What Church Is All About - Part 2

Last week I alluded to a song by Ken Medema that was a part of a musical (“The Gathering”) focused on church being a safe place for us to be honest about our brokenness and struggles in order for everyone to find help and healing. Medema’s words struck a chord in my teenage heart … and they struck it loud. I didn’t have room last week to share the words, but decided they were strong enough that it was unfair not to share them with you.  Since I don't have copyright permission to print the words here, follow this link to them: 

If This Is Not a Place

That's enough to think about for now.

What Church Is All About - Part 1

A long time ago (back in the late 1970’s, I think), Word Music released a musical with Ken Medema’s songs called “The Gathering.”  It was all about church being a safe place for us to be honest about our brokenness and struggles in order for everyone to find help and healing. We rehearsed but never performed it in my Youth Choir, but Medema’s words struck a chord in my teenage heart … and they struck it loud. I wish I had room to share Medema’s words with you (maybe later), but those words echoed back to me this morning as I listened to a podcast this morning.

In a message recently preached at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan (yes, the one associated with Rob Bell ... get over it), Steve Argue (wouldn't you love to have that name?) made the following observations:

Every Sunday around the world the faithful gather to celebrate the resurrected Christ and in this corner of this time zone this faith community gathers as well, and you know who comes here? There are people that walk in here with smiles, and there are people that walk in here with puffy eyes because they’ve been crying all night. There are people that are walking in here that are just excited about the week that they had, and there are other people that walk in there and they are literally crawling to see if they can actually make it to the grey chair. There are people with hope, and there are people with despair. And somehow … as we all come together, we attempt to worship God together.

And in an authentic community, in a place where there can be safety and trust, we actually let our guards down to actually be honest with one another. And as this community, we say together, “We will sing together.” And there will be some of us in this community that will [say], “Today, I can’t sing.” And you know what we say as a community? We say, “That’s OK, because we are the community of God and we will sing for you.” There will be times that we … gather as a community and we will say, “We will pray.” And there will be some people … saying, “I can’t pray today.” And as a community of God we say, “That’s OK, because we will pray for you. That’s what we do.” And there will be people that will say …, “We will have faith,” and, “we will believe.” But there will be some of us here on this particular day going, “I don’t have the energy to believe. I have doubts that are plaguing my faith and I don’t know what to do.” And as the community that’s authentic with one another, we say, “That’s OK because we will believe and we will have faith for you.” That’s the church of Jesus Christ.

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

I Have to Say This

Rob Bell has been talked about a lot since his book LOVE WINS came out. I have not read it yet (nor have MANY of his detractors), but I have enjoyed his previous books and have been ministered to in my journey with Christ by his teaching via the podcast.
Bell has been publicly denounced (shunned?) by John Piper and other notable voices in the American church and Christian media because LOVE WINS apparently smells of a universalist view of soteriology. I wonder if any of them sought to sit down one-on-one with Bell before making such public statements.
Bell's writings have often been way "out there" in terms of the 20th century understanding of orthodoxy that shaped my background as a follower of Christ, but I never thought of him as a heretic. The kindest review of his book that I have read gives him the benefit of the doubt on the heresy front, saying that he articulated some of his points inaccurately or clumsily. I'm eager to read the book so that I can understand what has caused such a scandal.
But what I really want to know right now is whether any who have so publicly denounced him as a heretic have even attempted to go have coffee with him and talk
... and ask him to clarify the points on which they find themselves in such deep disagreement.  If they haven't, does that reflect "the full and complete standard of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13, NLT)?

Notes from YouthCUE Knoxville 2011

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I am indebted to Mary Ann for filling in for me while I was away with the teenagers over the weekend. We ended up taking 12 of our Youth Choir members … and would have been able to take more had it not been for sports-related conflicts. Our teenagers are team players in every respect, and I applaud those who couldn’t go for their commitments to their team-mates.
YouthCUE has a lot in common with team sports. It always involves hard work, and each choir member plays a significant role as a team member. Each choir is expected at least to be familiar with the music beforehand, and Sunday afternoon’s concert is sung all from memory. We were in rehearsals for over two hours on Friday night, and most of the day Saturday (reasonable breaks were allowed, of course). Sunday morning we served as the worship choir for the 11:00 worship service of FBC, Knoxville.

 

Kyle Matthews came as a chaperone and bus driver for the FBC, Greenville group. Because I blew his cover (sorry, Kyle), YouthCUE asked him to lead the Sunday morning devotion for the participants, and to share a couple of his songs as a part of the worship service Sunday afternoon. I cannot recall all that he so artfully told us on Sunday morning, but his three points were:

1. The best things in this world are experienced together.
2. The deepest truths of life are best communicated through art.
3. Worship is important enough to require discipline.

Just before the service started Sunday morning, the organist who had been in rehearsal with us on Saturday assisted an elderly woman, bent over by age with arthritic hands, to the organ bench. I looked in the worship bulletin, found her name, and immediately assumed that Mary Eleanor Pickle had probably played piano some in her earlier years and was taking organ lessons to keep her mind and body active in her senior years, and that she had spent months preparing a piece that they were letting her play for the prelude. How sweet of them. As soon as she started to play, however, I learned how wrong my assumptions were.

 

Mary Eleanor Pickle is an extraordinarily gifted professional organist who has been playing organ for decades. Though her arthritic hands can no longer play quite as perfectly as they obviously once did, the joy of her heart translates through the instrument, encouraging even the most unmusical in the congregation to at least try to sing. Seldom have I heard an organ played more musically than she did. Because she disciplined herself to learn and practice her instrument, Mary Eleanor Pickle communicated deep truths of God through her art, and helped to bring a scattered group of people together in worship.

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Busy-ness Is Really Violence???

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Tony Campolo is professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University, a former faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, and the founder and president of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education. His web site describes him as: “speaker, author, sociologist, pastor, social activist, and passionate follower of Jesus!” There are conservatives who think he’s way too liberal, and liberals who get mad at him because he insists on talking about Jesus and the Bible.

Campolo is a powerfully engaging speaker, and – agree with him or no – anyone who hears him knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he spends a lot of time with Jesus (in prayer and study of scripture). I was listening to an interview with him yesterday afternoon on the way home from making a hospital visit yesterday afternoon. Someone asked what advice he would give to seminary students about preaching. The most important thing, Campolo said, was to wait on the Lord. Take time before you preach or teach to be still and open yourself to the work of the Holy Spirit in you.

That kind of waiting is hard in our day and time. We are too busy to be emotionally and spiritually healthy. Thomas Merton wrote:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence … activisim and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. … It kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

To Merton’s words, Peter Scazzero adds: And in doing violence to ourselves, we are unable to love others in and through the love of Christ. Campolo said we all quote Isaiah 40:31 but very few of us ever practice it. Here’s how Eugene Peterson translates verses 27-31 of Isaiah 40:

Why would you ever complain, O Jacob, or, whine, Israel, saying, "God has lost track of me. He doesn't care what happens to me"? Don't you know anything? Haven't you been listening? God doesn't come and go. God lasts. He's Creator of all you can see or imagine. He doesn't get tired out, doesn't pause to catch his breath. And he knows everything, inside and out. He energizes those who get tired, gives fresh strength to dropouts. For even young people tire and drop out, young folk in their prime stumble and fall. But those who wait upon God get fresh strength. They spread their wings and soar like eagles, they run and don't get tired, they walk and don't lag behind. (The Message)

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Emotionally All Grown Up

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I’m almost finished reading Pete Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. It’s such a good book that I’ve volunteered to teach it as a class this Fall. Our churches are full of emotionally immature people. You will see people you know in this analysis of stages of emotional growth.

Emotional Infants

• Look for others to take care of them
• Have great difficulty entering into the world of others
• Are driven by need for instant gratification
• Use others as objects to meet their needs

Emotional Children

• Are content and happy as long as they receive what they want
• Unravel quickly from stress, disappointments, trials
• Interpret disagreements as personal offenses
• Are easily hurt
• Complain, withdraw, manipulate, take revenge, become sarcastic when they don’t get their way
• Have great difficulty calmly discussing their needs and wants in a mature, loving way.

Emotional Adolescents

• Tend to often be defensive
• Are threatened and alarmed by criticism
• Keep score of what they give so they can ask for something later in return
• Deal with conflict poorly, often blaming, appeasing, going to a third party, pouting, or ignoring the issue entirely
• Become preoccupied with themselves
• Have great difficulty truly listening to another person’s pain, disappointments, or needs
• Are critical and judgmental

Emotional Adults

• Are able to ask for what they need, want, or prefer – clearly, directly, honestly
• Recognize, manage, and take responsibility for their own thoughts and feelings
• Can, when under stress, state their own beliefs and values without becoming adversarial
• Respect others without having to change them
• Give people room to make mistakes and not be perfect
• Appreciate people for who they are – the good, the bad, and ugly – not for what they give back
• Accurately assess their own limits, strengths, and weaknesses and are able to freely discuss them with others
• Are deeply in tune with their own emotional world and able to enter into the feelings, needs, and concerns of others without losing themselves
• Have the capacity to resolve conflict maturely and negotiate solutions that consider the perspectives of others

 That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Humility and "The Game"

A few years ago, teenagers in our local schools played something they called “The Game.” Anyone still playing “The Game” is obviously behind the times. The rules of “The Game” are simple: Don’t think about “The Game.” If you think about “The Game,” you automatically lose and you have to announce: “I lost The Game.” What's supposed to have made the game funny is that when you do that, it makes everyone who hears you think about “The Game” and lose, too. As I started writing this thing, I thought about (and lost) “The Game.”

Humility is kind of like “The Game.” One of the frustrating things about humility is that even the most humble person struggles to remain humble if someone praises their humility. It’s hard to know how to take someone complimenting your humility. C. S. Lewis wrote that “one is never so proud as when striking a position of humility.” Authentic humility and striking a position of humility are two different things. Authentic humility never strikes a pose. It just is. And a sure-fire way to make someone lose it is to tell them that you admire their humility.

During the passing of the peace one recent Sunday morning, another staff member asked me to cover the invocation that morning. We rotate responsibility for enlisting people to lead in congregational prayer, and since it’s an every 5 weeks thing rather than a more predictable rotation, it’s easy to forget whose week it is. I am always more than happy to cover for anyone on staff if they drop the ball on getting a lay-member to lead those prayers because I drop the ball more often than anyone else does. I covered the prayer without sweating it (I AM a professional, after all) and I was proud of my eloquence about our need to be humble in the presence of God. Then the Holy Spirit convicted me that I didn’t have the humility that I had just prayed about.

Here’s what I wrote:

My prayer this morning was eloquent and I was proud of it. Extemporaneous – yes – but I found words that expressed thoughts of humility that my spirit immediately negated with pride in how I expressed them. And I’m even proud of the fact that I recognize what that pride means about my lack of humility. The humility of admitting that I lack true humility makes me proud.
Humility – if you think you have it … you don’t!

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.