NT Wright and The Cookie Monster on The Colbert Report

Repent! (a story for all ye vile and filthy sinners)

A story to illustrate yesterday's post on repentance:

Say for instance you wanted someone to live a missional life--that is, a life given over to the mission of God to redeem everyone and everything (which in other words, simply means to follow Jesus); to turn from their inward curve and focus outside themselves on the things and people God loves.

To do that, you are inviting them to live in a new paradigm. Inviting them to repent of their old paradigm. So how do you do that? Yell at them? Tell them you are right and they are wrong? Guilt them into change? Quote bible verses at them? Engage in subtle verbal manipulation to get them to agree with you? I don't know of a better means than story. In a story, I can see myself and also see other ways to be myself.

Here's one story that did just that for me. Maybe it will for you too. It comes from this blog about St Aidan, the Bishop of Northumbria, a Celtic Missionary in the 600's on the northeastern coast of England and is an entry in the Missional Synchronous blog hosted by Rick Meigs.

One of the best known stories of Aidan’s focus came when King Oswald’s successor, Oswin, gave Aidan a fine mare from the royal stables as a gift. The mare was intended to ease Aidan’s travels and make him more efficient in his evangelization of Northumbria. Aidan received the horse, and promptly gave it to the first poor family that he met on the road. Oswin heard this story and enraged, confronted Aidan.

The historian Bede tells us of the encounter:

“The King asked the bishop as they were going in to dine, ‘My Lord Bishop, why did you give away the royal horse which was necessary for your own use? Have we not many less valuable horses or other belongings which would have been good enough for beggars, without giving away a horse that I had specifically selected for your personal use?’ The bishop at once answered, ‘What are you saying, Your Majesty? Is this child of a mare more valuable to you than this child of God?’”

King Oswin in humility agreed with Aidan and said that he would never again challenge how Aidan spent his resources in service to the poor.

Repent (ye vile and filthy sinners!)

It's a warm fuzzy word, isn't it? It just makes you want to pour a hot cup of coffee and pull up to a roaring fire.....or not. It's now freighted meaning usually conjurs up such crowd-pleasing images as judgement, condemnation, eternal hellfire and an occasional dash of brimstone just for effect.

And if it is one of Jesus' basic messages: "Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is near." then, uh-oh for Jesus, right?

Well, we need to rescue the word in word, practice and deed because it's absolutely crucial to human flourishing. The word in the original Greek is metanoia, which literally means "with mind" or "with new mind."

In today's language we might say it this way, "he had a paradigm shift." When we say that, we mean he was inside a way of seeing things that caused him to act, feel and live a certain way. Then a window opened and he shifted his position to an entirely new way of seeing things. Everything became clear and subsequently made sense in a whole new way. It was like he was seeing things again for the first time, with an entirely new set of eyes.

So if two people are comitting adultery (I've walked several people through this as a pastor), they are inside a system that has them seeing, feeling and acting as though this foreign object to their marriage will somehow make them happy/give them the thing they think they've always wanted/make them feel a certain way about themselves. If they do not repent, that is, have a paradigm shift, everything they know will be destroyed and the resulting relational shrapnel will literally scatter for years. They will not flourish.

This is just one example, use your imagination and extrapolate it out to any situation. It always holds true. Repentance, properly understood and done, is a fundamental key to human flourishing.

That's why preaching, when it's done well, always invites people to repent--to shift their paradigm. Mark Beeson, leader of a great church, took some notes on preaching for repentance here.

Too often that call for repentance is done in shrill religious-ese. We fail to show people the new paradigm (Jesus' new paradigm was always the Kingdom of God) and so they never give up on their old paradigm. They hear it as "you should stop being like you and be more like me, because I've got it all figured out." That almost never works. I'm not suggesting we can make people repent (we can't), just saying it needs to be given serious and careful consideration (note made to self) every time someone stands up to preach.

One of the best ways I know to do that is through story. A story easily gets past my defenses and gives me a picture of either what I am, or what I can be. I'll post a repentance story tomorrow.

For the City (Missional Sync Blog)

A bunch of us in the blogosphere are attempting to capture (recapture?) the meaning of the word missional. So many great books have been written on the subject that I honestly feel silly trying to articulate it in the few paragraphs of a blog.

It's a hot topic, at least in my tradition. Since that is the theological teat on which I was succored (I firmly believe you should use the words 'teat' and 'succored' whenever possible), let me start there.

There's this denominational magazine that gets sent to pastors every few months. The title of it is GROW. It's all about, as you might guess, growing churches. How to, Who is, What they are doing, What you can do to be like them, etc. I don't mean any vitriol by that, it's just what is (I intentionally left a link to the magazine out).

And here's the thing, the growth is measured--almost exclusively--in terms of the number of people who show up at a service on a Sunday morning or a Saturday night (aka, "the weekend" in North American church speak). It's existence is funded by an attractional understanding of church. The point is, if I am correctly reading the subtext, butt's in the seat. So gracing it's pages are frequently numbered lists of churches with titles like: "Highest Worship Attendance", "Largest Gain in Sunday School," etc. Secretly, I find myself scanning the list to see if we "made it" or if someone I know "made it."

Now this isn't all bad. I think we on the missional side of things throw too many stones. I am regularly re-oriented to God during those corporate worship times. My life is made sense of in terms of God and I find myself renewed, reordered and refreshed. I actually want to face my life again. Do we not want people to have this experience? Isn't this part of the purpose of corporate worship? Do we want it to be an experience people don't want to attend? Is there anything wrong with making the environment where it happens conducive to the experience of God we want people to have?

Here's a bit of the rub. The magazine features interviews of pastors "making it happen" and one frequent refrain is about how a new Sunday School program or discipleship effort is "missional." Honestly, I just scratch my head and turn the page. I don't think they get it. I think they think that because they've organized everyone and everyone knows what they are to do and they are doing it for Jesus...well, then, that's missional.

So is it? And if it isn't (I don't think it is--it seems way to focused on self-preservation to warrant that descriptor), then what is it? Many others have spent time defining it on the other blogs of this synchro-blog, so instead of a defintion, here's an example to end this way-too-long post:

We have a local ecumenical retreat center in town called Richmond Hill--very sweet place--that loves and cares for the city (they do personal retreats btw. And talk about history, they are just down the street from St John's Church where Patrick Henry taunted the Brits with giving him liberty or death). They pray for metropolitan Richmond 3 times a day...and then they go do something about it.

To wit:
*They've connected virtually every elementary school in the predominantly Title 1 Richmond Public Schools with a congregation that comes in an mentors and tutors kids.
*They work tirelessly to unite the fractured political jurisdiction that is metropolitan Richmond (too long a story for this post), and they are place of hospitality and retreat for the entire city.
*They give themselves away and expect nothing in return. They focus on what's outside themselves and spend their time and money there. And here's the thing, as a result, I want to be where they are located. The warmth of the place is amazing.
*In short, they embody Jeremiah 29:7.

Ben (their outstanding pastoral director), one of the most well-connected people I know who uses those connections to love the city, said this in a newspaper interview that I think gets at the heart of what it means to be missional.

We want to make sure we're real clear that God's interest is in the health of the metro area and it's people and not simply in churches. We want God's agenda out there for all of us.

So how does the local church become this when we live in "Highest Gain in Sunday School Attendance" land? Can you get there from here?

Here's are links to the other bloggers writing about today's topic:
Alan Hirsch
Alan Knox
Andrew Jones
Barb Peters
Bill Kinnon
Brad Brisco
Brad Grinnen
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Bryan Riley
Chad Brooks
Chris Wignall
Cobus Van Wyngaard
Dave DeVries
David Best
David Fitch
David Wierzbicki
DoSi
Doug Jones
Duncan McFadzean
Erika Haub
Grace
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Jeff McQuilkin
John Smulo
Jonathan Brink
JR Rozko
Kathy Escobar
Len Hjalmarson
Makeesha Fisher
Malcolm Lanham
Mark Berry
Mark Petersen
Mark Priddy
Michael Crane
Michael Stewart
Nick Loyd
Patrick Oden
Peggy Brown
Phil Wyman
Richard Pool
Rick Meigs
Rob Robinson
Ron Cole
Scott Marshall
Sonja Andrews
Stephen Shields
Steve Hayes
Tim Thompson
Thom Turner

What Ministry Looks Like

Tim Keller defines ministry like this:

Using your resources, gifts or abilities to meet someone else's needs.

Ministry usually takes the form of conversation, or waiting, or helping. It's always person to person. It's almost always ordinary and mundane. It rarely has an immediate effect, but it always has an immediate cost.

Here's a picture of what that looks like.

This is Victor. He spends times talking to teenage guys about their lives. He hangs out. He is a minister.

This is Jenn. She and her husband are in our small group. She waits on kids while they use the bathroom. She is a minister.

This is Todd, Jenn's husband. He goes into people's homes and repairs their electricity so their lives are easier. Plus, in his spare time he lets kids dunk him in the water. He is a minister.

This is Juliana. She's also in our small group. She stays home with her kids and works to raise them to be who God made them to be. She is a minister.

This is Russ (green shirt) and Karen. They stand around in the heat and make sure kids don't eat too many cookies. They are ministers.

Just for Fun

In the Navy

At the invitation of a friend, I recently went to Norfolk, VA, home of the world's largest naval base.

My friend is a Navy Chaplain (they call him "Chaps") who both loves what he does and is outstanding at what he does (two things which seem to routinely go together, by the way).

Some things I observed worth noting for those of us working in church-world:

• There is an insane amount of preparation for a mission. In fact, there is as much activity on ships and on base before the mission as during the mission. The Chaplain said often going out to sea is relaxing compared to the pace of life when on shore.
• Everyone knows what they are to do. Everyone's role is specific and very clearly outlined.
• There is a constant flow of communication. They meet every day to coordinate who is doing what when and why. Interestingly, the officers each had two computers. One for regular email and the other for "secret" email. I wonder what the secrets are? Recipes for Navy Beans? Directions to the nearest Old Navy?
• No duty is too small. We walked by several sailors doing dumpster duty. An aircraft carrier had just come into port and the sailors were disembarking and getting rid of their trash. With 5,000 souls on board, making sure the trash got into the right dumpster was pretty important.
• Not sure if they were sorting it to recycle it, but it looked that way. Not a very fun duty though...
• Taking care of what you've got. Whether it was a 25 year old ship being cleaned, shined, buffed and or the bodies of the sailors (people were running everywhere on base), they took care of their resources. While there, the Chaplain and I lifted weights (@ 0630) and went for a run (@ 1300), all of it "on the clock." Pastors could learn a lot from that.

An aircraft carrier--just massive. Pictures don't do it justice. The deck alone is 3.5 acres.

Chaps from behind and here (on the right) with the Quartermaster (the guy in charge of the maps). What you don't see just to the left is a screen with a little red sticker indicating that whatever is on the monitor is "SECRET." I tried to take a picture of it (it only had directions to the nearest Old Navy), but they both threatened to shoot me.
Cooler heads prevailed and I lived to blog another day.

The first picture is one of the ships my friend serves as a Chaplain, the USS Mason

Shaping the Future

Someone very bright recently threw out this zinger in a conversation we were having:

We either shape the future, or the future will shape us.

That's true of any endeavor, and because my "endeavor" is the world and life of the church, I want to pause and think about what that might mean...on Monday, June 23.

Rick Meigs is hosting a synchronized blog on the topic, "What is Missional?" on that day. So far, almost 50 people in the blog-osphere have signed up to post their thoughts.

The topic, if you aren't in church world, is a hot one and gets at how and why the church does what it is that the church does. Hope you can make it back then.

Ouch.

Um, yeah.

While this certainly isn't fun for any of us, imagine being in the thirld world and having your food prices (that you already can't afford) go up. That's what's happening globally.

As my one of my seminary profs used to say in talking about the Lord's prayer, our example is Jesus, who prayed it so that his praying and living were the same thing.

"Give us this day our daily bread..."

If we pray that, then we'll ultimately realize we have to do something about it and become one of the means God uses to answer that prayer. It's a dangerous prayer.

The Baby That Ate New York

Corban, our second, is huge. I mean, just monster proportions.

Some of his stats:

6 1/2 months old.

24 lbs. 10 oz.

120% percentile (which means he is 20% bigger than every other baby on the planet his age.)

To put it into perspective, he is the same size of multiple kids we know that are 12-18 months old. We are pretty sure that he is going to be an NFL linebacker and build mommy and daddy a retirement home. Something we'll be needing if we keep on pastoring.

Now I mean nothing damaging, because he's as cute as he can be. (So Corban if you are reading this as a teenager or an adult, please tell your therapist that your dad really does love you). Proof of his cuteness is below via a cell phone shot snapped while we were taking family pictures. Plus, he's maybe the happiest baby I've known. A really great kid who loves to laugh and smile.

A picture of his big brother and their beautiful mom too.