Yikes!

Leadership Summit 2005

Leadership Summit 2005
I attended this conference last week via satelitte. It was a powerful and well done conference. Due to working in a rural church, many of the concept are difficult to apply and most of them need to be contextualized.

Bill Hybel's sessions were fantastic! It was such a shot in the arm to keep pressing on, keep going forward, and be faithful to the ministry God has called me to.

If you get a chance to attend this conference, I would highly recommend it!

Sermon on Hosea 1:2-10

Here's the text from the Hosea sermon. Sorry it's taken awhile to get online. I decided to place it on Sermoncentral and link to it from here so more people would come across it.

A young couple were on their way to get married when they had a tragic accident. The next thing they knew, they were standing arm-in-arm at the pearly gates. They told St. Peter what had happened and then said, "We really want to spend eternity as man and wife. Is there anyone here who can marry us before we go in?" Peter thought for a minute and said, "This is an unusual request, but if you’ll take a seat, I’ll see what I can work out." The couple waited for three months before St. Peter finally came back with a minister to perform the ceremony. The man said to Peter, "We’ve had some time to think about this. We know that marriage is difficult even under the limited term of ’till death us do part.’ Since there is no death in heaven, I just want to make sure that if this marriage doesn’t work out, can we get a divorce?" Peter said, "Are you kidding? It took me three months just to find a preacher. What do you think your chances are of finding a lawyer?"

This is a funny story that highlights a difficult truth: marriage is hard. How many marriages are you personally aware of that have ended in divorce? Divorce is rampant in our society. It is so common that there is even a magazine dedicated to it called appropriately “Divorce Magazine”. Some statistical reports show the divorce rate near 50% in the U.S. Some argue that it is even higher!

Yet in spite of these statistics people are getting married. And summertime is the most popular time for weddings. This year I will officiate many weddings. Weddings are exciting and fun celebrations...

Read entire sermon

Pastors.com Article: The Next Christendom: shifting center of Christianity

Here are some excellent thoughts on the "Third Church" from Philip Jenkins...

Jenkins foresees the two faiths continuing to clash, yet he believes Christianity will leave the greatest mark on the next century.

The reason? Islam demands all people learn Arabic to read their holy book. Christianity translates the Bible into the language of all people. By doing so it encourages literacy and adapts to new conditions and places.

“And,” Jenkins says, “when people read for the first time, it probably gives them a great deal more self-confidence … and that tends to spill into political and social matters.”

Yet the Christianity of the Third World is different than that of the Northern Hemisphere. It is much more conservative and traditional -- especially among Roman Catholics. The biggest difference between the two churches is the poverty of the South.

In an interview with Atlantic Unbound -- the online edition of Atlantic Monthly -- Jenkins said, “You’re dealing with people [in the global South] who are not the world’s fat cats. That means they tend to relate much more closely to the biblical world and its concerns than do people who are rich and from their First World. Often they’re people without access to the kind of medical care that the First World takes for granted, so the medical, healing and exorcism elements of the Bible make very good sense to them.”

Jenkins saw the difference between the old Christianity of the North and West with the new of the South and East in a recent visit to Amsterdam. As he traveled through the city on a Sunday morning he found nothing which could be called church life. It was a day like any other day. Churches for the most part sat empty.

When he moved to the poorer suburbs, he found an entirely different picture. African immigrants -- many of whom had ancestors whose first contact with the Gospel came through Dutch missionaries -- were crowded into churches. “Seeing these Africans who are clearly not the world’s richest people, but who are very sober, respectable folk, you think, ‘Well, that’s the future of Christianity,’” Jenkins told Atlantic Unbound.

One thought that comes to my mind is an article I read in the latest edition of The Layman were the outgoing moderator for the PCUSA said that the Third Church are in their adolescence and they are learning and becoming more mature. Her comments were spoken in relation to the issue of homosexuality in the church. Those in the Third Church especially Dr. David F. Githii, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, have taken great exception to this comment and so do I.

In fact, this comment smacks of self-righteousness and judgment. Why do we believe that a greater "sophistication" on issues concerning sexuality is the mark of a more mature church? If I remember right, this isn't Jesus' standard.

the GATHERING and elsewhere: Emerging Church

We agreed that contemporary culture was seeking the following things as part of their spiritual search.

A sense of unity
Shared experience
Participation
Freedom
Being in a large group/community
The display of emotions is acceptable
Truth
"You have to experience it"
A yearning for Eden
Common purpose
Energy
Enjoyment
The importance of experience
Presence / intimacy
Something ethereal
Free will and choice
Its okay to be searching
A suspicion of control
A desire for personal responsibility (you have to find out for yourself)

Interesting thoughts! These ideas were gleaned from several pop culture sources.

The Comeback Kid: John Elway

This is the day all Broncos fans have been waiting for! John Elway is going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame today! He may not have been the greatest quarterback but he was the most entertaining! Elway is the first Bronco to ever be inducted.

8 days, 2 weddings, 2 funerals, 2 sermons

It has been a marathon week! Today, I will officiate the 2nd funeral this week and then cram some work in on my sermon from Hebrews 11.

The woman that died this past week joined the Christian Church in 1954. No one at the church can remember her ever coming! In 50 years no one can remember her attending! Wow! Of course, this will not be mentioned at the funeral.

Now I know that church is not the end all or be all of the Christian life. I know that we are saved by grace not by going to church. But to completely forsake the gathering of the body of Christ is totally counter to what I believe Jesus desires for us.

Furthermore, I am becoming more and more convinced as I read The Divine Conspiracy, that salvation is more than just believing the right theory concerning the atonement. Salvation is relationship. Salvation is transformation. How is transformation demonstrated, how is relationship demonstrated in someone's life if they fail to become a part of the community of believers? Should not our relationship with Christ transform us, transform our priorities, transform how we spend our time?

Yet the focus for so many people at a funeral is whether or not they believed the right thing. Few ask if they were transformed. Fewer still offer evidence that they were transformed. I hope that at my funeral there will be much talk about how God transformed me, changed me, how I was passionately in love with Jesus Christ. I hope it's not an exposition of what I believed. Who cares what you believe if it doesn't change you!

[Listening to: Comfortable - John Mayer - Inside Wants Out [EP] (5:00)]

Event Announcement: Missional Church Forum

From Allelon:

SEPTEMBER 2 - 4, 2004

THE CONVERSATION WILL BE FACILITATED BY
Alan Roxburgh, George Hunsberger, Todd Hunter, Mark Priddy, Gary Waller & Others

LOCATION: Eagle, Idaho

You are invited to explore new forms of the church with other people who care about beginning new churches andfindingfaithfulwaysforthemtolive.

The North American church is living in an alien context. Once the church was the center of community life, but now the church has been relegated to the margins of society. This time of change requires new, adaptive skills and leadership. Due to a series of critical factors we find ourselves in a place for which we are unprepared and in which many of our assumed skills and frameworks lead us in the wrong direction.

Missional Church Forum provides you an opportunity to examine situations you share in common with other leaders who, like you, live in them daily. It will provide opportunity for discussion around several key missional themes. Facilitators will be present to stimulate thinking along these missional lines. Time will be given for roundtable discussions by conference participants in order to help clarify and strategize for these challenging times.

SOME KEY IDEAS FOR THE CONVERSATION:

1. What does it mean to be missional?
2. How does the church hear the voice of God?
3. How do I help an existing church to begin to think missionally?
4. How do we impact the consumerism of our culture?
5. What does it mean to participate in the Kingdom of God?
6. How does the gospel speak to our culture?
7. What does leadership look like in a missional context?
8. What skills do I need to possess? How do leaders become cultivators of communities?
9. What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of ordinary men and women within congregations/communities?

HELP SHAPE THE EVENT
You can help shape the event by taking the polls at http://www.allelon.org/polls. The information will be used to help facilitate the needs for the direction of the conversation.

If you need more information you can email office@allelon.org or call the office 1.208.947.1609

If you have received this email by mistake or no longer want to get the network update you can change your email preferences here
or send an email to ADMIN

ALLELON
PO Box 639
Eagle, ID 83616
USA

Phone: 1.208.947.1609
Fax: 1.208.947.1610

FINALLY!

I was finally able to post today! My internet service provider out here in the sticks is just not working for some reason. I connected through an AOL trial and was able to post right away. Hopefully things will get sorted out and I'll be able to post through my ISP soon.

Anger or Dallas Willard is the man!

I am slowly working my way through Dallas Willard's excellent book, The Divine Conspiracy. It is a great book that I have been living with for a while, challenging me in many ways. The book is a powerful exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount. Here's a quote from his discussion on Jesus teaching concerning anger in Matthew 5:

The first illustration of kingdom dikaiosune (righteousness) is drawn from cases in which we are displeased with our "brother" and may allow ourselves to treat him with anger or contempt.

When we trace wrongdoing back to its roots in the human heart, we find that in the overwhelming number of cases it involves some form of anger. Close beside anger you will find its twin brother, contempt. Jesus' understanding of them and their role in life becomes the basis of his strategy for establishing kingdom goodness. It is the elimination of anger and contempt that he presents as the first and fundamental step toward the rightness of the kingdom heart.

The emphasis is mine because I find it amazing to think that the elimination of anger and contempt is fundamental, elementary to my spiritual life. Yet how many times have I heard this proclaimed? How many times have I been challenged to eliminate the anger in my life?

To this end, I am experimenting with a couple of new spiritual discipline tool idea thingys. I'm calling them "anger mapping" and "contempt mapping". As spiritual mapping has become popular among church planters and missiologists, I think anger mapping could reveal a powerful picture of particular geographical locations and the abstract relationships of those in a particular community.

I think it would look a lot like a mind map at first but could probably be overlayed a geographical area to demonstrate strained relationships and the "anger terrain". I'll be experimenting with this as I get a chance. What do you think?

THE MEATRIX

This is a very creative short animation lobbying against corporate farms. It's rather timely in light of the recent developments in the animal cruelty legal battle between PETA and KFC.

Vacation

I was on vacation most of this week and since I have been home I have been attending to cleaning and putting away our camping gear and officiating two weddings, and preparing for a funeral on Tuesday, not to mention this mornings sermon. Yikes. I'll post the Hosea 1 sermon soon, Lord willing.

Evil Empire

In rural areas focused denominational interests are becoming more and more a hindrance to the furtherance of the Kingdom.

This sounds like the Presbytery's Committee on Ministry! I know this is an overstatement in this article. But there definitely have been times that the denomination gets in the way. Especially between the pastors in town.

Being a denominational mut, I don't get it. I don't understand the blind loyalty to a particular stripe of Christian.

Missional rural churches

This author believes that out of the culture of the post-industrial era a new rural and Christian community could arise, from which a new authentic rural culture could be regenerated. This then is the call - to return to a model of apostolic times when the church formed strong local entities that nurtured the people to reach out to a hostile environment. The challenge is to find an appropriate way of communicating "the Gospel" to this new culture - even as it forms. And so the future mission of the rural church is "stretched between a great vision of the past and a new vision not yet fully formed." Midwives are needed to help a new church emerge.

The question in my mind is whether or not the existing churches can become this or if we need new churches to do this, especially in rural areas. But who wants to be a church planter in rural areas?

Even as a called pastor it has been very difficult to break into the community. I am and always will be viewed as an outsider. I can't imagine what a church planter would experience.

Plowing hard ground

Ray Simpson wrote that "the ground is so hard, and the people so pagan, that perhaps nothing less than a community of love in action will suffice to transplant the Body - the Life - of Christ."

They will know we are Christians by our love. The trouble is this is rarely the case. I know that in my two churches there are terrible feelings of hatred and animosity between people. We even have a lawsuit between two parties! The ground is not only hard outside of the church but inside as well.

This statement is so neat and clean. So easy to say. But how do you create a community of love in action? Especially in a community were people have known one another's families for generations and have handed down prejudices against one another?

Reinvention of the church

Here's a great quote from the article on transforming the rural church. I think it applies to churches across the board.

Loren Mead opines that there is "a call to something genuinely new ... our task is no less than the reinvention of the church."

Towards A Transformed Rural Church And Community

If by church we mean a community of believers, there is every reason to expect that the rural churches will be with us for a very long time. If, on the other hand we view churches as institutions within the local community, the question of their survival in the rural communities is less certain ...

Rural communities tend to be small and built on cooperation. According to Shannon Jung, "given the pressures on small communities from the outside world, congregations that squander precious resources on simply keeping a building open, instead of pooling resources, are sinful." The reality might well be that rural poverty will eventually force churches to work together to survive. It is now recognized that the days are gone where everyone was assumed to be a Christian and church member. Yet this assumption lives on in the "status quo," making new initiatives very difficult, if not seemingly impossible.

The challenge of advancing God's Kingdom in the rural church. I have been amazed at the desire to hang on to the good old days, the desire to return to the programs that worked in the past. But this article nails it on the head in rural churches...we must boldly work against the status quo.

If your church experience consists of "but we've always done it that way" kind of people read this article.

Sermon on Hosea

I've been asked to post my sermon on Hosea 1. I will try to get this posted later in the week. I have been thinking about posting my sermons for sometime. Part of the problem for me is that I don't always have a completed manuscript to post. I also preach my sermons twice and they tend to emphasize different things at the different churches. It's weird how the Holy Spirit prompts me to say certain things at one church and not the other (at least I trust it's the Holy Spirit!). As soon as I can record in manuscript form the message from this past Sunday I will post it.

Hosea and the Emerging Church

In continuing to prepare my message for Sunday on Hosea 1:2-10 (really all of chapter 1), I came across this in Gary Smith's NIV Application Commentary on Hosea/Amos/Micah. See if this resonants with you as it did me:

...one can begin to suggest areas where the theological message of Hosea relates to theological issues the church has struggled with in every era of its existence. If one views Baalism as a cultural expression of a Canaanite religious worldview, the true comparison for modern application is not limited to situations where pagans are worshiping idols in India or involved in some perverted sexual cult in some faraway country. The Canaanite culture needs to be copmared to the British culture, the Hutu culture, the American culture, or the Brazilian culture.

Each of these countries has a popular "religious" philosophy of life that explains how the world works. Each culture includes ethical standards for appropriate conduct, ecomonic ways of gaining prosperity (fertility in ancient Near Eastern terminology), and an explanation of how people are related to the divine powers. The questions that the church in every culture must ask are similar to the questions Hosea raises. Are the people who claim to be believers actually the people of God, or have they so accepted the popular religious culture of their day that they, like Israel, are "not my people"? Has the syncretism of the church with modern religious culture so infiltrated the fiber of the fellowship that people can no longer see a distinction between the two? Has the church lost its identity by compromising its beliefs and accepting the moral standards of the society that the church was supposed to transform?

Some in the emerging church discussion are asking very smiliar questions to Hosea! I meet for prayer with several lol's (little old ladies) once a month on Tuesdays. My faith and their faith are in very different places. My beliefs and their beliefs are very different. Much of their thinking and prayers are based on a popular religious philosophy of how to get ahead in life and how God interacts with us. Very little of it is shaped by Scripture especially not Hosea! Please know I love and care for each of them greatly! Yet they fail to recognize how much the American popular religious philosohpy has influenced their lives.

And quite frankly, it is unappealing to me and to many "natives" in today's culture!

Microscopic Model of Sydney Opera House

Yahoo! News - World Photos - AP This is truly amazing! As they have been saying the next big thing is small.