A Good Habit To Be In

Stretching really isn't much fun.  Any kind of it.  Taking time out before sports to stretch can seem like a drag, but not doing it usually leads to injury (so says my two major leg injuries in the past year).  Being stretched beyond our capacities isn't much fun either.  In the midst of it, we generally feel frustrated, bitter, and overwhelmed.  Unfortunately, I had a mentor in college who admonished me, "Never deny God the opportunity to stretch you."  I didn't think I could take on one more thing that summer, but then the opportunity came up to go to Kenya.  I went, on his advice, and that trip radically changed my life.  The saying has become central to my life philosophy.  I enjoy growing and learning anyways, so deciding to put myself in positions where God has to stretch me works out well.  It generally doesn't make it any more fun in the meantime, unfortunately.

Since getting married, my wife and I have tried to make it a habit to regularly do things we don't think we can do.  One of them is charitable giving.  We decided that every December, we would give a large amount to various organizations that we don't regularly support.  We don't really look at our budget or bank account, we just do it.  We use savings to cover whatever we don't have.  Giving becomes addicting if you give it a try.  We've tried this habit again with our current plan to spend the summer in Peru.  It's well out of our comfort zone, and we have to overcome all sorts of challenges like 3 month unpaid leave from work, sublease our apartment, find a long-term dog sitter, fundraise, and more.  We felt like it was what we were supposed to do, however, so we didn't let ourselves get distracted by those things - we just made the commitment.

I think this is a pretty good habit to be in.  There's certainly worse ones out there.  Putting ourselves in situations that we don't think we can do forces us to exercise our faith.  If faith isn't regularly tested, it can become self-confidence.  Self-confidence isn't a bad thing, but it's not faith.  Faith is relying on God to come through because there's no other way.  Making bold commitments is a great way to get there.  It's like jumping off a diving board - there's that moment when there's no turning back.  Faith can be like that - you just close your eyes and pass the point of no return without thinking too much about the consequences (please don't think doing stupid things is faith, however).  Like the water, we know that we've got an unbreakable safety net in God and that one way or another, things will work out.  Maybe it'll cost us tremendously.  That's okay!  Either way, you'll find yourself well-stretched at the end of it.  And more ready to be an instrument of the Lord.

It's All About Me, Pt. II

In my previous post, I wrote about how it feels like we have a culture of individualism creeping into worship music.  I feel a bit, however, like I might have missed a deeper point regarding my facetious title ("It's all about me").  More significant than whether or not our worship music is too individualistic is whether or not our worship is too consumeristic.

I stole this graphic, but I think it's pretty funny (video is definitely worth a watch too).  It's easy to poke fun when you look at it this way, but I fear that it hits too close to home and that's why we poke fun at it.  Worse, it sometimes feels like people easily talk disparagingly about "consumer worship" one moment, then dive straight into it the next.  There's two culprits here, as each side is quick to point out.  The churches blame the people - nobody comes if it's not what they want.  The people blame the churches - this is what they're being fed and who would go eat cereal when you could have eggs and bacon?  Gotta start somewhere, so I'm just going to consider a few thoughts, then I'd love to hear your feedback.

First, churches.  I believe this is a culture thing.  You're right, the people demand it.  But cultures can be changed.  I'm not talking about the entire nation, I'm talking about your own congregation.  To do this, you need to "exegete" your own cultural artifacts.  For example, do you have rows of comfortable seats facing a band on a stage?  You might be encouraging something.  Do you constantly work to make your production more and more professional to compete with the church down the street?  That's keeping up with the joneses, not ministry.  You're dealing with a symptom of something else.  When the Holy Spirit shows up, you won't need to worry about your production.  Spiritually mature believers, being discipled deeply at your church, won't be looking to be fed by worship - they'll be looking to praise God for feeding them throughout the week.  God laid down instructions for the Israelites to worship Him, and he didn't take their comfort into account.  Consider setting the bar a bit higher for your members - they may surprise you by reaching for it.

Second, people.  I get it, I really do.  It's called a "heart language of worship" - everyone's got one, and it goes deeper than just your "language."  Just the same as you wouldn't ask a Hispanic to sit in a Korean church week after week, you wouldn't ask someone who worships through contemporary music to sit through a liturgy with an organ and no choir.  There's nothing wrong with wanting to worship in your own "language."  But sometimes we need to put ourselves aside.  When you are a missionary, you enter another culture and choose to worship as they do.  Perhaps we need to think of ourselves more as missionaries, choosing at times to set our own language aside to be part of a community that ministers to each other, and then joins weekly to minister to God.  If you're complaining about the length of the opening set of music, or standing too long, or "those young whippersnappers with guitars", or "those old whippersnappers with organs," you're missing the point.  You don't go to church to get fed.  It's worship.

Anyway, that's just how I feel.  I really do get it.  I feel it.  As a postmodern, I hate scriptedness - it feels inauthentic.  You can tell when the church is really scripting their service, and it drives me nuts.  That's my consumer bent in worship.  I need to remember that it's not about me.  Every time I allow annoyance at anything to block my worship from God, I've got things backward.

It's All About Me

Worship music is a close subject to my heart.  I feel very connected to God when I'm singing to Him, as music runs strongly in my genes and influences my life significantly.  To me, singing worship is a two-way street of glorifying Him and telling Him things as He speaks back to me, convicting me of sin and the truth.  I sometimes close my eyes, I often use my hands, and I always move my feet.  It's like a subtle dance that I do with God, involuntary, but energizing.  I dedicated my life to God during a worship music set, on 7/27/98, and on 9/17/11 I married a worship leader.  Worship music is a close subject to my heart.

I feel a bit like I've been lined into this approach to worship music, however, by a prevailing American cultural artifact.  We tend to think ideally that our approach to God is informed solely by the Bible, but I generally find that it's informed far more significantly by our culture.  The American cultural artifact I'm talking about is individualism.  I began to notice it a couple of years ago.  It seemed like a lot of popular worship songs were focused on a "personal relationship" with Jesus, just like a lot of our preaching talks about.  Worship songs use "I" and "me" a lot.  They often talk about what I'm going to do, or what He's done for me, or what my emotions are.  Nothing really wrong with that, unless it becomes the predominant message.

I've started to think about the richness of a community coming to God.  Sometimes worship music makes me feel like we are a bunch of individuals who happen to be in the same place singing to God at once.  My personal theology has a lot more to do with God restoring creation than with God merely restoring me.  I'm grateful for my salvation, of course, but I'm pretty interested in God saving others, and God lifting people out of poverty, and God saving us from our own ecological destruction, God restoring marriages, and so on.  There aren't a lot of worship songs about these topics.  Sometimes I just sing different lyrics.  I absolutely love the song You Hold Me Now by Hillsong United, but I love it even more when I sing "You hold us now" and "For eternity, all the earth will give all the glory to Your name."  Suddenly the song doesn't seem to be about God wiping away my pain, but the pain of all creation!  Wow!

I'm hardly the first to talk about excessive individualism or a me-focus in worship music, but I hope to see more church music about the things that God's heart is about!

Mind Over Matter

I have been in the post-college workforce for just over five years.  In that time, I've virtually proven that the mind is capable of telling the body what to do.  There have been times that I've sustained 70-hour work weeks for a month in a row.  There was a time when I was working full-time, working part-time, going to school part-time, and dating the girl who would become my wife.  I've pressed forward with volunteer activities, mission travel, church involvement, family commitments, and laid 10 hours a week of school over the top of all of it.  And through it all, every time my body said, "Enough, I'm tired!" I would tell it, "You don't have time to be tired, get to work."  And I pressed on, sometimes finding in myself superhuman strength to work harder than I ever thought possible.  And I'm here to tell you that it worked.  I was able to forbid my body to feel tiredness.  And I was able to accomplish a lot.  A whole lot.

But that isn't the whole story.  There's a price to be paid for living this way.  The price of forbidding your body to feel fatigue is that your body learns to accept fatigue as "normal."  It's a constant struggle to get up in the mornings, even on days when you're looking forward to your activities.  Things blur into an unrecognizable mass of activities until you don't feel fully present at any of them.  Memories slip away, or are never formed, and there is a danger of missing the potential for amazing experiences.  Furthermore, friends slip away, as they perceive that you don't have time for them, and you never quite find the time to deepen that friendship that you're just beginning.  Family events become a burden, and you start to get cynical toward people around you that seem to stand in the way of getting done what you're trying to get done.  Even if you love everything you're doing, and I do, the price gets paid daily.

I don't pay this price gladly.  I do not regret all that I've accomplished and learned in the past five years, but I certainly regret paying the price.  I wish I had made more time for friends, family, and relationships.  I do know that this is a temporary condition.  School will be over in about a year and not having that constant burden hanging over me will be a life-changer.  In the meantime, I've learned that I am capable of far more than I think I am.  I've also learned that my mind has a great deal of power over my body.  I've also learned that I don't want to live this way.  I want to balance work, worship, rest, and play each day.  It's time to take a break!

The Business of the Church

I function as a business director at a Christian ministry organization.  I stand in a confusing middle world between the business world and the ministry role.  Constantly, priorities must be made and interests balanced...accountability versus flexibility, tax law versus grace, and more.  This is a place that I feel is my calling right now - not to be a ministry person with a gift for administration, but an administrator with a gift and passion for ministry.  Given this, it might surprise you if I say that

THE CHURCH IS NOT AND SHOULD NOT BE A BUSINESS!

Now that I have that statement off my chest, I can breathe much easier.  It seems so common for churches and ministries to cross over an imaginary boundary where they begin to function like businesses.  This should not be!  Under no circumstances (legal issues aside) should secrets be kept in churches!  Under no circumstances should people (staff, member, or otherwise) be treated as an object!  Under no circumstances should the "business" side of the ministry be allowed to take precedence over the ministry itself!  These are things that serve for-profit businesses well.  They have no place in the Church.

I've seen all of these things happen too frequently.  Pastors who keep secrets from the congregation or avoid divulging very significant information until the opportune time, and people who have become mistreated in the pursuit of a mission statement or a bottom line.  I've seen a desire for saving electricity cause ministry events to be regularly shut down prematurely.  There are many pastors who become CEOs, managing the staff and business and losing the shepherding in the process.  I've sadly had to watch a pastor ask for forgiveness from the altar for making the church an "organization" rather than an "organism."  Praise God that he was humble enough to say such a thing in front of the entire congregation!

None of this should be read to imply that the business is not important.  It is beyond important - it is critical.  I believe that a ministry that fails to keep its house in order loses favor in the sight of both God and men.  Unwise business decisions will sink the best ministries, and a poorly-laid foundation of policies, procedures, and support systems will topple incredibly fruitful programs.  However, we on the "business" side should never allow ourselves to think that our work is the end.  We are the means to the end.  Our job is to set missionaries and ministers up to succeed, not to ourselves succeed.  Sometimes that means we'll have to bend over backward, go above and beyond, and even grit our teeth and not say anything.  If we can do this, we'll see great ministry in our organizations, and after all that's why we all took the pay cut to go this route in the first place!

Phrases We Should Stop Using, Pt. IV: Least?

I'm returning to my series of "Phrases We Should Stop Using" to highlight another one that has made me uncomfortable for years.  I'm finally speaking out against the Biblical term "the least of these."

I mention that it's a Biblical term because that has made me wary of writing this post.  It's hard to say "We should stop saying this phrase" when Jesus used it and it's recorded by Matthew.  Yet I believe the phrase is overused and used to mean something that Jesus didn't.  We use the term to refer almost exclusively to the materially poor and disadvantaged.  I've written before about how one of the foremost disadvantages of the poor is a broken identity, but we continue to damage the poor's identities by calling them "the least!"  The tale is told of the youth group that wears t-shirts about "serving the least of these" while on a mission trip.  The recipients of such service, no doubt, would not be spiritually inspired if they could read the shirts.

What then did Jesus mean when he talked about "the least" anyways?   Sometimes I find it helpful to set aside deep study of the Scripture and return to what I call a "casual read."  If I simply read the passage like I might read a novel, what does it plainly say?  This can be a helpful tool when you miss the forest for the trees.  A casual read of Matthew 25 makes me think, based on the pronouns, that the use of this phrase hinges on a misreading.  We tend to attribute "the least" to the list of disadvantaged people in the passage, but what if "these" was the intention?  Then Jesus would be making a hyperbole by saying, "If you serve the least of all these poor and imprisoned folks, you're serving me."  A very different reading!

The Bible talks elsewhere about "the least."  In Matthew 5, Jesus defines "the least in the Kingdom of Heaven" - it's people who ignore parts of the law.  Paul, in 1 Timothy 1, calls himself the worst by saying that he is the chief of sinners and God's grace redeemed him.  Scripture would hardly tend to define the materially poor, the disadvantaged, the imprisoned, or the alien as "the least."  In fact, Scripture tends to express a preference for such people!  When we identify these folks as "the least," we are building an impasse between us and them, by inference saying that we are not the least.  This is clearly contrary to what Scripture teaches.  Let's agree together to stop making this distinction and instead think of Jesus as making an extreme statement: "Imagine the least desirable type of people to be around.  Now think of the very 'least' of these.  Go and serve that person."

Catalysts

Originally published at LINC North Texas:

It’s in vogue these days for mission developers to call themselves “catalysts.”  Church planters are catalyzing a new mission, organizations are catalysts in their communities, and so forth.  Catalysts tend to enthusiastically gather people and make things happen.  They are action-oriented people, often daring, and excitedly creating the future of the church day by day.  I have fond memories of science classes in school, so I recently gave myself a refresher on the roots of the term “catalyst.”  Catalysts, in science, are substances that either speed up or slow down reactions and processes.  The catalytic converter in your car has a precious metal in it (platinum, palladium, or rhodium) that speeds up the breakdown of noxious exhaust.   The two key features of catalysts are that they are only needed in very small amounts, and that they are never used up in the reaction.  Not part of the actual reaction, they go on to help over and over again.

This got me to thinking about our use of the term for mission developers, and for LINC North Texas.  Is there something we could learn from science’s original definition of the term?  When thinking about a catalyst in mission developing, I’m now more likely to think of a facilitator, a networker, or a collaborator.  I think of someone who brings together diverse people and then releases them.  They would make things move more rapidly with only very slight nudges of their own action.  Their passion, energy, and resources would not be used up, but after launching something, they would move on to the next mission.  I am reminded of Paul, spending just enough time in many cities to launch churches and then move on.  A catalyst’s focus would be on people, not programs, organizations, or structures.  Then they would have to leave.  It’s a special calling – different from a pastoral calling, a teacher calling, and many of the other ministries that Scripture speaks of.

This sounds very different than what some of today’s mission developing catalysts are doing.  Launching new missions is exhausting work.  Their leaders work 100-hour weeks building things from the ground up.  They are the clear leaders of the processes, and without them things can quickly fall apart.  These leaders deserve a great deal of respect for the challenge they take on and I wouldn’t take a thing away from what they do.  But I wonder if there’s a way to be a catalyst for mission development in the way that science speaks of catalysts.  Could a catalyst launch self-propagating missional cells and release the process from his control and begin a movement?  Here at LINC NT we are trying to see if this is possible in North Texas.  In the process, there’s a lot of 100-hour weeks.  But, Lord willing, can we not be used up by our efforts, but remain ready to launch over and over again?  Join us in prayer as we try to discover what the role of a catalyst would look like in our communities!