll give you six reasons and you can give the rest. I say this old, wonderful Sunday meeting we perpetuate is irreplaceable for a number of reasons:

1) It is a coming out. LGBTQ friends use the phrase “coming out of the closet” for becoming who they are. The idea is important on a variety of levels. At one level it means admitting who one is to oneself. It is also about choosing who to tell about who you are. Most commonly, I think people think it is about making a political statement by being public about one’s identity. Christians don’t have the history of stigma and oppression as gay people do (at least in the United States), but there is a distinct similarity on all three of the levels mentioned when one comes to a Sunday meeting where Christians are being Christians and doing what Christians are and do. It is on the first day of the week because Jesus came out of the tomb as the risen Lord on that day — we’ve been identifying with Him ever since. If you don’t come to the meeting, you are likely to become a closeted Christian.

2) It makes us a citizen. Paul says our citizenship is in heaven. When a Christian takes on that allegiance in the world, it makes a difference. In the United States, this unique citizenship is often in question, since the state has often sponsored and coopted Christianity, so many people think a US citizen and citizen of heaven are the same thing. But the visible body of Christ, meeting boldly in public is a statement of differentiation and often defiance.  If you are not a visible ally, to whom do you belong?

Notice I have not said anything about getting some great thing by coming to the meeting, yet. There are great things that happen every week and great people there who will love you. But I don’t think the meeting will ever be a good enough “product” to justify getting off our butts every week and going to it. In a way, it is redundant, and you can consume similar things elsewhere.  But there are certain things that we just can’t be and do unless we have that public meeting

3) It makes us effectively public. People prefer to think that they can have everything privately, these days. Maybe Amazon’s business model is built on that premise. They can deliver what you want to you door; you never even have to go outside!  — the ultimate in privacy.

  • Being a Christian is public. We claim Jesus before people and Jesus claims us before the Father.
  • The meeting is a main way we are an “us” as God’s people is an “us.” People can come and see it.
  • It  is a main way we accept the liability for being one of God’s people with these other people.

I love the risk and the trust of that!

4) It makes us an incarnation. We need to be incarnate and to actively incarnate our life in the Spirit or our faith is subject to being all in our heads and it won’t last. People need to be able to see us and touch us, experience us, or Jesus in us is hard to find. Likewise, we need to see each other and become part of a people, or we are too autonomous to receive the juice that comes with being together.

5) It makes our love bigger than a preference or a choice. There are pilates meetings to attend, NA meetings, book clubs, classes, political meetings, service groups and, primarily, our demanding workplace. A lot is going on. We can get with people like us and do what people like us do. My family, in itself, is the size of a small village. There is plenty there to keep me busy for a long time. I don’t need a lot more people in my life…UNLESS there is God making me bigger than what I already am or what I prefer. The Sunday meeting is a living example of and a laboratory for being more than what I already am and loving more than I need to love. If you only love those who love you, what makes you a Christian? Obviously not all our loving is happening in the Sunday meeting, far from it, but it is square one for starting down the road to being bigger.

6) Without worship you shrink. Here is a key issue. Worshiping, praying, discerning the truth in what is taught is an acquired skill that one can lose.  A log burning alone soon loses heat. You can come to the meeting, of course, and not worship there, too. But we are more likely to go with Jesus if we do the kind of things that mean we are going with Jesus. I still love to hear Richard Burton talking about it.

The institution of the church has been so bad, so irrelevant, so into its own authority, so led by the “B” team that it deserves much of its inattention, in my opinion. Even though I lead the church, I don’t always think the Sunday meeting, in its particulars, makes that much sense. Sometimes the people who put on the weekly meeting can’t remember why they do it, they just do it. They may not think they have any new believers around, so it just becomes habit, not strategy. Is that the issue? What do you think?

Right now, we are changing in many ways. The Sunday meeting is developing along with the rest of us. No matter what it becomes, I will have six good reasons, at least, to be there with you. Maybe some day the meeting will get us all into trouble together, it will have become so odd to have one. That’s OK with me, too.

 

Our evangelism nightmare: Hypermodern voices take over the airwaves

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I heard Dwight Schrute, I mean, Rainn Wilson, on NPR as I was driving around somewhere. What he said is stuck in my head. He is known for being an outspoken follower of the Ba’hai faith — it is the “outspoken” part that is stuck. At one point he said that people “threw up in their mouth a little” when he started talking about his life with God at parties. So it is not easy for him to talk about what he believes. He does it, but it is not easy.

Wilson’s claim to fame, The Office, began in 2005, about when we moved into our South Broad location. It makes me wonder if that TV show was riding the zeitgeist of dodging people who make you “throw up in your mouth a little” — like White Goodman (above) and Dwight Schrute. Christians (and I guess the followers of the Bab) started getting on the list of people who make you vurp — at least the ones who talk about their faith as if they actually believe it.

Old evangelism stories are out of date

I was telling old stories to Aaron the other day about talking to people as if you actually believe that Jesus will raise you from the dead, and such things of faith. At one point he looked a little uncomfortable. I don’t think he was vurping, but he reminded me that things have changed a bit since I was his age. Some of my stories seem out of date when I start talking about the Jesus movement, which might as well be the French Revolution as far as twentysomethings remember it. We are experiencing more of an evangelistic nightmare than easygoing chats about Jesus.

Twentysomethings were born into a profound philosophical discussion. Their churches, for the most part, were holding on to a Christianity that was conformed to philosophical paradigms from modernity like rationality and hierarchy. In the late twentieth century, postmodern thinkers came to the fore and staged a short-lived rebellion. They taught everyone to consider their “values” and argued that values have the meaning we assign them, but no meanings that last; we cannot discern truth but we can play with the nonsense. They wanted to emerge beyond modernity — stuck with its faith in progress and commitment to empowering the individual. We had “emerging churches” for a hot minute to match that movement.

The dialogue out there is all hypermodern

You can Google all this, of course. But you might not bother because you have become what many call “hypermodern.” Modernity and postmodernity are both the the past for you. They are, essentially, irrelevant because you believe that what took place in the past took place under “lesser” circumstances and is irretrievably different from now. You think artifacts from the past (like the Bible or “faiths”) that clutter the cultural landscape are to be reused to generate something better.

Wikipedia quote: Hypermodernity has even more commitment to reason and to an ability to improve individual choice and freedom. Modernity merely held out the hope of reasonable change while continuing to deal with a historical set of issues and concerns; hypermodernity posits that things are changing so quickly that history is not a reliable guide. The positive changes of hypermodernity are supposedly witnessed through rapidly expanding wealth, better living standards, medical advances, and so forth. Individuals and cultures that benefit directly from these things can feel that they are pulling away from natural limits that have always constrained life on Earth. But the negative effects also can be seen as leading to a soulless homogeneity as well as to accelerated discrepancies between different classes and groups.

So if you feel like people will consider you a Dwight Schrute at a party if you talk about Jesus, you might be right. You are acting like an historical artifact (Jesus) has meaning. You seem to be fighting the inevitability of change. You are saying that life on Earth has meaning and we don’t have to fight its constraints as if we should have power over it. You are standing out against the backdrop of gigantic institutions enforcing soulless homogeneity on us in the name of progress. And so much more.

It is an evangelism nightmare. Hypermodernity assumes everyone is an idiot if they are not hypermodern, like the cartoonist from Charlie Hebdo who responded to people praying for Paris after the recent attacks (above). For him, religion is modern, the past. Paris is freedom and joy, the future. Religion (a modern umbrella under which all “faiths” belong) is the seedbed of terrorism = faithful people are in bed with terrorists = You make me sick you Christians!

Jesus does not need to make people vurp

What to do? I’d hate to terrorize a party! I hardly want to stand in the way of progress. I don’t even understand all this philosophy.

Four suggestions, for now.

  1. Talk this over. Things ARE changing fast. We need to keep talking about what is happening, like I am talking right now about how Aaron was schooling me.
  2. Remember that Jesus is present, even if people try to make him an historical artifact. Even if people have repeatedly subjected him to the latest philosophy, the Lord rises in each era and has been incarnate in them all. You don’t have to argue the Lord into existence.
  3. Have a story and tell it. Jesus is going to be found in a loving relationship of trust in which God can be spoken of as the lover God is rather than a mere philosophical argument, a value, or political statement.
  4. Pray. Like right now. Jesus will be revealed and you will be inspired to live a life of creativity, free of shame and free to share.

The workplace: What if I gave it all at the office?

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We are hurtling into the future like never before. The change makes us anxious about whether we can keep up and makes us less likely to take risks, since the whole world seems risky. Just keeping the house together can feel like a challenge. For instance, what if a supermarket is your workplace? All the Pathmarks are shutting down as part of the A&P’s bankruptcy and the consolidation of regional supermarket chains into giant multinationals. Our Pathmark in Gray’s Ferry was across the street from a new Bottom Dollar, so we had two stores for a while. Then Aldi bought Bottom Dollar (it’s rival) and Pathmark went bankrupt. ACME (pronounced akamee, if you’re new) bought a few Pathmarks but not ours. So now we have no stores and have to travel somewhere else for food.

The workplace is no less challenging for many of us. For instance, one of the blessings and curses of new technology is that work is mobile. I am writing on the laptop I took on my weekend away — I was never far away. Work is so demanding and we are so afraid of the forces that will take it away from us, that we give it total loyalty at all times. Social observers say that the workplace, mobile or otherwise, is the dominant place where people work out life now; it replaces family, friendship circles, church and other organizations that used to be the major ways people found an identity.*

The all-encompassing workplace

An example of an all-encompassing workplace is what many people say is the best place in the country to work: Google. An employee reviewer says, “The perks are amazing. Yes, free breakfast, lunch, and dinner every weekday. Aaaaaamazing holiday parties (at Waldorf Astoria, NY Public Library, MoMA, etc.); overnight ski trips to Vermont; overnight nature trips to the Poconos in the summer; summer picnics at Chelsea piers; and on and on and on. The company is amazingly open: every week Larry Page and Sergey Brin (right) host what’s called TGIF where food, beer, wine, etc. is served, a new project is presented, and afterward there’s an open forum to ask the executives anything you want. It’s truly fair game to ask anything, no matter how controversial, and frequently the executives will be responsive. * No, nobody cares if you use an iPhone, Facebook, shop with Amazon, stream using Spotify, or refuse to use Google+.“ There’s no reason to leave.

So let’s say you want to build the church and have a mission to the 10,000+ 18-35 year olds that move into Philadelphia every year. If home life is hard that is one thing. But who can compete with Google or with every other employer that thinks they are doing you a favor by making it possible for you to never leave work and making other things work like your family? Doesn’t the church want you to be under the umbrella of its family (since God is our father and Jesus our brother)? Isn’t Jesus the leader who calls us to work in his “harvest field” since the night is coming when the work of redeeming the world is finished? (see John 9). Doesn’t just bringing up that sense of competition make a few of you readers squeamish or resistant? Don’t leave yet, let’s try to talk about it!

Gave it all at the office

What if you feel like “I already gave what I have to give at the office?” Or “I’ll let you know what I feel right after I answer this call; it’s about work?” Maybe you’re thinking, “I have a hard enough time seeing my children and now you want me to be like family with a bunch of other people?” Yes we do.

The sense of competition is compounded for many of the people in our church because they managed to get a job that actually does good – maybe it is not good in the name of Jesus, but it is good. What’s more, they are either in charge of or working in an environment that is good for them. They lead. They are affirmed and successful. They are building or have built something that feels useful to them. They may have been good for a cause – just think of all the dear friends we have who have poured their heart into education, homelessness, counseling and so much more. They really give it at the office.

As a result, these good people often leave the church to others who do it for their job, or to a “B-team” composed of people who don’t have quite so much to do. Or they take roles in the church that they should have because of the gifts they have been given and then don’t really do them because they have to find a new grocery store or because work has an emergency. This week someone told me their relative has meals delivered because he and his wife discovered they would make more money if they spent their cooking time creating billable hours.

I am not trying to solve all the problems of being a radical in a rapacious world with this blog post. But I do want to bring up the perennial questions of practical devotion to Jesus before we have to reduce church down to fit into the life that is being forced upon us. Does the Lord speak to you and do you listen? Is the church the Lord’s vehicle for redeeming the world or is it making progress with your unmarked-by-Christ good deeds? Is your vocation who you are in the body of Christ or is it how you get paid?

At every age, answering those and many other questions is how we form into Jesus-followers and make it possible for others to meet God — and at every age, they are hard to answer. 20somethings are often good at jumping into being radical but they are also good at freaking out over their insecurity. 30somethings often struggle with a sense of being tapped or trapped; it’s a difficult decade for seeing things spiritually, even if you want to. 40somethings are at the beginning of their best contributions to the work of faith or are beginning to slide toward death, getting  by, turning off, avoiding the problems they now know about.

Answering the big questions about vocation

At some point you have to be and build the church or attending the meetings seems kind of extraneous to life. Sitting in a cell or Sunday meeting gets old after a few years if you come to get too much instead of using them for the mission – to give your gift, make a disciple, build a missional community. For the 20somethings the meetings can’t just be ways to find out who you are, they have to become what you do because of who you are. For the 30somethings they can’t just be the obligations of staying in the game, they have to become what you are building. For the 40somethings they can’t just be the habits of being a church person, they need to be the basis for giving the gifts you have.

Circle of Hope really forced the issue of commitment this year when we made extravagant plans together and then had the audacity to implement them all. We were doing well as we were but then we changed a bunch of stuff and called people to take a new look at who they are and who we need to become as a church. It was like shutting down the grocery store. What’s more we asked everyone to give a bit more money (or some!) in order to pay for the new ideas and give us the capacity to imagine what’s next, plus we asked for the necessary time to make something great happen. That sounds a lot like competing with the workplace for preeminence.

Jesus is famous for upending what is usual and demanding preeminence. When he healed the man born blind he got into a lot of trouble with the powers that be. (You read John 9, right?). The man who was healed got in trouble too! The physical act of the Lord’s work caused the transformation he was after. But his work not only healed the man, it resulted in a conversation about spiritual blindness with the men who dominated their world. Those men thought they were doing good and holding the fragile society together in the face of its enemies. Jesus upended it and said, “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Regardless of Google and even the nonprofits that think they buy all our time, Jesus is the Lord who calls us to his most satisfying and necessary work. We are his hands and feet, the church is his vehicle. He is the light of the world in us and the night is coming.

*Overcoming Workplace Pathologies: Principles of Spirit-Based Leadership, by Gilbert W. Fairholm

Lack of sincerity: What to do when your words get twisted

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Last week Rachel played a video of Jerry Seinfeld receiving the 2007 Comedian Award that 1.2 million of you have already seen on YouTube. In it Seinfeld makes fun of the award he is receiving. “I really don’t want to be up here” he said, “I want to be in the back over there or over there saying something funny to somebody about what a crock this whole thing is.”

I appreciate his honesty. In his own way, Seinfeld has been a prophet. One line from his recent Clio Award speech kind of sums up his message: “We live in the world and we know everything stinks.” He has been standing in the back of our rooms talking about how stupid everything is for a couple of decades now. Even more, he drew the so-called Millennials into the back-story of the comedian lifestyle and encouraged most of them to have their own self-conscious lifestyle of being comedic. As a generation, they are prone to standing back and observing how stupid everything is. What’s more, as an “audience” they are so tuned in to people doing “bits” that they are also aware of how you are doing a bit in the middle of a conversation, and are likely to be observing you observing and critiquing how well you are critiquing. Always performing, they might be more interested in how you say something, or how they can make fun of how you said something, than in what you are actually trying to say.

Sincerity is hard to find

So it is no wonder that our pastors suffer so. They are all from the Seinfeld generation and they know that some (if not most) the people their age have been trained by Seinfeld to stay removed and cleverly observe what they have just done. Even if they get a compliment or some affirmation it may be accompanied by a joke, “That’s a really great speech for someone who makes speeches for a living.” Sincerity is always suspicious. If you are putting yourself out there for anything but a self-deprecating joke you are not to be taken seriously.

It is no wonder we have cells full of cell leaders who don’t want to get in line to be the next leader. I don’t think their inhibition is about their conviction or hope or even their supposed fear of commitment. I think it has a lot to do with the requirement to be publicly sincere. Once you come out as someone who cares about Jesus and others (“No, really, I mean it,” we have to say) they fear they will run into “that guy standing in the back” who is going to start observing everything they do and twisting everything they say. In the old days, people would throw the liar out. But these days, self-consciously lying for effect is a respected art form. Like Seinfeld said in his Clio speech, “I love advertising because I love lying.” Then he looked at the laughing audience and dared them to figure out whether he meant it or not.

Jesus vs. Jerry

So leaders of the church need to learn a lesson from Jesus that may be more relevant now than ever. One place to start is John 8, where Jesus has an amazing dialogue with people who are standing back, observing and then attacking him. In one of the funniest moments in the Bible Jesus says “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” His detractors immediately say, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?” Whoever is going to stand for God is likely to get similar treatment, only it will not be as straightforward or as unintentionally funny. It will be about twisting what you say for a moment of amusement.

Jesus’ words were most famously twisted by the devil himself. His response provides a good example to follow by anyone who is enduring the same, relentless attack by someone not interested in hearing what you say but very interested in mocking it. Someone was talking about their fear of being mocked the other day, and I suggested they at least begin responding to their fear by trying on the mentality of Jesus.

  1. He doesn’t live by what people say about him. The devil tempted him to make bread from stones, a bit like Seinfeld admittedly makes a living from doing nothing. ”If you are the Son of God” the devil began accusingly –- he’s always good for making every moment conditional rather than true. Jesus told the tempter he could live off what God says. Just avoiding this temptation by never taking on the mantle of leading or caring won’t make it go away. People will keep twisting. Our response either exposes them or saves them.
  1. He knows he is being tested. It is OK to see someone’s snide remark or sarcastic, meaning-diminishing comment as a temptation or even as an attack. They may as well be telling you to prove your worth by jumping from the pinnacle of the temple. Jesus told the devil not to test him. Perhaps you should speak back to a Seinfeld-trained person and tell them not to test you. We can at least not facilitate an atmosphere of insincerity by letting everything be undercut by people trying to convince us that everything is a joke, including us.
  1. He is ready to confront the tempter. “I don’t mean anything by it. We’re just talking. Don’t be so serious.” There are a lot of ways to make something nothing, and people expect us to conform to the nothingness. Practice saying it so you are ready: “Why are you twisting what I am saying?” The pastors and cell leaders, especially, need to discern how to say, “I am giving you my heart and you are not receiving me. I am telling you the truth and you are undermining it.” It might be kind to add, “Is that what you meant to do? Or do you just do it because Seinfeld taught you?”

New development: The practical beginning of the “second act”

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Development is hard. For instance: The crew and I, led by the devoted foreman Ben Blei, are in the last throes of finishing the project down the street at 1226 S. Broad. All the details we missed are becoming evident. All the last-minute demands to meet the deadlines are irritating us. Relationships that need to work, but don’t work that well, are becoming obvious. Our limitations are also becoming obvious. There are a lot of problems associated with developing an old abandoned building. There are good reasons people don’t take on big projects like that.

As I was writing that line, someone emailed and told me they were as good as an abandoned building and God started developing them! But they had some good reasons why they did not want to get with that program: details, demands, relationship issues, limitations, etc, etc. It is exciting whenever I hear about someone who is in the throes of developing faith! Because the main development project people resist taking on is themselves.

That kinds of sums up the focus of my new job. I’m now the “development pastor.” It is a big idea for a job description, in that I am going to get practical about how we get from here to there as the whole church, Circle of Hope. But it is also a very small idea, in that I am going to have more time to be devoted to individuals, especially the leaders, as they move into their future in Christ.

I am excited. I even renamed this blog to make that clear!

I need to develop and I want to help others develop

That’s probably the same as you – we’re on the same team after all. I just get to lead in it. We all need to develop — we’re doing it one way of another. I want to follow Christ into my fullness.

To develop in Christ means one has some kind of experiential knowledge of spiritual things that moves them to action — not just book knowledge, or secondhand knowledge or even Circle of Hope knowledge. You know God and that relationship is developing. I first learned this when I finally read the Bible and saw in Romans 8 that people who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. In all our talk about our “second act” we have been devoted to risking that the people of our church will be led by the Spirit: we’re trusting Christ to be at work in all of us; we’re trusting each other to keep developing as people in Christ and to resist settling into some placeholder life.

The last time I spoke in a Sunday meeting I offered three basic things we all need to hold on to if we are going to keep developing as individuals in Christ and keep developing as the Lord’s church. Let me briefly list them again.

  • Take incarnation seriously

The finite manifests the infinite, the physical is the doorway to the spiritual — like Jesus the incarnate Son of God is our way to eternity. This is the way to that. There are not sacred and profane places or moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places and moments. Christ in YOU is the hope of glory. Christ in US makes us the incarnation of the Lord in the here and now. To develop, take that honor seriously. You and we are important, no matter what voice inside or big power from outside tells us.

love will always be key to our development

  • Practice remaining in Love

Only love “in here” can enjoy love “out there.” Fear, constriction and resentment make us blind and need to be overcome. People cooperating with their development let their inner darkness and fear rest in Christ. God’s gift of love in Jesus makes that possible. There is no law or moral code that makes you better than remaining in Love. Stay there no matter how many times someone wants you to prove the validity of what you know in your heart by the data, or they try to make you love the empty container of the law without the content of the Creator. “Remain in my love,” the Lord says – then you will develop.

  • Stay close to the cracks in everything

Jesus says, “The last will be first and the first last.” Paul says, “When I am weak I am strong.” It feels upside down. But when we stay close to this seemingly irrational crack in normality, we begin to see Jesus — out there on the edge of what looks like an abyss to us. He is always about to fall over the cliff into what people think is nuts or impossible. We need to stay close to that. This is the hardest for me and most of us because it means we need to stay close to our own suffering. We need to be one of “the poor in spirit” who are blessed. We need to notice our own cracks and not cosmetically alter them. Living with Jesus on the edge, where things are cracked and paying attention to our own cracks in health and relationships is the mother of spiritual development.

development area

We need to develop as a church in mission and I want to help

Our ambitious map for 2015 is full of what’s next. It is so packed, we will probably need to extend it beyond a year! It is a very practical doc but very focused on heaven. We are redesigning ourselves to match what God is telling us and changing to meet people where they are at now. I hope you share my estimation of us: we have what the world needs; we are the next church finding its way in a changing world. As believers with a beachhead in the megalopolis, we are incredibly well-positioned to be used by God — and we are being used.

I have already been at work helping us to refine who we are so we can move into who we are called to be now. We planted new admin at the Hub. We redeployed our pastors to “get out there” and not be a four-headed unit with too much responsibility. We deepened our reformed Leadership Team and turned the Imaginarium into a rolling Council meeting. We are retooling how we use our two corporations: Circle of Hope Inc and Circle Venture to let us relate to the powers in useful ways. We installed Rachel as a new pastor and released me to think bigger and act smaller. We are getting together the masterminds (and we have them) to imagine how we can be large and personal, prophetic and empathetic, active and contemplative, dispersed and focused, attentive and inclusive, communitarian and missional.

All my experience leads me to this moment of development, I think. While it is hard for me to change from being the day-to-day pastor of a congregation, I am excited for this new moment of opportunity. I have some good years of service ahead of me! Even more exciting, I think, is to be a part of Circle of Hope, now — when devoted, reconciling, ambitious brothers and sisters in Christ are moving into their second act and trusting God to do something even greater.

Remembering Mike Brown Sunday Night

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People are asking: Why are we going to 46th and Market on Sunday night? (Why do you try to get me to do these things?)

The pastors answered this on their video Wednesday.

I want to emphasize one thing here about why we are going. We are going to pray. We will be grieving and remembering people who have been killed by the police. But, even more, we will be interceding for the police and claiming the block where the new police station is being built for peace. We will be seeding a new era of nonviolence and a new spirit of love in the community.

Continue reading Remembering Mike Brown Sunday Night →

The Great Commission: Facing threats to fulfilling it

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My last seminar at the Mennonite World Conference was one my friend told me I needed to attend, since it was by Wes Furlong, pastor of an unusually large Mennonite Church in Florida. I was eager to see how the Anabaptists were trying to come to the megachurch picnic.

MWC in the Farm Show Complex

I was disappointed because Furlong did not show up. The replacement said he was still with his family after his vacation and felt it was better to stay with them. This was ironic, since part of his material included  asking a good-hearted skeptic to tell you what your church is like after they attend a meeting for the first time. I was the good-hearted skeptic at his meeting this time. Not showing up made a big impression. Come to find out Furlong has gone to quarter time at the church and started hiring himself out as a consultant and as one of the architects of the new splinter-group Evana. When I googled him, the first thing that came up was Wes Frulong.com. He’s his own brand.

There is a lot I learned from my seminar experience, but let’s give the material his substitute offered some respect. He wanted to explore how Anabaptist assets can serve the cause of fulfilling the Great Commission.  This is always a good topic of discussion. We do well to think about it because, I think, Circle of Hope and BIC assets are deep, but they are often poorly delivered in service to the cause. In the case of the BIC, I think the assets are well described, but the organization has been talking about itself for a decade or so instead of mobilizing for action. The BIC has hired a lot of Wes Furlong types to get ourselves going, but the denominational culture has become even less about our historic or actual assets, it seems to me.

The teacher talked about three things that are special threats to Anabaptist types if they want to fulfill the Great Commission. These are threats to most other churches, as well.

1) The original vision of a founding pastor/formation team or of a denomination tends to move toward institutionalization. The goal line might be clear and the way to get there might even be clear, but the requirements of the institution are too distracting to make enough good plays to get the ball over the line. To get anywhere, the homeostasis needs to be disrupted, but the system is designed to preserve itself.

2) Fear of authority. The baby boomers are in charge and they have taught their children to be even more suspicious of anyone in charge than they are. Unless you are an especially skillful or charismatic person, a leader in the church spends a lot of time figuring out who is in charge at a given moment and making all their many bosses happy. They never succeed in making everyone happy so they are on a hamster wheel of failure until they burn out. Nothing can be mobilized.

3) The lack of clarity between modality and sodality. This is about being a people and being a mission. Obviously we should be both: a missional community. But often the modality (the church as a means to the end) is more important than the sodality (that singular cause for which the church exists). Churches get on the bus and then decide where to go rather than being invited onto a bus that is already scheduled for a destination. We end up with a covenant to confab rather than convert.

In the face of these threats to meeting the Lord’s goal, what must be done?

1) Trust the Holy Spirit to start a movement. You can’t do anything right enough to make the plant grow, but you can prepare the soil, sow, and till.

2) Understand that a lot of it depends on the hearts of the leaders. If they don’t want to go where Jesus is going and they can’t bear the rejection they will bear when they go with him, there is not going to be enough passion to sustain mission (like enough of THE Passion).

3) Our perception of ourselves in Christ will probably need to change. The teacher gave a metaphor of the Mennonites (and I think the BIC have this disease a bit) as being the quiet people of the land because they have the tongue-screw still applied from their days of being quieted by persecution. It is hard to get the assets on the road if you can’t talk about them. People are worried about how the gospel is communicated but that can’t be the main concern; we should know who we are and let the communication be contextual and variable.

4) The organization will need to change to facilitate the goal, not vice versa. The Cape Christian church went to local officials and other neighbors and asked what big need in their area was going unmet. They found out that it had to do with families, especially foster children. They took on the task. They built a new building that included a splash park. Soon families were coming to their church after going to the splash park. What’s more, they got committed to fostering and ended up responsible for 50-60% of the foster family placements in their city of 175,000 people. Their goal changed everything.

What does it take to help people know Jesus and become fully-functioning members of the body of Christ — not abstractly, but in our location? Serious answers to that question could arrive at serious goals that are worth our lives – the lives Jesus gave us to live, not to waste while we aspire to live in some more-perfect future – like the future when some renowned presenter shows up to encourage you to show up.

Looking for a church in downtown Amsterdam? (Probably not)

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I appreciated hearing from the inventive pastor of a downtown Amsterdam church today named Henk Leegte. He was helping us Mennonite World Conference attenders figure out how to be the church in a postmodern and postChristian context, like the Netherlands (and probably like the U.S. if we don’t pray up the alternative).

He named some reasons the Dutch have overwhelmingly deserted the church in all its forms.

  1. The scandals in the catholic Church
  2. Hypocrisy among church leaders and members
  3. Fear mongering preaching by Dutch Calvinists, especially
  4. The charitable aspects of society used to be funneled through the church. But the government took that over after WW2 and that function of the church is now part of the state.
  5. They just don’t care. The people are not bad, unethical or uncompassionate; they just don’t care about the church. 60-70% don’t even know what Christmas and Easter are all about, anymore; they still are holidays, but they don’t mean anything Christian. Strangely enough, the Dutch all do one religious thing every year. At some time they go listen to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Go figure.

What does this church do to connect?

1) they keep their doors open (literally). They don’t just say they are open, they actually provide a place that is open. They also have a café where people can experience artistic expression. They try to stay close to the culture that way. This is also a safe place in which people can belong before they believe.

Algemene Doopsgezinde Sociëteit

2) They tell people Bible stories. Not knowing them (like they don’t) can be crippling. For instance, people like going to the Van Gogh Museum because they don’t need to know any content. If you go to the Rembrandt Museum, you need to know the Bible. They help remedy this deficit.

3) They are prepared to meet people when God comes up in their lives. This happens around births, death and marriage. There are questions at the crossroads. People pray then: thank you and help.

4) Maybe their most innovative idea is their challenge to people of influence or power to give their sermon one week.  This usually fills the church. Whether the person is a Jesus follower or not, the pastor challenges them to put their opinionated self in the pulpit. He gets to know them a bit and suggests a Bible passage that might suit them. He gives them the meaning of the passage. Then he let’s them lead that part of the meeting, including a prayer (even if they never pray). It is always interesting and often moving. They make sure they have the special meeting in November so people can still remember where the church is at Christmas.

All over the Eurocentric countries faith in Christ is diminishing. It takes creativity and passion to learn new ways to communicate the truth and love of Jesus. Where people don’t care anymore, we are introducing the gospel like they never heard of it. In some ways this is a great advantage.

What do you do in your context? What needs to be done?