signs & wonders

According to one version I heard yesterday, someone ran their Tacoma into the Vineyard sign (which is no mean feat…) and then walked away from it apparently unhurt. Not sure what’s what yet. Don’t know how their vehicle made out, but from the looks of the sign, the Tacoma won.

This weekend in our Summer of Love series we covered the sixth commandment, “You shall not murder”. I briefly touched on the tension between Christian pacificism (Walter Wink’s “third way”) and “just war” theories. John Howard Yoder is probably the best to read on the former, and Augustine as an early proponent of the latter. C. S. Lewis’ “Why I Am Not a Pacifist” essay from The Weight of Glory is a quick, head-tilting read as well. Regardless of your slant, an introspective “heart-check” is critical to understand why one leans either way, to make sure we aren’t driven by fear, or self-preservation, or self-righteousness or vengeance.

For followers of Jesus, ultimately our citizenship is in the Kingdom of God before any nationalistic adherence. If there is an example that a government can actually champion as morally right for the safety and justice of its people, we should approach it extremely humbly. Jesus can never be aligned to a country or a cause—that’s what the freedom fighters of the first century, the Zealots, wanted of Him. But they missed the Big Picture: He is the Cause, the cure for a very sick human condition. In our current context, despite being Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, or whatever, we are all messed up with a one-way ticket to Gehenna unless intercepted by the grace and love of God. My politics will not save me. I desperately need Jesus.

The New Testament implies that in this age of grace, the business of war is associated with human governments, not the Kingdom of God. When Jesus was being interrogated by the Roman government, He said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my followers would be fighting for me...”. The Kingdom cannot be fought for on a flesh-and-blood level. The case for pacifism can best be made here: any persecution for the Kingdom’s sake is met with a martyr’s mindset.

At the same time, Paul seems to say we have a responsibility with human governments in a fallen world. He writes:

“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.” Romans 13:1–7 (TNIV)

The degree of involvement is what’s argued. The pacifist asks: should I even pay a portion of taxes that support a military?

Paul’s passage is tough to swallow for a guy like me, a product of the sixties. I was a vociferous anti-Nixon protestor, complete with black armbands and all. It seemed unconscionable to me that you could send an eighteen-year-old to Vietnam but he couldn’t vote until he was twenty-one. The Twenty-Sixth amendment finally rectified that in 1971. One study put the average soldier in the Vietnam war at nineteen-years-old as opposed to WWII where the average was twenty-six. But this is where this all gets tricky: despite what I would consider a strong “justice”-streak in me, I had other demons I was wrestling with, and by age twenty I was introduced to Christians who began to shake not so much my world view but the secret places of my heart. It is one thing to argue politics or even morality, but another thing when a seven-million watt searchlight exposes your soul. I was undone.

All this rambling simply means that at times I don’t trust my own heart in how I settle some of the peripheral theological issues (one might argue what is considered peripheral). It’s not always as black-and-white from text-to-text as I’d hope. And sometimes we have to admit that we’re looking through a glass darkly.

One thing I know for sure: Jesus changes everything. And I’m still working that out.

summer of service 2009

Whew.

Last week we got back from Ireland on Thursday night, spent the next day scrambling to write a message for the weekend, spoke on Saturday and Sunday, then SOS ‘09 kicked in on Monday. Summer Of Service is a weeklong servant-oriented student conference. Over 900 students and leaders from fourteen states came (we cap it off at 900); it’s an amazing combination of passionate worship and serving others.

Sounds curiously like “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength…and love your neighbor as yourself.”

SOS pursues that combination for middle school and high school students. In this me-first, über-consumeristic, entitlement-driven, earth-bound culture that we carbon-based bipeds have created, try to imagine the spiritual booster rocket it takes for a young person to escape this powerful inward-focused gravity. SOS is designed to be that.

This year the theme was What About Now? and focused on Micah 6:8: He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. Nearly 1500 adults volunteered to make it happen.

Typically, each day began at 9am in the main auditorium with one of our own student ministry worship bands (these guys were amazing…including a killer thirteen-year-old drummer!). And, of course, some fun stuff. I’ve never seen jelly-filled doughnuts shot from a water-balloon launcher at a youth leader in catcher’s gear with two cops and a radar gun clocking it at over ninety-miles an hour. And then the outreaches for the day started.

All students cycled through four different kinds of outreaches throughout the week: First was participation in a huge free block party in a lower income area—we held eight of these. Second was building walls for four Habitat for Humanity homes and then passing out free water bottles at busy intersections. Third was participation in a program we’ve been doing in the public schools called Be The Difference…a self-revealing encounter focused on respect, bullying and how to treat fellow students, breaking through stereotypes. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen students break down and weep over buried issues in their lives. And then last, everyone had an E2 session: the Evangelism Experience. In this segment, each group of students learns how to hear God’s voice. They learn to pay attention to impressions and pictures. After being trained, they’re given a list of five questions to ask God, the group prays, listens, compares their “words” and then their leader attempts to design an outreach on the spot...then they take off with a certain amount of money given to them.

The stories were amazing. After feeling led to visit “tent city” (a homeless camp on the river in Cincy), one group of kids from Michigan pooled the money they had saved to go to Cedar Point amusement park on their way home…and drove back down there to give it to them on their free time. Regardless of outcome, you have to admire any student that denies themselves anything for someone else. When it comes to giving, we obviously want to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, as Jesus said. But I think we spend way too much time worried about getting ripped off rather than the danger of selfishness.

Check out Student Ministries Director Pete Bryant recapping the stories and watch this amazing band of students leading worship in this weekend's celebration.

After the afternoon outreaches, students would come back for an evening of fantastic worship music (Phil Wickham, Jeremy Riddle, Robbie Reider and our own Zak Stegman). To see nine-hundred students and leaders all singing to Jesus at the top of their lungs is brilliant. A short teaching followed that.

One night, instead of worship we held a luau for over seven hundred special needs adults, complete with games, dancing, a pig roast, dinner and more. It was fabulous watching students escorting our special needs friends around the building, dancing and playing games. Our guests had the time of their lives.

We finished the week on Friday night with baptisms; it just doesn’t get any better than that.

It makes me wonder: what would an SOS for adults look like?

vineyard u.k….the irish tribe

We flew over from Basel, Switzerland to Dublin on Thursday. Turns out Ryannair only allows about thirty pounds per checked baggage…as opposed to United’s (and everyone else in the universe) fifty pound limit. You can pay extra…like, twenty Euros per extra kilogram. We were all at the fifty pound limit, so we jettisoned clothes (I dumped all my t-shirts) and crammed as much as we could into out carryons, and just made it to the gate. Turns out everyone here makes fun of Ryannair—they charge for seatbelts. Okay, I made that part up.

There are now six Vineyards in Ireland. They had their regional meeting in Dungannon—five were able to make it. We did two sessions together; I spoke on developing outward-focused churches, had lunch, and then an extended Q&A time. Great guys…all with similar hearts.

Sunday morning I spoke at the two services at Vineyard Dungannon. My buddy Jason Scott (lead pastor) wanted to launch a new series: The Apprentice, about discipleship. Apparently there’s a British version of Trump's show with a hyper-successful, self-made businessman named Alan Sugar who doesn’t have a comb-over, but he does have an attitude. Jason asked me to speak about surrender…so I spoke on three levels of surrender in a person’s life: surrender for survival (“Lord, help me!”), surrender for service (“Lord, what can I do?”) and the surrender of self-denial (“I am crucified with Christ.”). Afterwards, we had lunch with all the ministry leaders.

A very, very cool thing has happened here. Last year they launched a campaign called Leaving a Legacy and raised over a 180 thousand pounds to create a great space for kids in after-school programs and teens on Friday nights, a center for ministry to the poor called The Storehouse, and their ongoing ministry to the Dalits (the lowest caste in India—“untouchables”). Remember, this is a church of only 130-150 people or so. I’m so proud of these guys.

Plus, a few weeks ago they launched their second service on Sunday mornings. Last October they were averaging 75-80 people on a weekend, so doubling their services nearly doubled their attendance. I love it when leaders move beyond what some consider “facility restrictions” or worse, “lack of volunteer leaders”. We decided recently that we would not launch a new ministry or program without asking the question, “What’s the maximum number of volunteer roles we could create for this?” I think people want to play in the game…and often they’re not asked.

Anyway, it’s been good to connect with our friends here and hopefully bring a little encouragement. What they’re doing ministry-wise is certainly encouraging to me.

more in schweizland

part 3:

Spoke Saturday night at the Glaube in Bewegung Conferenz—Faith in Action Conference—on leadership. This was my third session and even though the conference was a general conference, I felt I should speak on the issue of leadership and organizational health. I had a few pastors thanked me for the message; I hope “civilians” could make use of it.

On Sunday late afternoon I spoke on social justice. There’s an odd dynamic here is Switzerland; the government’s social care system virtually eliminates any homeless issue; we could learn a few things in America. But that can create other problems according to our friends here: a “hiddenness” of the people who are taken care of from the community. Yet it does makes for an odd slant when talking about justice issues—in general, people’s health needs and housing are practically taken care of here. Obviously there are cracks in the system and people are people anywhere on the globe. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs eventually comes into play, particularly in a country where only 3% of the population attend church.

But we also live in a global community that is shrinking rapidly. The needs in third world countries shout at us. The Pharisee’s question, “Who is my neighbor?” has gotten more difficult in this information age, and the only way to avoid it is to become hermitage monks and totally withdraw from society.

I don’t think that’s do-able if you have the heart of Jesus and understand the generosity of God.

It was a more serious talk about systemic poverty. I was reminded of the dilemma a few years ago in Nigeria. Nigeria will spend more on paying off its debt to Western industrialized nations than health care. The tsunami in 2005 took over 150,000 lives, but that’s how many Africans die every month of AIDs. And get this: Nigeria has already paid over 15 billion dollars on the original 5 billion dollar loan. It’s all interest—and they still owe $32 billion. Interest on international bank loans can fluctuate wildly. Something’s not right. You and I have Christian brothers and sisters in those nations. The Bible has some of its harshest words for those who will not fight against social injustices.

Anyway, it was a difficult talk to give with a translator, but we made it. Looking forward to a couple of down days.

outward-focused life in switzerland

part 1:

I’m writing this from a town called Whylen, Germany, directly across the border from Basel, Switzerland. Last night I spoke at a conference called Glaube in Bewegung or Faith in Action in downtown Basel, a beautiful city that’s a striking combination of old world architecture and postmodern capitalism. You might see an H&M store in a four hundred year old building. The downtown streets are vibrant and crowded with people shopping and eating in cafes (and Starbucks). It’s on the Rhine River, which is light green and clean; the Ohio River looks like chocolate compared to this. We saw swimmers, even though it was a little cool. Imagine people coming to the Serpentine wall in Cincinnati and swimming.

A banner over the doorway of the church hosting the conference says, “Small things done with great love will change the world” in German. The conference started with a bang: a quick welcome and then—surprise! —everyone goes out to serve. I loved it. The Vineyard here has such a good relationship with the city that they have a key to the city’s sanitation department and can take several hundred bright yellow vests, “trash” pickers and gloves to clean the city for outreaches. Sweet.

For the first hour of the conference we walked the streets and picked up cigarette butts and litter. The streets are actually quite clean, but this is really a nice touch. Afterwards, my friend and host Martin Benz spoke (in German, of course) and then I spoke with a translator. People seemed to respond well; Martin called it refreshing. I think that’s good. Later we walked to a restaurant called ZicZac’s with concert posters of B. B. King and Junior Walker serving food entrees with names like “San Antonio Chili” and “Louisiana Ribs” all in German. Plus, top it off with a Swiss microbrewery beer. Huh?

part 2:

Finished the morning session speaking about what Outward Focused Churches look like. Again, a bit difficult to do with a translator. Not her fault; Nina has done a great job. It’s just finding your rhythm and tempo that’s hard…and self-editing as you go. I’ll speak again in a few hours and then again tomorrow night for the fourth session. Did another outreach today; cleaned windows in a senior citizens center apartments and got to pray with a woman in her nineties through a translator.

I had interesting conversations with several pastors who seemed spun by the talk. They are in the process of discovering their church's soul...which I talked about this morning. I also met a very sharp Christian psychologist named Dr. Samuel Pfeifer who spoke as well. I felt a connection with him; we had it interpreted in English for us...and well worth it. Shared an interesting lunch with him.

Getting here was an experience; we got stuck in Washington D.C. in a thunderstorm and sat on the tarmac for nearly five hours before we could take off for the eight hour flight. I was in the middle of the center row of four seats next to a large gentleman. Big deal…we’re flying, for heaven’s sake…and not taking a boat. I’ve got no room to complain.

Anyway, after this conference, midweek we fly to Dublin to meet with the Vineyard leaders there and speak in my friend Jason Scott’s church in Dungannon. Looking forward to seeing all our friends there.

Enough for now. Spread the love.

wedding countdown

Appreciate all your comments in the previous post. As you read for yourself, views on how the gift of tongues operates are extremely varied. I’ll try to revisit this soon. Promise.

But tonight I’m sitting in a hotel room in Chattanooga, Tennessee the night before I give my oldest daughter away in marriage. This is a first for my wife and me. All the typical thoughts have flooded my mind—Where did the time go? Didn’t we just bring her home from the hospital terrified that we wouldn’t know what to do? Wasn’t she just holding her “maid-of-honor new-baby-sister” while still in diapers? Kindergarten was just last week, right? We just watched her get baptized, didn’t we? Wasn’t yesterday when she went on her first youth group retreat? Can this really be her first prom? Didn’t we just cry when we dropped her off at college? And on and on.

When I was younger, I thought those kind of comments were quaint conversation-fillers when old people gathered. But here I am. Pensive. And old.

And even stranger for me is thinking that some day Rachel will have those same kind of thoughts.

I have long told my girls that my primary job as their dad was simply to make the transferring of my fathering of them to their heavenly Father as seamless as possible…and that He would do a far better job than me. All of us know the huge effect our dads had on our view of God; that’s Spiritual Psych 101.

I guess the largest part of Christianity is learning how to let go, isn’t it? How to hold life loosely. How to die to yourself. It seems to me we squeeze the life out of everything we hold tightly.

I’m convinced my most holy moments were the times I liked the least, when I had to...

—let go of my need to be right.
—die to the idea that I know how to run my universe better than God.
—not blow my own trumpet.
—let go of money when I thought I was the one who needed it.
—zigged left when the world zagged right.
—swallow my pride.
—forgive.
—trust my Father more than myself.
—not worry about looking stupid.
—learn how to die.
—pick up my cross.

Okay, I know this all sounds a little morose for a prewedding post, but there is a tenderness to all this. And remember, I did say these are the most holy moments.

And I couldn’t be happier for Rachel.


In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal. (John 12:25 The Message)

speaking in tongues

This past weekend was on the last section of the Nicene Creed: We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

That’s a motherboard of theological hot-circuits: baptism, resurrection, judgment and the big apocalyptic finish.

At the uptempo close of our worship in the 11:40 celebration, someone suddenly spoke out in tongues for what felt like a lengthy time, though probably a minute. It was quite emotional and fairly loud. I was in a back room getting ready to go on when I heard it. Our worship leader, Charlie Hines, paused for a few moments and then closed in prayer, though the woman was still speaking. She slowed down to a finish and then Charlie did what we always do—have people say ‘hello’ to someone before you sit down. The vibe in the room was a little uneasy.

Brad was backstage getting ready to do the transition and said, “Should I say something?” I told him no and that I would talk about it. It really was a pastoring-moment.

Before I walked out, Brad asked, “What are you going to say?”

“I don’t know. I’ll shoot from the hip.” (I think that’s an old cowboy term for not taking time to aim with the gunsight. It ain’t accurate but it’s fast…)

Of course, depending on your church background, this is either a mystery, a big deal or a non-issue. The charismatics were probably thinking, “Finally! Now let’s get the interpretation…”. The evangelicals were wondering, “I knew it! I thought there was something suspicious about this place…”. And the clueless were thinking, “What the…? Is she having a nervous breakdown?”

Even more interesting to me was the “emotional field”, in psychologist Rollo May’s language, that rippled out. There was a palpable uneasiness. I think it was not only the fact it’s a rare occurrence (I can’t remember the last time in a large corporate setting like that), but accompanied with serious emotion. Imagine being at a family reunion in a local restaurant, everyone’s eating and laughing and telling stories and suddenly Uncle Frank breaks into a very emotional, passionate diatribe…in Latin. Suddenly, the emotional field shifts radically.

Speaking in tongues is an important piece of the Christian experience. But it’s not without difficulties in practice; just look at the various theological viewpoints, not to mention the methodologies. I won’t go into that here…that’s a month’s worth of blogs; Paul devotes three whole chapters to addressing its use, abuse and context in the Corinthian church.

Let me just preface this by saying I speak in tongues myself; it’s personal and a critical part of my prayer life. But how it’s used corporately is debated, even among charismatics. And in our post-modern, dechurched and yet weirdly religious American culture, it’s even more strange when your weekend gatherings are designed to have a user-friendly attractional element.

But that’s not the point of this post. I just wanted to let you inside a communicator’s head (as if you were interested…) from a pastoral perspective.

For instance, my first thought was: “Uh-oh…we have some ‘splaining to do.” Thought number two: “Oh. That’s me.” Third thought: “Dang. I’m giving a hefty message today about judgment. Plus, this?” Fourth: “If I brought someone for the first time today, what would I be thinking?” Fifth thought: “Do this in two minutes, change the vibe in the room…and move on.” Thought number six: “Wow, this is actually cool—an opportunity to teach on how to handle this.” Seventh thought: “Am I spiritually discerning anything about this expression of tongues?”

My intuition was that this was more of a personal release from someone who was emotionally troubled, and was giving personal expression to God from that…not a corporate message.

Anyway, after setting up the message, I mentioned how I needed to take a moment and ‘pastor’ what just happen. It was the classic elephant in the room. I briefly explained how we have a theology open to the gifts of the Spirit, but that the gifts work best in the right context and that it’s not a normal custom for us to use the gift of tongues in the weekend setting. I relayed that we believe the ideal place to learn and practice spiritual gifts is in your small group where there is relationship and accountability and that in a large gathering like this with people all over the map in their spiritual journeys and backgrounds, anyone can walk in off the street and say they have a message from God; it can quickly get confusing and disorienting. As leaders, we have to carefully shepherd the mission God has clearly given us.

Leaders have a responsibility to navigate and interpret. It isn’t always pretty, it isn’t always simple and you’ll never please everybody. I have been in charismatic and word-of-faith circles in just about every imaginable shape and size for thirty-five years. I think I’ve seen the best and worst; I’ve embraced some and jettisoned equal amounts of teaching.

And then I went on with a message on baptism, resurrection, and judgment. Sheesh.

Interesting postscript, though. Today a friend called me who was on the prayer team Sunday. He said a woman came to them for prayer afterwards and said, “Uh, I’m the one who spoke in tongues.” He smiled and said, “It’s okay. What can we pray for you about?” She wept as she told them she was a struggling single mom, pregnant, and with news that her baby has serious physical difficulties and will not live after birth. She was in deep, deep pain. I have no doubts that she was crying out from that place.

And the truth is, most of us regularly project messages from God through our own lenses.


At the same time the Spirit also helps us in our weakness, because we don’t know how to pray for what we need. But the Spirit intercedes along with our groans that cannot be expressed in words. The one who searches our hearts knows what the Spirit has in mind. The Spirit intercedes for God’s people the way God wants him to. (Romans 8:26-27 God’s Word Translation)

the vineyard movement

This past week Joe Boyd and I were in Galveston for the Vineyard National Leadership Conference. Besides thoroughly enjoying the time with Joe, it reconfirmed what I love about our particular tribe and why it seems to fit me/us nicely. By the way, the head of our region, Ken Wilson, spoke at the Vineyard this weekend on the passage about the Church in our Nicene Creed series. Ken is the author of two great books; check out his last one called Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back.

Since my earliest recollection of the Vineyard and connection in 1984, there has always been a “kingdom-centered” theology, that is, the incarnation was the fulfillment of the Kingdom…and that the central message of the Church is the Kingdom…and that the Kingdom is expressed in supernatural and practical ways. John the Baptist’s first message was, “Change the way you think: the Kingdom of heaven is near.” In other words, the curtain between heaven and earth is opening and the playwright is stepping onto the stage. A thin place has suddenly been breached.

Jesus’ first public announcement was the well-known prophetic passage from Isaiah 61 that had been referenced for centuries as the day when the Sovereign Lord rebuilds and restores a devastated planet, when justice flows like a river. When I look at the rampant political corruption in Zimbabwe and the desperate lining of pockets of power in an economy with an unfathomable no-kidding inflation rate of five-hundred-billion percent, or when I saw the long-abandoned massive strip-mined craters for tin in Nigeria as a result of colonialism, or read of the approximate quarter-million children trapped in sex-trade slavery in Thailand, I shout, “That’s not fair. Where is the justice?” Who wouldn’t?

Only one problem: what if God applied His perfect justice to me? Ouch.

Would I weep like the German Oskar Schindler, whose factory saved nearly twelve-hundred Jews, and say, “I could have got more out. I don't know. . . I threw away so much money. . . If I'd just...”? I live in a country where the average American is financially worth nearly a hundred times more than the average Indian.

And what about the unseen pettiness of my thoughts, the unspoken demand for comfort, the sense of entitlement?

How often have I turned a blind eye? Have I hoarded in ways that are indiscernible in our culture? Do I spend more on DVD’s than an Indonesian makes in a year? The average American spends a whopping five hours a day watching TV; is that justice when hands and hearts are needed for the homeless, for forgotten senior citizens, for global peacemaking, for neglected children, for whatever? If justice really ran down like a raging river, would I be swept off the banks in it?

That’s why I need the fresh mercies of God every morning.

But the message of the Kingdom focuses on individual wholeness and systemic social righteousness. It functions both on the level of practical justice and the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. That’s what appeals to me about the Vineyard movement—it’s not just talk. And it’s not just about social causes. And it’s not just about the charismas. It’s the practical and supernatural outworking of the Kingdom. There is a risk element to it that we like to define as faith.

I need a family, a tribe, that’s bigger than my own. It’s not about “joining” the Vineyard movement. For me, it’s like discovering your spiritual DNA in a family you’ve been searching for for years.

And that’s what the conference reminded me.

more holy ghost stories

Years ago when I was traveling and playing big loud, guitar-laden, synth-soaked, huge-snare-drum, eighties-style-music-for-Jesus, we played a gig in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Interestingly enough, earlier that day we had stopped in a typical franchise bookstore, like a B. Dalton’s-type place, and were caught off-guard by the shelves and shelves of new-age, metaphysical and occult-oriented books filling the store. This was not conservative Catholic Cincinnati; this was an Age-of-Aquarius mecca.

Later, at the close of the concert that night, I invited people to make Jesus the Lord of their lives. As we gathered the people who wanted to do that to the side of the stage, a young woman crashed into the circle and began shouting obscenities and making fun of what she called “religion.” She certainly got everyone’s attention. There was a man with her—I assumed her boyfriend—who stood behind her with a creepy half-smile the whole time.

I pulled her aside and said, “What’s the matter with you?”

She told me she had tried religion years before and it was nothing but a {expletive} {expletive} joke. What’s more, she let it be known she was buzzed on coke at that very moment.

Without thinking too much about it, I asked her if I could pray for her. I think I thought that would just shut her up for a little bit while I tried to figure out what to do next. She said, “You can {expletive} do whatever the {expletive} you want!” So I simply prayed out loud, “Holy Spirit, please come and touch this woman.”

All of a sudden, WHAM! She fell to the floor like a bag of rocks. Out cold. No kidding.

The Smiley Guy with her looked at me…then looked at her…then back at me. The young adults who had come to receive Jesus were watching with their mouths open. This was not your average mosh pit.

And all I could think was, “Oh man, Jesus. You killed her.”

I really wasn’t sure what to do so I kept praying over her like this was a normal occurrence. A minute or so later, which seemed like an eternity, she suddenly jumped to her feet and literally ran out of the auditorium with The Smiley Guy running behind her. I chased after her, trying to do a little post-counseling cleanup, asking her if she knew any Christians or any churches in the city, but she said nothing, didn’t look back, and flew out of there like she’d seen a ghost.

And I would say she had. The Holy Ghost. It was shock-and-awe in the auditorium that night.

Christianity is not another philosophy. It’s not a moral viewpoint. It’s not another pathway to inner bliss. It is the transforming of spiritually dead and alienated people into a vibrant, spiritually-energizing, life-giving relationship with God based on our surrendering to the Lordship of His Son, the God-man Jesus—the messiah of all, the savior of the world. Not a nice-guy teacher. Not another enlightened guru. Not a philosopher. Savior. Lord.

But it doesn’t stop with you and your individual salvation.

Post-resurrection, Jesus told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem and they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them. Part of the reason why was because they were about to be thrown into the middle of a cosmic clash. There is a war between good and evil on this planet, between God’s purposes for humanity and an evil force that wants to disrupt that. As John put it, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” (1 John 3:8b)

One of the first things critical for a new Christian to learn is that they’re in a war zone now…and the enemy’s tactics are everything from distractions to temptations to apathy to money to unforgiveness to you-name-it. And he’s good at this; it’s not always the Big Obvious Stuff. That’s why he’s called The Deceiver. If you’re not having some problems living out your faith, then I doubt if you have any faith.

The first time I had someone explain to me that I had a real enemy who wanted to neutralize me because I was a potential threat to his destructive plan for the world, it lit a fire in my soul—there was no way I was going to be taken out as a follower of Jesus.

And the reason why is because Jesus picked me, of all people, to be part of His offense. Just like He picked you. Over the years I’ve heard people say, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if (insert Big Shot name here) became a Christian? They could really advance the Kingdom of God!” Truth is, Jesus doesn’t need The Big Celebrity, because He already has all the power. In the final climactic confrontation of good and evil personified in a being called Antichrist, Jesus defeats him with a breath (pneuma). That’s all.

If that’s all it takes to defeat the powers that are against the Kingdom of God, I’ll take some of that.

the creed

Often in churches like ours (uh, whatever that means), the mainstream view of “believe, then belong” is turned upside down. That’s because doctrine was often seen as the gatekeeper for who can enter the community. As a result, churches were often seen as dogmatic, unwelcoming places…instead of a place where people might explore the faith. A friend told me last week that a co-worker told them they didn’t like Easter at their church because “all these casually religious” people show up. Obviously, something’s wrong with that picture.

And so in emergent or even user-friendly circles, we’ll say, “Belong, then believe”, and the community becomes a place to discover faith. It’s really about simply creating safe places for people to check out Christianity…and inevitably, the nature of weekend celebrations begins to morph.

But there is a caveat.

If the process of exploring the faith becomes prolonged, the seeker may get frustrated with the level of relational connection he or she can realistically have with the community. And that’s the conundrum: we all want to belong, to be connected, but what you believe affects the depth of relationship you can have. I talked about that this weekend, but would have loved to have parked there a little more.

Let me personalize this.

Suppose I worked a civilian job and had two co-workers who were dyed-in-the-wool Scientologists. I enjoy having drinks with these guys; they’re funny, personable, and we share a common love of movies. But they are sincerely committed to the Church of Scientology. I could kid them about a dubious religion launched by a hack science-fiction writer who once said, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion,” but that would hurt their feelings and I like them too much for that. Or I could joke about the upper levels of Scientology where it’s believed seventy-five million years ago the Earth was part of a seventy-six planet Galactic Federation ruled by a malevolent overlord named Xenu who fixed the population problem on other planets by bringing people to earth and strategically placing them around volcanoes that were then blown up with hydrogen bombs. Hence the exploding volcano on the cover of Dianetics. But that would hurt their feelings because they deeply believe it’s true.

So how could I ever become a part of their community at the deepest level? Or share what they feel so intensely about? There would always be a gap in the level of intimacy we could have. It’s a bit of overstatement to say we can belong before we believe, at least to the degree that we may want to belong.

That’s one of the reasons a common creed is so powerful. Certainly it’s not the only thing that creates real community (try transparency, vulnerability, kindness, servanthood, honesty, etc.), but it is certainly the final barrier.

Do you believe that?



humor postscript:

Off subject, this stuff got me thinking about a Top 10 list we once did in a series on Toxic Religion. It made me laugh when we wrote it. Maybe we need a break…

TOP TEN WAYS TO KNOW YOU’RE IN A TOXIC CHURCH
10. When people raise their hands during worship, it’s for permission to go to the bathroom.
9. Water fountains only dispense Kool-Aid.
8. Doctrine includes story of Xenu, a galactic ruler who brought billions of people to earth 95 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, blew them up with hydrogen bombs and…oh wait, that’s Scientology.
7. Services are B.Y.O.S.—“Bring Your Own Snake”
6. Front door of the church has a peephole.
5. Church motto is: "Small Things Done With A Lot Of Guilt Won’t Help You Out, Sleazebag."
4. Sign in lobby reads: “Line forms here for comet rides.”
3. Two words: pat downs.
2. The church bus has gun racks.
1. They're closed on Christmas. Hey…that’s not funny.

creepy post-easter thoughts

It was a great weekend. No. Spectacular.

But only in hindsight.

Easter and Christmas weekends are when we push everyone to invite someone from work, family, neighborhood, etcetera, because, well, these are the times when people do their church-duty-thing and therefore an ideal time for us to clarify what it means to follow Jesus. On these big invitation weekends, I find myself getting weird. Antsy. Narrowed. Hyperpicky about techie-things. I feel bad for our staff. And, even worse, I get more inward-focused. I hate that; that’s the worse part.

You’d think I’d learn. Let me illustrate from a different life I once had.

I led worship at VCC for about a dozen years. Because of my church-orientation (word-of-faith camp) in the early days of my conversion, I thought that as a worship leader, if I hadn’t gone into hyperfaith and “prayed through” in the Spirit for thirty minutes prior to leading worship, then worship wasn’t going to happen. And if the worship wasn’t happening on any Sunday morning it was my fault. Back in the late eighties I worked a crazy job in a jingle-house recording studio outside the Vineyard as well as leading a couple of small groups and the worship on Sunday mornings. Going into hyperfaith was the “proper response” to my obsessive need to perform well for God in all those contexts (uh, plus a great way to burnout…). Only God and worship leaders’ spouses know the real performance anxieties as the worship leader asks this quintessential question on the car ride home: “How do you think worship went today?”—hoping to be validated in some way.

One Sunday morning as I was in hyperfaith on the way to lead worship, the Holy Spirit broke through and said, “You really think this thing depends on you, don’t you?” In other words, if I don’t pray just right, then God won’t show up—and I suddenly realized how sick I was, how creepily religious, how egocentric, how much it negated the body of Christ and the beauty and power of grace. As if this whole thing depended on me. Please. Talk about getting the wind knocked out. And so for the next month or so, I would drive to church on my way to lead worship with the local heavy metal station playing at 120 decibels—just to drive out the religious demons.

And I didn’t even like heavy metal.

There is so much performance mentality behind religious activity that it scares me now. The truth is, God loves us and enjoys our company so much and is frankly unimpressed by how well we think we do or don’t do. That doesn’t mean we become slack and shoddy, but that all of our activity is in response to His love for us, not in any effort to gain it, however subtle that may be.

So what does this have to do with my current Easter anxieties?

It’s just too easy to take everything extremely personal and forget that ultimately it’s not really dependent on us. Yeah, I know it’s my job to craft a thoughtful message that bridges the perception-gap of “church” that people who come twice-a-year have…and even more, hopefully present the message of the resurrection lucidly. And I know ultimately the buck stops here in terms of what gets included in the celebration. But if I’m not careful, that turns into a perverse performance mentality that cuts the legs out from under grace. It’s the same weirdness that crept into the Galatian church.

Anyway, it can make my enjoyment of the weekend weird. Face it: us pastors have peculiar issues.

So tonight Anita and I were eating at a local restaurant when we got a server who goes to the Vineyard. As we headed out the door, our server said, “There’s another guy who works here who goes to the Vineyard as well. Wait a minute.” She left and came out with “Bob”, a twenty-something who told us a great story. While in college, he got addicted to a prescription drug and then compounded his troubles by getting busted one night using a fake i.d. in a local bar. Even worse, he wrote a check with the fake name on the i.d. and ended up with two felony counts and some misdemeanors.

That’s serious; you don’t mess around with felonies. He hit the lowest point in his life.

When his trial came, the judge miraculously dismissed the felonies and left him with 150 hours of community service. Turns out, he was sent to perform them at the Vineyard and said it was the best 150 hours of his life. He did his time while Summer Of Service (S.O.S.—we host hundreds of kids and take them out serving every day for a week) and other things were happening and said his life radically changed. He was a lapsed Catholic and had always “believed” in God but it never seemed “personal”. That was two years ago and he’s been on fire since; he says he now lives to give Jesus glory.

I asked him how his family had responded to all this. He replied that they’ve started coming to VCC and this weekend his mom said, “I need to make a change in my life,” and walked down front to get the New Testament and Next Steps cd.

Wow.

Wish I could enjoy those moments in the moment, but I guess it’s not half-bad with hindsight. She was part of a crowd of people who took that first step in the six celebrations.

I love it. Looking back now, of course.

Hope you had a great Resurrection Day...full of grace.

easter 2009

John tells quite a story...

Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jews. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away.

He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)

Then the disciples went back to their homes, but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

“Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

John 19:38–20:29 NIV

This changes everything.

“i’m going to church…”

Sorry this so long. Okay, not really.

I liked my cohort Joe’s setup for describing how absurd it is to say, “I’m going to church”. Comparing nineties grunge culture to how we talk about church was more than clever. When the New Testament declares that we are Christ’s body, Joe’s descriptions of what Jesus did with His body in Luke’s account was rich. Check it out here.

Now let me revert and use that term the way Christians typically do.

For some of us, we grew up in “churches” that were as dry and dusty as a stack of National Geographics in your Uncle Ned’s basement. I lived in a small town where everyone knew everyone. Each Sunday we shuffled in quietly with the other half-smiling dysfunctional families and slid into the pew and drew pictures to keep our little hands busy while a man in the front droned in monotone about things in the afterlife that didn’t seem any more interesting than what was going on at the moment. As a kid, church had a stifling silence about it, like walking into the school library where a stern-faced woman could rap your knuckles and knock the Dewey-Decimal-daylights out of you if you even thought about whispering.

That’s how going to church felt. God was mysterious…and up there somewhere. And generally a little ticked off.

One day, after missing my fourth grade Sunday school class for several weeks, a card came in the mail with a little picture of a church with a steeple. Written under it were big letters and spaces that spelled “C H _ _ C H”. Below that it read, “What’s missing here? U-R!” That form letter filled me with shame, like I’d been caught by my elementary principal for skipping school. “Church” triggered two primal feelings as a child: I have done something terribly wrong and I might do something terribly wrong.

By the sixth grade I was out of there and never returned until I met Jesus in my twenties. And was convinced in my newfound agnosticism that if God did exist, He had left that place as well out of sheer boredom.

That all changed when I experienced Jesus as savior and master. And what made that powerful was the enlightened understanding that the One who died an excruciating death by one of the more morbid forms of execution the Romans could invent was God. Jesus was God. It wasn’t because someone crammed a doctrine down the mouth of my soul, but simply because some other soul-beggar who had found the messiah told me that Jesus had given His life as a sacrifice for me as well. And so I thought if He was just another man giving his life for another cause, that’s nice, but it doesn’t do anything for the human condition, certainly not the condition I was in. It had to be bigger than a cause.

And the only thing bigger than a righteous cause is Love itself. Or Himself.

God becoming Man and laying His life down for His own creation, initiating the Kingdom, and restoring severed relationships captured my heart. It made me want to thank Him, to worship Him, to live my life in worship to Him, to do whatever He said.

And then as I walked further on, I found out things that I could actually do for Jesus.

One day I discovered that He didn’t love me for what I could do for Him, He just loved me. I began to see how abusive my relationships were with others. They were typically reciprocal, based on what someone could do for me. I then fell in love with Jesus even more, because He was changing they way I saw everything.

Then one day I learned that love was a powerful force placed in me by the Holy Spirit that was only released as I chose. I found myself in hard situations, sometimes because of my own dysfunction, sometimes I was in the crosshairs of spiritual warfare, sometimes the target of someone else’s woundedness and pain and sometimes God was simply saying no to my requests. It was then I discovered the greater power of worship: Would I love God and tell Him so only when things were going the way I want them to?

And then I fell more deeply in love.

So what does that have to do with “church”?

An old Bible commentator and English lit scholar from the turn of the twentieth century that I’ve enjoyed is an author named W. J. Dawson. Dawson once wrote that many churches are “social clubs, united by moral ideals, rather than spiritual communities quick with divine fire.”

I think that’s certainly a picture of much of the contemporary church, and especially the worst version of us: moral police for our culture.

The church is not a group of people gathered around an ideal, it is a people who share a common revelation of Jesus Christ, a true spiritual community because it’s not founded on any other foundation but a spiritual one. Do they agree on everything? Of course not. They are at different levels of maturity and growth. They are like a family—there’s a big difference between the family baby and grandfather: a world of experience. But they are bound by the same genetic code.

As Joe pointed out, the word church that Jesus used is the Greek word ekklesia (ἐκκλησία) meaning “the called out ones.”

I like to think of it as people who have been called out of the sleep of this world, who have been awakened to something far greater than they were dreaming of. A greater reality. Life in God. The God who breaks through routine, the God who smashes through addictions, the God who brings clarity, the God who fills with purpose, and the only thing in life worth worshipping crashing through our doldrums, or crises, our bewilderments. There is none like Him, the psalmist said. And there is nothing that can overpower the community He is building because it is built on something more solid than what has ever been experienced in the history of man.

It’s good to remind ourselves periodically who and what the Church actually is.

more cowbell

Hopefully I'll never Twitter. Or is that Tweet? No offense intended if you do, but it creeps me out.

But I have to admit that Christopher Walken's is addicting. Total proof he's an alien.

Oddly, that doesn't creep me out. Go figure.

jesus reset prayer

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1 NIV)

“I’ve come to change everything, turn everything rightside up—how I long for it to be finished!” Luke 12:50 (The Message)

Wow. I loved—no, LOVED—the twenty-minute guided experience this past weekend that our creative team put together for the Reset message on prayer. It was clever in that it felt personal yet communal at the same time. If you didn’t catch it, it’s really worth your time; check it out here and walk through it. It follows our worship time and lasts about twenty minutes.

If time wasn’t an issue, I would have unwrapped one idea more thoroughly. Context is everything. Usually when we teach through “The Lord’s Prayer” (or the “Our Father” in some circles), we typically interpret it line-by-line. But in Luke’s abbreviated version in chapter 11, the key to understanding this prayer is the context offered in verse one. Jesus was upending everything (or turning them rightside up) in terms of how people viewed God as a father, how they imagined the messiah, how they saw spirituality and how they thought about intimacy with God. Jesus was great at this: “You have heard that it was said _______, but I say to you, _______.” He wasn’t throwing out the first, He was simply offering 3-D glasses to see it with more depth. “The Lord’s Prayer” was more about resetting how they (and we) interact with God.

When Jesus’ guys asked, “Teach us to pray, just as John the Baptizer teaches his followers”, they were thinking of a particular paradigm of spirituality embodied in John. It’s apparent that John had very pronounced spiritual disciplines, perhaps similar to the Essenes, the religious order that produced the Dead Sea scrolls. Very structured times for extended fasting and prayer. Ascetic, holiness-oriented, prophetic and mystical. This isn’t a “John-the-Baptist” slam: remember, Jesus said that there was no one greater than John except, paradoxically, the least in the kingdom.

Keep in mind that by this point Jesus had already been accused of being the polar opposite of John the Baptist in both Luke chapter five and seven—hanging out with the wrong crowd, going to parties, eating (as opposed to fasting), drinking alcohol, doing “ministry work” on the Sabbath—all the stuff that didn’t seem “spiritual” to the religious leaders.

And so for us, this routine, overly familiar prayer would have seemed shocking to religious first-century ears. Short, simple, bold and intimate. That’s why Jesus told those stories afterwards, to help them (and us) understand how much God longs to relate to them and give them what they need based solely on His love for them. It didn’t have to be fancy, long or super-spiritual-sounding.

And not just prayer; He was resetting definitions of spirituality and the way we relate to our Father.

Reset.

love, enemies...and evil

The problem with a message about the boundary-breaking love-of-God is that it really demands an acknowledgement of evil. And that’s where things get tricky, especially when God says to love your enemies (Luke 6:35).

Some years back I was having lunch with a man who wasn’t completely clear what he believed about Christianity—there was a mix of new age ideas and pointed questions regarding Jesus Christ. He seemed to be uncomfortable with any authoritarian view of right and wrong; rather, determine for yourself your own moral code. He appeared to have difficulty with simple social protocol, sometimes coming to weekend celebrations dressed in sexually provocative clothes—very tight and extremely short shorts. In the course of our conversation, he disclosed what appeared to me to be an awfully painful memory of his childhood, but he shrugged it off as, “That’s life…I’ve moved on.” He told me that growing up, he couldn’t remember a day his dad did not beat him. Worse, his dad was an overtly religious man who read his Bible regularly and immersed himself in church activities. He vividly recalled being taken to the garage with his brother and beaten with a belt until his dad was literally exhausted.

Let me cash a reality-check here. Every one of us has an unspoken struggle with God. Some point where we won’t forgive, some place that we won’t leave, some wound we won’t let God near, some surrender we don’t want to make, some spiritual discipline we don’t want to do, some sin we don’t want to turn away from. If we bury it deep enough, perhaps we won’t have to deal with it. And so we numb ourselves with superficialities, false intimacies, pharmaceuticals or religious activities. This man’s unspoken struggle with God was obvious. As with many of us, it’s usually not an intellectual difficulty we have with God but a moral one. In this case: How can I be expected to honor my parents? Don’t tell me to love my enemy until you know what it’s like to have an Adolph Hitler for your father. Is God crazy?

And that’s a great question: Is God crazy?

Talking about loving your enemy requires talking about evil. Evil can best be described as total and complete self-absorption. Christians call it pride. Psychiatrists may term it malignant narcissism. While God says, “You must surrender your will to me”, evil says “Surrender to no one. It’s better to be your own boss in your own private hell than to submit to anything else.” The perversity of this is obvious: evil invalidates its own philosophy because it demands its way and its own rights, requiring someone to submit to it. Bow to me. When we think life exists to serve us, we have slipped into a dark world.

Scripture implies that we are all in that place to some degree. And yet we are commanded to love one another, even our enemies.

In his classic book, The People of the Lie, author and psychiatrist Scott Peck tells a chilling story of evil as he counseled a young fifteen year-old boy named Bobby who was suffering from depression, particularly since Christmas. His grades in school had plummeted sharply and in a totally uncharacteristic act, Bobby stole a car. The parents seemed very concerned—solid, church-going, blue-collar workers. Less than a year earlier his older brother had committed suicide by shooting himself. While counseling this quiet, depressed boy, Peck was surprised to find out that for Christmas his parents had oddly given Bobby a gun only six months after their oldest son committed suicide. And not just any gun, but the very same one his brother had used to kill himself, wrapped up again in a box. It was a disturbing act of evil, and they seemed totally nonchalant about it. Peck’s problem was not so much what he could do for the boy, but rather the deep need Bobby’s parents had for psychological help. This boy was sleeping with the enemy.

I’m certainly not saying that loving your enemies is easy, simple or quick. My personal experience has been one of process. I’m flabbergasted at how Stephen collapses to his knees and cries out, “Lord, don’t hold this against them!” as religious zealots in Acts 7 are stoning him to death. I’ve got a long way to go.

Keep in mind that there is a purpose to loving your enemies. The primary purpose is in understanding that kindness is destructive to evil. It is exactly what Jesus did when He was incarnated into this planet. First John 3:8 states, “…The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work”. He came healing, forgiving, loving and correcting. We are to do nothing less if we identify ourselves with Jesus Christ. The goal is creating a context where repentance is possible. Darkness hates light. Evil attempts to slink into dark corners, but the light that comes from the kindness of God leads to repentance, as Paul says in Romans 2:4.

There is a secondary purpose as well: we are healed and transformed dramatically in the process of loving our enemies—we allow our souls to become more Spirit-filled, more like the Father who sends the rain of refreshment on good and bad alike. We don’t “practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty”; this is guerilla warfare, strategic divine love aimed at darkened hearts. Jesus was intensely purposeful and strategic in His command to love your enemy.

One last thing.

Often when I talk about this, I’ll have newer believers ask me if we’re supposed to love the enemy of our soul: Satan, as in, “Are we supposed to pray for him if he’s our enemy?” God doesn’t offer us that grace. For whatever reason, fallen angels are not offered repentance. What’s more, we are clearly told his ending: he is destroyed in a fiery finish. The personification of evil is done away with in a sweeping vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The Kingdom comes.

Many years ago, my sister-in-law was supernaturally healed of a terrifying, debilitating and extreme bi-polar condition. She had been in and out of psych wards, delusionally paranoid, after years of zombie-inducing drugs and steroids. I cannot describe the pain she went through and the crushing effect it had on her family. She knew full well the oppressive captivity of the enemy. Years later in a conversation she said, “When Jesus throws him into the pit, are we allowed to cheer?”

She wasn’t being sarcastic or facetious; that was the liberated joy of someone freed from a hellish dark prison, someone who has experienced precious soul-liberty. We’ve all seen old World War II newsreels of celebrations when the Allies and French resistance liberated Paris months after D-Day. Now imagine that in your soul…or picture the man of Gadarenes.

Vengeance belongs to God. But I’m pretty sure we’ll cheer at the ultimate victory over evil.

jimmy fallon & macgyver

He’s giving it the proverbial college-try, but ouch, it’s brutal. Don’t know if you’ve caught the late night talk show wars, but Jimmy Fallon from SNL fame has the old Conan O’Brien spot and Conan’s soon to take over Leno’s Tonight Show, Leno is moving to 10pm, Jimmy Kimmel’s still smirking, Bonnie Hunt has jumped in while Craig Ferguson delivers the best monologue rant in brogue out there. Here’s the line of the week from a CBS marketing exec: “We're calling it ‘America's Entertainment Stimulus Package.’”

Puh-leeze. We’re in worse shape than I thought.

Jimmy seems like a nice guy, but he ought to fire his writers. Even though he’s finding his rhythm, the monologue punch lines couldn’t be flatter. But here’s what’s puzzling to me as someone who’s fascinated by communicators, artists, performance and production: why are talk shows still following the same tired format? It’s been the drill for decades. The host walks out to a band playing. The applause lights flash. He delivers a monologue with a few news items and jokes. He introduces the band with some hand gesture, the camera pans to a band that plays some lame fifteen second bumper, then cuts back to the host now sitting at his desk. That’s followed by some sight gags: headlines, fake book covers, top tens, etcetera. The band plays an outro, the host says “We’ll be right back with Sarah Jessica Parker right after this…” Following the commercial are the two consecutive guests and the obligatory music group at the close.

What’s with that? Isn’t it time for a talk show format change? Is that the most creativity they can muster? With millions of advertising dollars at stake, bloated talk show salaries, and teams of creatives, that’s it?—and no one has a different programming idea? Really?

I know what you’re thinking: Dave, did you take your medication today?

Here’s where I’m going with this. It got me thinking about how we “do” church services and celebrations. Every church has a format (we call it a liturgy in church-world), even the ones who say they’re “led by the Spirit”. In my charismatic roots, even the “free” church service not bound by any pesky carnal programming had an understood liturgy: music, free-style singing somewhere in there, Sister So-and-So will probably have a message in tongues, the same people will come up at the end to shake or fall down, and the message will still end up taking seventy minutes no matter how long everything else takes. Golden Corral has a booming Sunday lunch business at 3pm for Pentecostals.

It doesn’t matter what denomination, non-denomination or inter-denomination your tribe is: we all have our liturgy, our format. House church, weekend-centered, traditionalists, or whatever, we all have our program. And the program is how you deliver the message. Talk about a Reset.

Number One reality check: There are a couple of minor programming differences between church-world and network talk shows, namely beaucoup bucks (Letterman alone gets an estimated paycheck of 40 million per year) and huge production staffs. But maybe it’s time for us to think about how we tell the Story each week. To be sure, there’s a certain amount of comfort in routine…and for maximum participation, there’s a need for repetition. Still, it seems to me there’s a need to reinvent periodically, to hear the Story a bit differently. I love what my teaching buddy Joe said last week about reading the Christmas story in July; it’s good for the soul to separate the emotion and sentimentality from the December kitsch of Consumermas.

Number Two reality check: even if we had unlimited funds and huge creative teams, is that really what we would want? Is that what we’d want to spend our money on? Are we really able to justify that before God? It gets tricky, doesn’t it? Peter tells the handicapped panhandler in front of the temple who asked him for money, “I don’t have any. But I do have something else: in the name of Jesus, get up and walk.” Cue to miracle. No resources, but creative power.

There’s an apocryphal story from a dark time in Church history. The Church was at the height of political power and wealth in the Middle Ages. The Pope was reported to have said confidently, “Now we can no longer say `Silver and gold have we none.’ A priest responded with, “And neither can we say `Rise up and walk’.”

Maybe we have the whole assumptive format screwy.

And in the end, sometimes MacGyver is the most creative guy in the room with only a paper clip, some dental floss and a mullet.

okiepalooza

I’m writing this from a hotel room in Oklahoma City before speaking at a conference called “The Small Church Conference”. Craig Groeschel from LifeChurch.tv and Toby Slough of Cross Timbers Community Church north of Dallas are speaking as well…all from megachurches.

There’s a little obvious irony here, eh? Israel Hogue, pastor of The Edge Church, is sponsoring the conference. As Israel puts it on the conference website, “Craig, Toby and Dave have all come from small beginnings. They know what it means to be a local church with not a lot of people, money, or resources. They didn't start "mega," they started "micro" and grew from there.”

It got me thinking about those early days with Steve Sjogren. There were a lot—and I mean a lot—of sacrifices made by him and his wife Janie to see a different kind of church launched in Cincy. When Anita and I came on board in 1984, we were meeting in Bruce and Sandy Ullrey’s living room with twenty or so people on the north side of Cincinnati. Like many starts, everyone was in their late-twenties or early-thirties, mostly bored with church as we knew it, and wondered why there couldn’t be a church that we actually liked going to. And couldn’t it be simple and just have authentic no-big-show worship and have a heart for the poor? Maybe a message that didn’t sound canned? And a service that didn’t make you feel worse than when you came in? Spirit-led…but not weird? Authenticity. Simplicity. Relevance.

I led worship for four years every weekend as a volunteer. I wrestled with coming on staff in 1990; I wasn’t sure I wanted to be paid to do something I liked doing…as if that might mess things up. We had probably grown to about 700-800 adults by then. After coming on staff (I use that term loosely), time marched on and things heated up. There were a number of years where I was gone at least four nights a week when our girls were little, eventually doing eight celebrations a week, leading worship at each of them, teaching every midweek, often on weekends, and pulling off seminars and conferences. Those were heady years. Everyone wore lots of hats; many of us easily put in 60-70 hours a week. I can remember pulling many an all-nighter for a video, print or music project. We were on a mission.

Looking back, it obviously wasn’t healthy. We were a bit crazy and addicted to our own adrenaline.

Now 25 years later, there are still formidable hurdles, mega-problems, new issues, and big challenges to conquer. I don’t think it ever gets simple…because life in a fallen world is not simple. And besides the corporate decisions, personal choices are still the most difficult (we’re in good company: Jesus sweat drops of blood wrestling with his decision in Gethsemane).

One more thing, though.

Sometimes I think when people want to return to being a “New Testament Church”, there’s an idyllic myopia. When people ask me why we can’t be more like the New Testament church, I answer “Which one? The church in Corinth was sexing it up every which way and getting drunk at the church potlucks. The Colossian church was worshiping angels and beating their bodies to prove they were holy. The Galatian gang was legalistic and racist. The Thessalonians were sitting on their hands waiting for Jesus to take them away, hoping for a Left Behind scenario. And check out the things Jesus said to the churches in Asia Minor in the Revelation. It isn’t pretty.”

Just a reality check.

I’m not sure how this works, but either Jesus views us as we shall be, or else He sees us through a lens of love that “covers a multitude of sins”. Somehow this is His plan: “to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” (Ephesians 5:27 TNIV).

Big, small, messy, tidy, broken, bruised, lethargic or vital…we are the Church.

altar calls and tickets

Reset took off with a blast! Joe did a bang-up job (what is a bang-up, really?) portraying different “Jesus-es”. We could have easily come up with ten different models, but time is the communicator’s enemy. I’m looking forward to next week.

I’ve got a long tale here. You’re going to need some Earl Grey and a teapot.

Ready?

One of the things I’d personally like to hit the reset button on is how evangelicals have reduced the mission of the Church to an “altar call” pragmatism. And weirder, an altar call mentality that’s more methodology than anything.

For those of you who unfamiliar with the altar call, it’s more a product of nineteenth-century American evangelists than anything, particularly Charles Finney. Today it’s so much a product of the evangelical culture that it’s virtually a sacred cow. Heck, I’ve used it many times. I’m certainly not against calling people to repent; I question the method…and confusing the method with the mission.

Charles Spurgeon, who had a serious heart for people who didn’t yet know Jesus, decried the use of altar calls and “enquiry rooms”. He felt it gave people a false sense of security and created a mediator-environment when people needed to be sent to Christ to wrestle with their brokenness.

Spurgeon wrote:

“Sometimes we are inclined to think that a very great portion of modern revivalism has been more a curse than a blessing, because it has led thousands to a kind of peace before they have known their misery; restoring the prodigal to the Father's house, and never making him say, 'Father, I have sinned.' How can he be healed who is not sick? Or he be satisfied with the bread of life who is not hungry? The old-fashioned sense of sin is despised, and consequently a religion is run up before the foundations are dug out. Everything in this age is shallow. Deep-sea fishing is almost an extinct business so far as men's souls are concerned. The consequence is that men leap into religion, and then leap out again. Unhumbled they come to the church, unhumbled they remained in it, and unhumbled they go from it.”

He even expressed the dirty little secret of crusade-style evangelism:

“Very few of the supposed converts of enquiry-rooms turn out well. Go to your God at once, even where you are now. Cast yourself on Christ, now, at once, ere you stir an inch!"

Which leads me to repeating my rant about having a Kingdom theology instead of a “get-your-ticket-to-heaven” theology. It bothers me when altar calls—“get-saved-so-you-can-go-to-heaven”—replace a Kingdom of God theology—the power and grace of God is breaking into our world now. And we’re the conduit.

If the world as we know it is all going to burn, if all we are interested in is getting people to heaven, if the only thing important is “saving souls”, then why do we pray for healing for people? It must be a sign that the Kingdom has come, that the future is breaking in on us now. Think about this: if caring for our environment, if fighting for justice, if wrestling with racism is not important because someday this is all going to be done away with, and the only thing important is people’s souls as evangelicals believe, why speak out against abortion if the souls of pre-age-of-accountability unborn infants are guaranteed heaven? Why lay hands on the sick if this life is a vapor and a better one awaits?

Why? There are two possible reasons.

One reason could be a quality-of-life issue. Doesn’t a person with advanced debilitating polio deserve a higher quality of life, if even for the sake of his or her family, their kids, their sense of contribution to society? Maybe. Someone could argue that Stephen Hawking’s intense form of ALS has actually given his brain room to run because of his debilitating physical limitations. Suffering through sickness certainly has unintended results, although Jesus never seemed to say to anyone, “Keep your leprosy. It will keep you humble.”

But I think there is more to the question than the quality-of-life answer.

We do it since we have hope that because of Jesus’ resurrection and therefore the declaration that He is the New Lord (because death is the one master that everyone bows down and submits to), He gave us the mission of bringing the Kingdom (Luke 4:18, 19; Matthew 28:18; John 20:21). That’s what a Kingdom theology will do, something I’m thrilled the Vineyard movement as a whole promotes. It affects the here-and-now more than anything else. We are the answer to someone’s prayer when they cry out the “Our Father”-prayer: “Let Your kingdom come now…let Your will be accomplished now…the way it always is in the dimension where You live, Father.”

Consider the following story as a metaphor.

Ernest Gordon—former dean of Princeton Seminary who died a few years ago—was the inspiration behind the classic movie Bridge Over the River Kwai and more recently To End All Wars. In real life he survived three years in the brutal prisoner of war camps of Southeast Asia during World War II where an estimated 80,000 prisoners died of starvation, dysentery, malaria and torture while building a railroad…almost four hundred men per mile of track.

Gordon tells an amazing story: Once at the end of the workday, a shovel was missing in the tool shed. The officer in charge was furious and announced they would begin executing each prisoner, one at a time, until the man who took it came forward. As guns were pointed at the first man in line, one of the soldiers stepped out and said simply, “I did it. I took it.” They viciously beat him to death in front of everyone.

The next day the guards discovered that they had miscounted—all the shovels were there.

One of the prisoners remembered the Bible verse, “Greater love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Word spread throughout the camp…and the atmosphere changed. Men began to look out for each other, to treat each other like brothers. Gordon began teaching from the Bible. They started what they called the “church without walls”.

Gordon wrote:

“Death was still with us — no doubt about that. But we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip. We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that made for life and those that made for death. Selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, self-indulgence, laziness and pride were all anti-life. Love, heroism, self-sacrifice, sympathy, mercy, integrity and creative faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense. These were the gifts of God.”

And oddly enough, the POW’s even created “normal” things like talent shows, lectures, debates, and readings…even a jungle university.

Think about it. Why would men who were facing certain death bother with that? If your comrades were dying around you of slow painful dysentery and maltreatment, if you’re working sunup to sundown on laying railroad tracks through impossibly difficult terrain in a hostile world blinded by madness, why have a lecture on Shakespeare?

Why? Hope.

The scent of a future inhaled in the present. Hope.

That is a Kingdom metaphor.

reset reset

Reset your brain.

Reset your heart.
Reset your worldview.
Reset your password.
Reset your motives.
Reset your faith.
Reset your objectives.
Reset your clock.
Reset your mouth.
Reset your aim.
Reset your theology.
Reset your love.
Reset: this weekend.