Tag Archives: net

Where are we going? — deeper, sweeter, wider

Building community, The Mission, , , ,

The direction I am pointing applies to everyone, of course, but I am especially thinking of the dear people of Circle of Hope. By the time Lent is over they will have persevered for 20 years! By the time this post is over, I hope to contribute how we see where we might be in ten more (and you too, reader, wherever you are).

We’ve already taken our first steps into the future. We called it our “second act” when we were hit by the inspiration at the end of 2014. Then we started acting inspired: restructuring, redeploying and redeveloping. I wrote about it here and here and other places, too. It has been a great ride.

So we did that.

Now what? In late spring we will get together and consider where we are going and make a new map. So more will become clear by then. But already the first steps are showing where we are headed. We are an amazing group of people who can absorb change, work hard and imagine big. It is hard to say all that we will be able to do, but I think we are heading this direction: deeper, sweeter and wider.

Deeper

Our capacity to know God and teach others to follow Jesus is deepening. I think Jesus has spoken to us like he spoke to his first disciples, only metaphorically:

“Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch” (Luke 5:4).

We are doing that. We are letting our nets down into the deep water of the Spirit. I am especially excited to see the budding fruit of two new developments. First, I hope you have heard about Gifts for Growing. We decided to gather our resources for getting from here to there spiritually and lay them out on a more cohesive track, starting with the first seeds of faith in “earth” and moving toward the deep waters of grace in “water.” The cells and Sunday meetings are still the main places where a person gets what they need to grow, but we are organizing our teachers to give us what they’ve got: exploring money, relationships, the Bible, spiritual disciplines and more.  Second, Circle Counseling is growing. We’ve added five new counselors and a new building at 1226 S. Broad. The counselors will also add gifts to grow on. The Hallowood Institute Gwen is starting will undoubtedly share its wealth with us too.

We have kind of reached a tipping point of giftedness. Our fisherpeople, so to speak, are equipped with boats and nets and they bring up a lot to feed us from the deep water of the Spirit. That capacity is a great treasure to spend over the next ten years.

Sweeter

You can’t really go back and have do-overs on relationships, at least not in real time. The experience of community we have shared is irreplaceable, unrepeatably sweet. But like good long term relationships (like I have been blessed to experience with Gwen) community is sweeter as the years go by. In each other, we have tasted that the Lord is good. Peter tells us to get rid of what could be bitter and honor what is so sweet.

Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.  As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:1-5).

I don’t know how we did it, for sure, but we ended up with sweet relationships that can span the whole region. The cells and teams are so often sweet places to be. They don’t feel like obligations, they seem like treasures. I am glad for that. The capacity to build and preserve authentic, covenant community is the thing we can lead with (like we said last week) when we present Jesus to the future. I can see us doing it in the quarterly compassion efforts from last year, in the restored covenant that has been proposed, in how the Cell Leader Coordinators take themselves and their cell leaders seriously, in the talk back from last night at South Broad and how we included the new people in the room. We are not sugary, but we are sweet.

Someone told me last week, as people sometimes do, that they forgot what they had in our community until they visited another version of the church (like ones some of the presidential candidates come from). We are blessed. No matter what bitterness the world serves us, we will form an alternative that tastes like Jesus in the next ten years.

Wider

This is the most exciting (and most frightening) place the Lord has us going in the next ten years: there may be twice as many of us. We are getting ready for those new people and the gifts they bring to the mix right now. I know God has opened up my heart wide to them. It’s like Paul says his heart was to those entering the first churches,

“As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses…;  known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed;  sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. We have spoken freely to you, [everyone], and opened wide our hearts to you” (2 Cor 6:4…10).

A lot of churches at twenty years old are committed to preserving the good things they’ve got going. By the time they are forty they are perfecting their spiritual combover. We opted for a makeover. We have changed some element of most things we do — and some things (like Nate, Ben, Rachel and me!) are totally retooled. The pastors are “getting out there” meeting new people in new ways. Likewise, we have new events that give new ways for people to connect. The apprentice pastors agreed on a plan to take our Sunday meetings on the road into new areas of the region, so look for that very soon.

I think we should double our size before ten years is up, maybe long before. That’s not because bigger is better. It is because we have what people need. Our community can embrace them. And the world craves what we have.

I again watched most of the movies that are up for awards this year. I think most of them are some turn, dark or vengeful, on the myth of the hero. The world can’t help looking at itself telling itself stories about itself. Jesus manages to escape his own imprisonment in the monomyth again and again. We tell His older story well. I am delighted to offer a better hope than the tired tale the world keeps producing. It is great to see people come to know God as they meet a missional people – us, and so many other Jesus followers all over the world. They’ll get deeper, sweeter and wider with us.

Jesus the great disrupter of homeostasis

Doing Theology, Psychological growth, , , ,

These are some thoughts that have been developing in me ever since I studied Matthew 13 in preparation for our training on Saturday. Jesus keeps disrupting me with them. I hope he will bless you in the same way.

Jesus is an artful, courageous-but-loving disrupter of homeostasis.

The Lord’s goal is to help people, like us, who are prone to resisting change to keep changing in God’s direction. We’re working on being disrupted by Jesus so we can be  disruptive with Jesus in a world stuck in its ways.

Jesus has lovingly stirred me this year. He is artfully refocusing us all. The newness feels good.

The pearl of great price by Daniel Bonnell

Jesus comes to us breathing the air of eternity and moving with the rhythms of the Kingdom of God. As a result, He inevitably disrupts our sin-soaked sense of reality just by showing up and being himself.

When we meet Him, this “Pearl” of truth and love often seems like a shocking discovery.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:14-6)

“Why did I not see that Pearl before?” we ask.  We have reasons. Even though our spiritual lenses are foggy, the Ultimate Disruption to the fragile equilibrium we protect still comes to us like wind and moves us. We find Jesus to be of greater value than anything to which we are tied.

Sometimes we feel caught in a web, or writhing like a fish in a net, trying to move but surrounded by people who tie us up.

They judge us foolish, even irresponsible for selling out for the Pearl.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. (Matthew 13:47-50)

by Fiona French

We are surrounded by people who don’t “get it” about Jesus and feel threatened or bored by his demands. That’s not OK, but it is realistic. When the church brings in its net, it is a mixed catch.

I don’t think we are “ashore” yet. The Lord ended His story looking into the future. So things are not all sorted yet. I am sailing through time with a lot of God’s beloved, unfinished creatures. I am mixed up with people who resist and wonder why I’m trying not to resist with them. Soon the net will be full and brought to shore. Until then I’m in a mixed bag, fin to fin with “fish of every kind.” The final judge of what gets thrown out is God, not me.

Our new normal in the kingdom of God always has a bit of instability to it. For one thing, none of us is personally complete. For another, we are in a net with some bad fish, and everyone in the net is trying to get loose. For another, we are all on the way somewhere and the journey is not over.

The promise Jesus offers to those with ears to hear is that everything is happening in “the kingdom of heaven” and the mysteries of our time will be sorted by God in the end. I take heart in that promise when I resist not knowing what is coming next.

We have the stability of knowing our end and of knowing the One who will bring everything to its end. Ultimately, we have a great equilibrium which the world cannot offer. Even so, we have a hard time hanging on to our treasure.

The world nets people every day and sorts them out into its baskets. It is especially judgmental about people who judge it for doing that. If they are sorting you out, don’t stay their basket; they don’t have the right to keep you anywhere. Even if their latest law promises to make everything right, don’t let their judgments delude you.

Jesus asked them, “Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.”  And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” When Jesus had finished these parables, he left that place. (Matthew 13:51-53)

A healthy homeostasis is anything but staying the same.

Healthy homeostasis is being a stable organism which allows newness in while retaining the necessary oldness.

With us, there is a constant movement in and out. There is a permeable “in” and a flexible “out,” like our cells work. Jesus gives a profound version of this truth. He says His kind of “scribe,” who knows all the new laws of the kingdom of God He is revealing, brings out the old and the new. They discern the treasure. The old is new and the new is old.

What these scribes understand is we are constantly being formed, yet constantly at home in the kingdom. People who are locked up in their past, who cling to the church of their 20’s, or who build walls around their country or children don’t “get” Jesus, like people did not recognize his true self in his own home town. Did the following scene get played out in you life somewhere along the way, yet?

Finally, He came to his hometown and began to teach the people in their synagogue, so that they were astounded and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power?  Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?  And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?”  And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor except in their own country and in their own house.”  And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief. (Matthew 13:54-58).

polar bear in disrupted homeostasis
Nazarene clinging to their homeostasis?

Jesus the great disrupter of the homeostasis went home to Nazareth. They did not see him as a pearl. They judged him as some kind of “fish” they could understand, caught like them in the “net” they called home. If his deeds of power did not come from where they understood, “They must not be real.” If he came from that family system, “What makes him think he is anything but from that family system?” Their resistance quenched the Spirit.

Jesus followers are always working on meeting the status quo as change agents and always interested in feeling deeply at home in eternity, moving yet rooted. We are brave enough to be ourselves in Jesus. But we are always going to be coming up against the kind of resistance which keeps people in bondage and quells miracles. It is difficult, isn’t it?

How do you see the incident in Nazareth?  On the one hand, the writer definitely blames the people for their unbelief: “He did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.” He seems as frustrated as you might be about people who are poking you with the fin of their faithless ways. On the other hand, it is at least possible that Jesus did not do miracles in Nazareth because the questions the people were asking were the exact questions he needed to excite in them.

They didn’t need a miracle, he astonished them just by showing up as his true self.

“Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power?“ That’s a good question. “What is this newness? Why do I feel this strange feeling? Why am I so irritated?”  They were going to get plenty of chances to see works of power, including a resurrection, but maybe, for now, their questions were leading them to seek for treasure and eventually see it right in their own home town.

The presence of Jesus disrupts us enough to dislodge us from our sin-soaked homeostasis. If we understand who he is and what he is talking about, then we can reconfigure around a new love and an eternal truth in the kingdom of  God. It is amazing how our frustrations with the past and our questions about the future combine to lead us to the kingdom of God.