Death and Hope

During my studies at SSU for my Masters of Ministry, Pete Fitch gave us an expression for a spiritual condition to aim for and to practice: Fat Souls.

It could be my appetite for Guinness or for food in general, but this practice of a mode of being has stuck with me.  Sometimes I feel myself getting thin, sometimes it sneaks up on me but whenever I sense it I know my practices have not been keeping my soul fat enough to withstand the weight of the world that is constantly pressing in on me. 

And I try to do something about it.

After an incredibly intense 10 days, I arranged for the Elusive and myself to retreat to the mountains for 48 hours. A time to rest, reorient and renew in the Appalachians at a Christian conference center called, Ridgecrest.  They offer this ridiculous deal for pastors for which we are grateful and try to take advantage of a couple times each year.

I went tired but also excited.  I’m supposed to be starting work on a second Masters next week and I wanted to be rested up for it.

Our second night there coincided with the start of the South East Vineyard Regional Worship leaders retreat and so we snuck in to see and hear old friends and new friends.  Legends John and Marie Barnett led worship that night and the Swirlmaster, David Ruis, spoke.

During worship, I died.  During the message, I received hope.

I don’t remember how many songs we were in to the worship set, but it wasn’t long before I knew the Spirit was speaking to me.  There are times where I ‘sense’ the Spirit speaking to me, I get ideas or impressions but there are other times where I ‘know’ the Spirit is speaking to me, I recognize that Voice that is neither mine nor the enemies, neither vague nor opaque. And as I worshipped with a room full of people jumping in with both feet, led by two people who live what they sing and who embody “a sacrifice of praise,” God was inviting me to die.

I was supposed to start school again next week, I was excited, looking forward to it and full of anticipation.  And the Spirit took it all apart, took me right down to my core again, challenged me and called me to something else.  I had a choice and I chose to die to my dream. I wasn’t happy about it.  I didn’t feel some spiritual euphoria as a result.  But I did feel peace.  Or maybe ‘resolved’ is a better word. I told the Elusive the next day. And the next day I withdrew from the school.

I still don’t feel happy about it.  Maybe what I feel is a small slice of what Paul felt when the Spirit prevented him from going to Bithynia (which I hear is lovely).

As Jon Foreman sings: "Friend, all along / Thought I was learning how to take / How to bend not how to break / How to live not how to cry, but really / I've been learning how to die / I've been learning how to die"

I was undone during the worship.  When David Ruis spoke to us, I was filled with hope. 

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I often think I might be mad, alone, a voice out in the wilderness (the crazy - tinfoil hat kind, not the John kind). David’s message gave me hope for myself (I haven’t completely lost the plot) and for us as a movement, a collection of saints moving together further up and further into the story of God. I won't try to recap, but if you get the chance to hear or watch the message when it's available, you should.  It's a message for all of us.  It's a message that reminded me of what I love about the Vineyard.

My soul got fatter this week, even as I feel a significant sense of personal loss.  Weird, right?  

Sometimes I attend gatherings of my Tribe and I’m left feeling that sense of being the “odd duck.” Tuesday night felt like I was in one of the very best expressions of who our Tribe is and what I believe our Tribe is called to be. It was a night of beauty, of honesty, of simplicity, depth and Kingdom and Spirit and power.

I’m grateful for the Swirl that is our Vineyard worship community and the friends who created the space for my Liminal moment Tuesday night.  I’m grateful for a safe place to die and for a resurrection of hope.

Ordaining Amy

This past Sunday, I had the privilege of organizing and leading an ordination service for my friend, Amy.

Personally, I like Thomas Oden’s somewhat sacramental view of ordination and the meaning and purposes he unpacks in his book, Pastoral Theology. Ordination is far more, (if Oden is right – and I think he is) than conferring a title or making something legal or official.  Ordination is a vow, a sacred commitment, that is reciprocal in nature.  The Ordained owns their calling and declares their willingness to be responsible for and to the community of faith.  The ordaining community of faith affirms the calling and declares their willingness to cooperate with and support the Ordained in all ways needed.

The Scripture that we read for Amy’s ordination was from 1 Timothy, chapter 1, verses 12-17. It’s a favorite of mine, with deep significance for me about own sense of the call to ministry.
While I didn’t share these specific thoughts with Amy and the saints assembled, I’m putting them up here as a record, a stone of remembering for me and for her in future days.

1 Timothy 1:12-17 NLT
12 I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength to do his work. He considered me trustworthy and appointed me to serve him,13 even though I used to blaspheme the name of Christ. In my insolence, I persecuted his people. But God had mercy on me because I did it in ignorance and unbelief. 14 Oh, how generous and gracious our Lord was! He filled me with the faith and love that come from Christ Jesus.
15 This is a trustworthy saying, and everyone should accept it: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”—and I am the worst of them all. 16 But God had mercy on me so that Christ Jesus could use me as a prime example of his great patience with even the worst sinners. Then others will realize that they, too, can believe in him and receive eternal life. 17 All honor and glory to God forever and ever! He is the eternal King, the unseen one who never dies; he alone is God. Amen.

A few personal observations from the Text that resonate within my soul, 29 years on this journey of my own.

God will enable you where he has called you. (vs. 12)
You did not imagine God’s call on your life.  As the community of faith and as faithful friends, we’ve gathered here to affirm that we see what you feel, God has called you to represent him, to share his story and his love with the world around you.

Your ordination is not based on human will but God’s will and he will empower you by his Holy Spirit for every situation you find yourself in, every trial you face, every soul you are called to care for.  Our calling is not based on our adequacy or superior ability but rather God’s willingness to use the imperfect, the limping, the misfits and the weak to reveal his own great power.  God is with you. 

And that is always enough.

Your past does not determine your future. (vs. 13)
There are all kinds of things about our pasts that try to intrude on our present experiences and our understanding of who we are or who we’re not.

The good news from Jesus is this, “behold, I make all things new.” And “anyone in Christ is a new creation.”

God has set you free to engage with him in writing the chapters of your story that are still to come. Many people will continue to offer to write your story for you.  Politely decline these offers.  Listen and follow and play the part God gives you and resist the pressure to play the parts others want you to play.

Jesus offers us a new perspective on the future, a new freedom, new possibilities, he removes human limitations and prejudices and he alone determines the story of your life.

Two practices that last: faith and love. (vs. 14)
Out of all the things man has made the ministry of the gospel, the two greatest practices we are called to engage in are faith and love.

Trust God and demonstrate the reality of God to the hearts that surround you by showing what God can do with a life that is committed to trusting him with your past, trusting him in your present and trusting him for your future.

Love others as Christ has loved you.  Do what love does and embody for the whole world this truth – that God is love and that love wins. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.

You are being called into the company of Wounded Healers. (vs 15, 16)
Good leaders, wise leaders and honest leaders walk with a limp.

Don’t hide your imperfections and wounds from the world.  Embrace your limp and live transparently with a world that clings to their masks. Let your liberty and freedom create a hunger for those you do life with to live true faced with you.

Liberate souls and disarm the Powers by celebrating your weaknesses because when you are weak, he is strong. These words from God are true for you and me and call us out from behind our masks to be true faced to those we know: “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” 

The scars of Jesus and our own scars, not our pretend perfection and flawlessness, are what will bring healing and hope to those with whom we journey

He is God, you are not. (vs. 17)
Two great truths that every pastor or minister of the gospel needs to remember at all times:
There is a God.  You are not him.

We are not ordaining you to be our, or anyone else’s savior, that job’s already been filled.
We are not asking you to be perfect or challenging you to always say and do the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reasons.

You won’t.  You can’t.

Be perfectly imperfect and trust God. 

Rest. 
Rely.
Find your identity in your being and not your doing.

I have been directly involved in two ordinations in my lifetime.  The first was a woman within a tradition that allowed her to preach on the mission field but not in her home church.  Amy’s, my second, felt redemptive in that I have come to understand that God has called Amy and God has called many women, to preach and teach and lead – and her freedom to be who God created her to be, provided by Jesus, also liberates me.  I have never known anyone whose calling was more certain to me than Amy’s.  I’m grateful for the grace that allowed me to be part of her service of ordination and the affirmation of the church that this seemed right to us and to the Holy Spirit.

Soul Blisters

During my youth ministry days there were many uncomfortable moments.

My first was the first morning I taught the Junior High/Senior High Sunday School class.  I was still in Bible College at the time, relatively young, and during the night a giant zit had emerged just beside my nose and just below the frame of my glasses.  It was physically impossible for the Junior High guys NOT to say something about the zit.  But they could have at least let me pretend to get through the lesson first.  The comments, stares and pointing fingers continued through the worship service that followed.  Good times.

Many times passed between that and the time I noticed a couple had “disappeared” during a youth lock-in.  Not in Bible College any more, it was my full-time gig and new missing kids never ends well.  I left a couple other leaders in charge and started checking behind the closed doors of Sunday School classrooms all over the building.  This led to awkward and uncomfortable moment #927 when I caught the young couple in flagrante delicto. Sadly, I was more embarrassed than they were. The times they were a changin’.

The truly uncomfortable moment I want to tell you about though happened during my last youth ministry.  We had a pretty cool youth ministry, incorporating video into our gatherings, real cutting edge, paradigm shifting kind of stuff.  This particular night, we were watching a video by Carman, the Italian-American rap “artist.” In this particular video, in true, dramatic Carman fashion, his character was saved at the last minute from martyrdom and some seriously kick-butt, Frank Peretti style – angels came to his rescue.  The kids were cheering, reacting just the way they were supposed to and then the uncomfortableness came when one of my adult leaders casually said to the cheering kids, “You know, in real life, hundreds of Christians had their heads cut off, were burned at the stake, thrown to lions and torn into pieces and there weren’t any angels that came in to save them at the last second.”

Downer.

Thus ended my chance for the altar call to end all altar calls that usually started with talk of destiny and ended with a story about a close friend dying in a car accident on their way home from youth group without ever making a decision to follow Jesus. Cue tears, cue raised hands, cue inspirational “fight song” style worship song to send kids back to school to be overcomers.

Downer.

But the truth is that all those young people were given the gift of a liminal moment that night.  A chance to cross the line between immature and mature faith. A chance to move beyond the God who protects us from the lions and tigers and bears, oh my! And to move forward with the God who sometimes walks with us into the lion’s jaws. A chance to grow past the God of my indestructible youth to the God who “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”  A chance to let go of the bedtime story God who manages my portfolio for the highest possible dividends and embrace the God who may be pleased to let my business crash and go bust because He’s more interested in giving me something far more precious than success and wealth.

Downer.  These are not the platitudes with which you gather crowds, build ministries or secure air time.

Out of 13 Apostles, 12 were martyred and 1 was exiled.  I’m thankful for the great men of faith today who have figured out that these early believers got it wrong.  That, in fact, God wants me to have my best life now.  Who have helped me see that if walk faithfully with God (which includes my tithe to the local church) that I am guaranteed good things from God, protection from burly angels who have been working out, and that no evil will touch me.  God’s finally stopped letting us be slaughtered and started guaranteeing our parking spaces. I’m not sure when God switched this up but I’m glad to be living on this side of it.

But what if the reality of our journey with God is that He hasn’t really changed nor have His ways and plans changed?  What if God’s priority is still transformation, redemption and a relationship not for my purposes, but for His? What if I’m not David and my problems aren’t Goliath and following God doesn’t guarantee me a long life or one that could even remotely be called successful by the people who put people on the covers of magazines or elect them to be president of something? What if God is really all about delighting in some obscure nun who dies at 24 from tuberculosis and can only contribute something insignificant to the world called, “the little way”?

What if our journey is less about getting pumped up to face another week and more about a long obedience in the same direction?

My Problem with Worship part 4: (A multi-part post...)

You can find part one here, part two here and part three here.

So, my big idea is this, as we’ve commodified worship a number of unintended but detrimental consequences have occurred. The story behind Matt Redman’s song, “The Heart of Worship” illustrates one pastor and a congregation’s effort to face and overcome some of these consequences.  That a song about that church’s struggle with worship being reduced to our musical preferences became a huge successful song on the worship charts is a perfect illustration of the power of the Powers.

We will sing about not singing and the irony will be lost on us.

That’s not Matt Redman’s fault, that’s my fault, I led that song a lot without even once thinking about the irony.  The best way to worship with that song is likely not to sing it and instead, share the story and invite people to bring their own offerings.

Not thinking about what we’re singing is, for me, an issue.

In part one, I wrote, “We have neglected to pay attention to what we sing.  Our songs will shape our theology if our theology hasn’t shaped our songs.  I’m part of a movement that holds at its core a belief in an enacted inaugurated eschatology. My experience is we quite often sing songs coming from other perspectives that are inherently based on other central beliefs that are in conflict with our own.  We have sacrificed good theology for “a good beat I can dance to.”  We don’t have to, we just do. I believe that within our movement we’ll soon wake up to find the songs we sing have moved us a long way from the radical middle.”

The context of my thoughts about this is the movement of which I am a part.  But I think anyone, in any church with a statement of faith, a mission statement or even a motto needs to give this some consideration. What in the world are you saying with your songs?

I remember attending a worship service at a church several years ago that sang a song whose title I can only guess is, "Money Cometh," based on the repetitive phrase in the chorus.  I attended another church that sang Kevin Prosch's song, "Show Your Power" and found myself awkwardly singing different lyrics than the rest of the congregation when we came to the line that Prosch wrote, "We ask not for riches but look to the cross..." They would not sing, "We ask not for riches..." negative faith baby.  So the lyrics were were written so they could ask for riches while they looked at the Cross. 

A few years ago, as a church planting pastor and a worship leader, I attended a small gathering of academics and theologians – professors and smart people and such – to talk about post-modern hermeneutics.  I was the dimmest bulb in the room and my mind was blown over and over.  During a break, I was standing by two other participants and listening as they were talking about a very popular worship song at the time.  “When it gets to…” and he quoted the line, “I stop singing and look around to see if anyone else seems aware of what they’re singing.”  Having just led that song the Sunday before, it had never occurred to me to stop, nor had I really thought much about that particular line – because the chorus was awesome and I sounded really good on it too.

Considering what they were saying, I realized I didn't believe what I was singing either, it painted a very ugly picture of God if a person thought about it, and I didn't want our church singing that line either.

Overhearing their brief exchange started me thinking more about what I was singing.  It made me realize that the songs we sing shape what we believe about God as much or more than the messages I preached.  Never once did I hang out with someone during the week when I heard them unconsciously repeating lines from my message but I often heard people singing a line or two to themselves from a song from the past Sunday morning worship time. I never had someone ask me, mid-week, if I would repeat the message from a week before, but I did have people ask if we were doing that song again.

Our songs don’t reinforce the pulpit; our songs are pulpits.

My Problem with Worship interlude: (A multi-part post in which I offend many friends)

One of my favorite stories about worship leading comes from Eddie Espinosa.

Eddie tells a story about one of the members of his worship team coming to him to complain that worship had become boring and flat.  His band member zeroed in on the problem, Eddie always had a prepared set list for worship and what he needed to do was toss the list and follow the Spirit.

Eddie listened, didn’t argue and took in what his bandmate was telling him.

And then he went home and prepared for worship the next Sunday just the same way he always did.  He prayed, listened, considered songs, listened and came up with a list.

But this time he made two small changes.  He hid the list.  He didn’t give the list to his bandmates.  The other change was that he asked God for permission not to follow His lead.  What he meant was that while he normally would drop in a song if he sensed the Spirit leading in a particular direction in the midst of worship, this time he would stick to the list, no matter what.  He felt God was with him.

Sunday morning the band sound checked, ran over a couple songs, seemingly at random and then chilled until the service started.  Once the worship service started, Eddie played his set list just as he had prepared it, start to finish.

Worship went so well that his complaining bandmate came to him after the service really excited.  Instead of complaints he told Eddie how amazing the morning worship had been and he told Eddie he knew exactly why it had been so good…because he’d thrown out the list!

And that’s when Eddie told him the truth.  He’d used the list, just like he had every other time. And he’s done the songs in the order they were on the list, just like every other time.

Eddie’s story isn’t about making a list or not making a list, but it does reveal just how subjective our singing experience can be. 

As a worship leader I’ve led some Sunday mornings where I was pretty sure God had left the building and I wished I could’ve gone with Him.  And then mid-week I’ve received an email about how “powerful” the worship time had been that week for someone there.  Other times I’ve felt like we were in the groove and if we were ever anointed it had been that Sunday, only to have another leader tell me how flat and dull worship had seemed that morning.

As a preacher, I’ve preached sermons I felt went nowhere and sermons I felt were almost worthy adding to the back of the Bible.  And just like with the worship songs, the reactions from others have been contrary to my own experience and perspective.  There’s a lot of subjectivity that takes place on a Sunday morning but to be honest, most of the pressure for how a morning goes lands on the worship leader.

They succeeded/failed to create the atmosphere for the Holy Spirit to move.

They succeeded/failed in getting hearts to open up to what God wanted to do.

They succeeded/failed in ushering us into the secret place.

It wasn’t me screaming at my wife on the way to the service, or yelling at my kids all morning to get them ready.  It wasn’t that I haven’t looked at my Bible app since we left the service last Sunday.  It has nothing to do with my total disengagement with prayer since the last Amen the previous week.  The problem rests solely with our worship leader not jiggling the right levers that got me with the feels.  It was the poor song selection.  It was the bands lack of attention to their transitions.  Or it was simply because the stupid fog machine broke down between first and second service and I can’t get my praise on without diffused light and copious amounts of fog.

Worship is a performance but it never has to be entertainment, even if we are entertained.  A performance is something we do together, share together and own together.  Entertainment is something we grade, we consume and when it doesn’t keep us engaged we move on to another vendor. 

Internal. External.

There is a subjective nature to our worship service that begs for leaders, senior leaders, who will trust their worship leaders and work collaboratively with them.  We need senior leaders to communicate with our congregations that we are all responsible for our worship experience and Sunday mornings are the summation of our experience that started on Monday morning and not a pep rally to get us through the week.

and thus I conclude this interlude...tomorrow I conclude my ranting...

on worship.

As always, leave your comments after the beep, I love to hear from you.

*Eddie's story appeared in Things they Didn't Teach Me in Worship Leading School, Tom Kraeuter, Emerald Books, 1995.

My Problem with Worship pt. 3 (A multi-part post in which I offend many friends)

Part one is here.  Part two is here.

Let me sum up the big idea of part one and two – we have turned worship into a commodity. We leverage it to obtain market share and we treat songwriters, worship leaders and worship music like cogs in our machine.  This has created a number of unintended consequences.

Back in the day, John Wimber, who became the catalyst of the Vineyard Movement, knew music and knew musicians because he was one.  That’s exactly the kind of leader you want to lead a movement with the songs of worship and the experience of the presence of God at its core. Heart of an artist, mind of a strategist, imperfectly perfect to nurture the vulnerable and artistic hearts that gathered to sing and seek, hungry for an authentic experience of God’s presence.

John’s leadership was critical because he understood that the journey to the heart of God always had a singular result – to be propelled back out into the world to love the lost and least, to be the Church. Worship was more than the songs we were singing in the Vineyard, worship was a life laid down in surrender and obedience – a willingness to be a fool for Christ.

And then, worship became popular.

I remember when Christian radio wasn’t playing worship because everyone wanted to listen to contemporary Christian music – it was about God, it was about living for God but it wasn’t usually about God or to God.  It was more often a sermon set to music, sometimes heavy on emotion – “hey kid, who are those Christmas shoes for?” – but it moved away from worship songs.

And then, worship became popular.

The Vineyard had a lot to do with this – not exclusively, but the Vineyard was very influential in making worship (and forgive me for this expression) relevant again. John and the Vineyard influence went overseas – not to plant Vineyards at first, but to come alongside and work together with the churches in the U.K. that were hungry and open to what John and the Vineyard had to offer. It was like fanning a flame or pouring gas on a match – like all these songwriters had just been waiting for someone to say it was o.k. to give birth to new songs and new sounds.  John brought a spark but the tinder was there and ready.

And then, worship became very popular.

And then someone said, “Hey, we can make some money off this!”

Little companies sprang up and big companies bought them and worship as a commodity quickly took shape. And worship filled the airwaves again.

First we bought CDs packed full of amazing songs.  Then we bought CDs with a couple amazing songs.  Then we bought CDs hoping for at least one amazing songs.  Because when we commodify something, we lose interest in quality in our drive to have product to sell.  Eventually we saturate the market to the maximum of what it will bear. And then just a little bit more.

And we start ripping songs, trading and sharing songs because as consumers we know the man is sticking it to us with a 12 song CD that only has two tracks we really like so we’re totally justified in sharing and not paying for our tunes ‘cause, y’know, it’s the man. 

And the artists suffered.  The creators piece of the pie became infinitesimally smaller.  Getting on a CD now was just “giving people exposure” for which they should be thankful and they should stop asking or royalties.

What does all this have to do with how worship became songs?

As we commodified worship, it required us to elevate singing in order to secure our futures.  It’s like toothpaste or shampoo – in order to get your dollars, we have to make the paste about more than teeth and the shampoo about more than soap for your hair.  We’re selling you a brand, a lifestyle, a chance at romance, self-esteem and admiration.  We can’t really brand serving homeless people a meal or speaking out against human trafficking or showing hospitality to strangers or building a racially diverse community or doing most of the things that love does.  Mind you, we’ll brand it and commodify it when and where we can, but it’s just a lot harder than commodifying songs to sing.

Rather than following the Wimberism that the “meat is in the streets,” the commodification of worship has led us to believe that what we do in here is the meat.

And so we influence the Church at large to embrace the belief that songs are our worship.  When we sing is when God shows up.  Because we’re doing this song, miracles can finally happen here.  Social Justice is a code for liberal theology and works based faith, we’ve transcended that with worship and the Spirit will change the world in response to the sweet songs of love we gather to sing.  I don’t need to tell anyone about Jesus or live like Jesus with my neighbor, I just worship him and people walking by will be hit with waves of the Holy Spirit and want to follow him.

Then we started judging Sunday morning worship by whether we did that song we really like, the one that gives us the feels.  Was “Oceans” in the set? Then the anointing was present.  Was “Oceans” still in the worship set? The anointing has obviously left that worship leader/team.  And we’ve reduced our worship experience to measuring the ability of the leader and team to give us the feels rather than our ability to pour out our hearts to God, lose and find ourselves in the Father’s heart and to be compelled by his great love back out into a world full of pain and need.

Recently, I heard someone say, to oppose the powers, you’ve got to oppose the Powers.

I’m writing this as a follower Jesus who loves to worship with songs, who learned to play guitar so he could write songs and sings songs to Jesus.  I’m writing this as a follower of Jesus who has been shaped by worship music by people with last names like Barnett, Tuttle, Doerksen, Park, Smith, Ruis, Prosch, Redman, Mark, Beeching, Hughes, Houston and others.  I am not suggesting that present day worshipers don’t minister to people beyond their songs.  I am simply observing that powers have generally coopted our worship wherever possible, commodified it and marketed it to the singers of the songs by reducing worship to this single expression for which we can be charged a reasonable fee.

And our artists become baristas. (no offense to baristas, I need you too!)

I will now put on my tinfoil hat and sit quietly in my corner.

My Problem with Worship pt. 2: (A multi-post in which I offend many friends)

Part one is here.

Since this is a blog and not a thesis, I’m going to make some observations that I won’t be able to back up with statistics or footnotes to research.  This doesn’t mean that my observations have no merit or are not true.  But they will just be observations that come from my experience.  Feel free to tell me how it really is.

In my original post I wrote, “We’ve created a culture that has mistakenly come to believe that worship is primarily songs we sing about God or to God and that loving God is best and most adequately accomplished through singing songs.”

I am convinced this belief has taken root in our church culture because we have commodified worship.  We’ve found a way to harness the winds of heaven in a way to benefit ourselves. And by “we,” I specifically mean those in senior leadership of the Church. Worship has become a commodity by which we secure market shares and fortify our positions.

I’m old enough to remember when contemporary worship started to gain traction.  I’m a veteran of the ‘worship wars.’  I can still recall when, “I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me…” was both contemporary and risky to sing on a Sunday morning. I’ve survived a church split where the style of worship was ground zero for the pent up frustrations of two similar but distinct groups of people.

But we’ve crossed the Rubicon, even if skirmishes continue to break out in some places.

And do you know when the tipping point came?

Ever see a gas war?  I used to drive through a small town with 3 gas stations situated on 3 corners of a 4 way intersection.  They always had the same price on gas.

Until one of them blinked.

And then down came the price for a time. First in one, then in the other two. Market driven competition.

In the worship wars, someone blinked.

Someone told their former senior pastor they were now going to another church because they used guitars and drums in their worship.  Blink.

It was less an ideological shift and more a pragmatic shift.  Not for everyone, but for the mainstream folks, we went from killing the musical prophets one month to investing in new sound systems the next.  And in most places, non-musical pastors started telling gifted musical people how to play, what to play and with whom to play.

And as soon as we pastors saw how the musical people created “the feels” for people, we both feared and adored them.  We feared them for their influence and we adored them for their influence.  The fault was not in our stars, but in ourselves.

And frankly, we still fear and adore those who lead our worship.  And so we’ve been handicapped from the start of this adventure. Senior leaders know that those who gather can just as easily scatter and often have.  So senior leaders do what every human is tempted to do when they are scared: they control.

And there are so many ways to control.

Sometimes we control with honey.  We make promises that range from paid salaries or stipends to goals of getting your music recorded and published.  We tell you how wonderful you are and valuable you are, under the umbrella of our covering. Or some other non-sense that puts you under me.

Sometimes we control with a stick.  We berate worship leaders on their song choices, the length of time the songs took that service, the lack of response from the congregation.  We wonder to our worship leaders if maybe they aren’t harboring some hidden sin.  We accuse them of building their own empires or having a “spirit of pride.” And we keep those who are wired to be sensitive and who tend towards self-doubt off balance and disempowered. Hungry for our benevolent approval or fearful of our anointed disappointment.

And so we created an us vs. them world, when really there’s only ever us.

But as soon as you’re a “them” and you’re not an “us,” it’s ever so easy to turn you and what you do into a commodity.  Rather than I/Thou, we maintain an I/It relationship which never produces life. 

Never.

What happens next?  Tuesday…how worship came to mean singing.

My Problem with Worship (A multi-part post in which I offend many friends)

The root of my troubles with worship is this: commodification, the source of all kinds of evil. 

As soon as we figured out a way to make money* off of Jesus and the stuff of heaven, we started dancing in the dragon’s jaws. We have to be on guard about this constantly in North America.

(I know most of my musician friends would love to make money from their music and very, very few of them actually do.  The couple that I know who have or do make money off their music also happen to be some of the most generous people that I know and they would be embarrassed to find out how the stories of their generosity have leaked out. Making a living at writing, producing or leading worship isn’t what I’m talking about.)

What I will be writing about in this multi-part post:

1) We’ve created a culture that has mistakenly come to believe that worship is primarily songs we sing about God or to God and that loving God is best and most adequately accomplished through singing songs.

2) We have neglected to pay attention to what we sing.  Our songs will shape our theology if our theology hasn’t shaped our songs.  I’m part of a movement that holds at its core a belief in an enacted inaugurated eschatology. My experience is we quite often sing songs coming from other perspectives that are inherently based on other central beliefs that are in conflict with our own.  We have sacrificed good theology for “a good beat I can dance to.”  We don’t have to, we just do. I believe that within our movement we’ll soon wake up to find the songs we sing have moved us a long way from the radical middle.

3) The intimacy, vulnerability, simplicity and honesty that was the heart (as I perceived it) of Vineyard worship is being altered by #2 above and as a result we are beginning to experience a new norm in preaching and teaching that neglects these same virtues.

4) We relate to our worship leaders, songwriters and singers as commodities. Within the worship community they find encouragement, support and understanding from one another, but seldom do they experience these things from senior pastors and leaders. Us vs. them feelings are generated by the way senior leaders relate to worship leaders and communities.  Bands and worship leaders come to our churches to play and lead worship and regularly receive, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” but we are giving them nothing or whatever is right next to nothing for what they've done.  

To be clear, it’s not the songwriters in the Vineyard that are at the root of this.  It is the diminished emphasis we are giving to worship and worship music generated in and by the Vineyard that I believe is at the heart of this. It is our propensity to commodify.

It’s a leadership issue, not an artist issue. 

As local pastors, we have adopted a new credo – growing my church is the most important thing on my agenda.  It is my only agenda.  If we’re growing, God’s blessing is on us and therefore on whatever I do or don’t do to get there. I am judged by the size of the church I attend or lead.

A friend of mine was leading worship at one of our churches during a season of personal grief as one of his children was attacked by cancer.  This season drew deep and powerful songs of lament from my friend who was kindly asked by leadership to, "stop singing the sad songs..." because it was bringing the worship vibe down on Sundays.

So much for weep with those who weep.  

And so we play to the crowd because attendance and offering equals salvation and success.  We reinforce this on so many levels that it must be true. We emulate other wildly ‘successful’ senior pastors and ignore when they crash and burn or leave a trail of broken and bloody people “under the bus.”  We ignore all the stories we know of worship leaders and worship pastors (in and out of our movement) that have been burned out and tossed aside like commodities rather than image bearers.  We stop listening to our veterans and the wisdom they have earned because we need what’s new, what’s sexy, what’s getting air time on the radio.  Because we’re competing for market share and we have to produce something better than the church(es) one block over.

And deep down, you know that’s true.

Worship has become commodified.  And worship leaders are a commodity.  And our worship services have become about the market. Again, this commodification is not the work of the artists, but the system of which we are a part.  And that atmosphere you permit is the product you will create.

The Church is at its best as a prophetic witness to the world by living with a different agenda, in a different way that looks more Cross than marketplace and looks at people as image bearers and not fodder and see worship as a way we live and not a commodity we leverage for a greater share of the market.

And thus ends my homily for today…

Feel free to comment and suggest ways to fix me or fix the problem.  

Part two will be posted Monday.

(* and money's just a symbol.)

Dear Friends Who Preach and Who Listen to Preaching

I’ve said before how much I love preaching as an art.

As a result, I listen to a lot of preaching, past and present, and find something beautiful in almost every message. 

Almost.

There’s a contemporary trend that seems to be wildly popular and often the homiletical approach of some preachers of very large churches – as well as some very normal sized churches. 

Honestly, it has much more to do with orientation than it has to do with size.

This trend usually develops a message in one of two ways with both achieving the same broken result.

The first way which seems very popular today is the allegorical sermon.  These practitioners and artists will spend a lot of time in the Old Testament turning the narrative into allegories about modern day struggles and issues and how to overcome them, how to live in victory, be a success, get a win. 

It’s very American, very much in tune with our modern zeitgeist.

The second way which also seems very popular today is (what I will call) the therapeutic sermon.  These practitioners and artists will take a relevant, contemporary topic and piecemeal scriptures together (or sometimes not) that support their thesis about how you and I can deal with common problems, struggles and issues we face and come out as winners, overcomers and with the best life now.

Several years ago, I was part of a 3-week summer English camp in mainland China.  Our goal for the camp was to teach conversational English to teens and young adults as a means to building relationships and sharing our faith.  One method we used was to share Bible stories as English lessons and in the midst of our lesson, bring up our faith.  I was surprised, the very first time I did this, to discover that my “atheist, communist” students already knew the stories I was telling them.  Instead of being surprised by the parables or the stories, they spoiled the endings which they knew by heart.

I was confused. So I asked them to tell me more.

What I discovered was that in the same way I had been taught Aesop’s fables or tales of Greek mythology, like Pandora’s Box, these students had been taught a lot of the Bible but it hadn’t told them anything about Jesus.  The story of the Prodigal Son was, for them, a lesson on the importance of family loyalty.  David and Goliath, overcoming adversity.  Loads of Bible.  No Kingdom.  No Jesus, the Autobasileia.  It was like getting a vaccination, just enough to immunize us from the real thing.

And this is what scares me about a lot of preaching I listen to.  Lots of stories with life lessons, lots of allegories that turn the Bible into a cleverly disguised self-help book, great moments that would easily make an Oprah segment or a TED talk, but they’d play in atheist classrooms in China as easily as a gathering of saints in Chicago. As a pastor I get emails offering to teach me or sell me programs of successful preaching plans for a year.  Ways to plan your preaching around peak times of the year for visitors and ways to capitalize on the natural rhythms of holidays and special events to build interest and attendance.  I have friends who visit other churches or watch them on-line like I do and I inwardly cringe as they extol the buzz they feel coming away from these services that are obviously designed to, like Hans and Franz, pump *clap* you up.  But my taste in Germans leans much more towards Bonhoeffer than it does Hans and Franz.

My personal litmus test has become “David and Goliath.” If a preaching pastor takes that text and turns into a Malcolm Gladwellian story of triumph over adversity or any version that makes the story of David about how you and I can face down the giants in our lives, I know that the paramount goal of the message is not the Kingdom, it’s the crowd.  It’s not telling the story of Jesus, it’s telling the story of me, in which Jesus briefly appears as a supporting character.  It’s not about transformation, it’s about self-actualization.

If the medium is the message, the message is, “it’s all about you.”

Stanley Hauerwas once said, “…the story that we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story, it is a story that has at its heart the attempt to make us tyrants of our own lives. But no one is more lonely than tyrants. Since they must always distrust everyone around them, because they know that they want their place…” The unintended consequences of preaching us into the center of the story is, as Hauerwas observes, that we are made tyrants of our own lives. This kind of message, unintentionally, does not bind us together, it drives us apart. We’re always at odds with each other and in conflict or tension with one another as we vie for our place at the center of the story. And there can be only one.

But Jesus tells a better story, Jesus is a better story, and his Kingdom offers a better story than our self-centered services and self-centered messages tell. Jesus is the center of the story, and we’ve all been invited to join a story that formed us and forms us, we did not form it.  We become a part of the story and that story makes us open to the stranger, the other and causes us to recognize that this isn’t my story, it’s not about me, my rights, my destiny but about Jesus, the Kingdom and his story, the one he tells and the community tells together.

There is a better story than the one that’s all about you, and I’m very sure there’s a better story than the one that’s all about me. And I think the best preaching we can all do is to tell the story of the Autobasileia. That means we’ve got to immerse ourselves in our story and live that story, not just talk about it. Especially not just talk about it.  That story needs to permeate our day to day lives, our relationships, our vocations, our conversations, our calendars and our check/cheque books.

I know, I'm not the official voice on "how to preach right," I'm just a nobody who isn't impressed with the Emperor's new clothes. And I'm convinced if I let the Emperor go out like that, I'm complicit and responsible by virtue of my silence.  There is a better story.

Women: My Confession and my Credo

I don’t know if this is my philosophy or my theology but it is what I believe and what I hope is my practice.  My Credo.

When the movie, Selma, came to theaters, we were living in the States again.  My daughter went to see the movie.  I chose not to prepare her for what she was going to experience.  She came home devastated.  She asked us if it was true that white people like us had treated black people like that. In school she had learned history but those brief lessons did nothing to prepare her for a very recent story of people who have been segregated, abused and lynched here in America.

There’s another story I haven’t adequately prepared her for: her own.

When my daughter was little, she would ask me if I would turn the church I was pastoring over to her when I was finished. And as she has grown into a young woman, the sense of vocation has not left her. Of all the things she talks about doing with her life, the one constant has been full-time ministry in one capacity or another. What I don’t want to tell her is how hard it will be for her, as a woman, to live that vocation here in America.

I am part of a network of churches that is connected relationally across the U.S. and around the world.  In each country, our churches observe their geographical boundaries as the boundaries of their own orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  So in Canada, for instance, our churches had a position on women in leadership that was egalitarian in belief, if not in practice.  Egalitarian meaning that leadership roles were assigned by God based on vocation, not on gender.  In the U.S., same network but different practice: we have staked out an egalitarian position but we have no requirement that anyone in the U.S. actually has to live by it.

I attended my first U.S. National Gathering of our network of churches about 3 years ago.  It was held at the “mother ship” in California. Thousands gathered from all around the U.S. as well as others from around the world.  One main session during the day featured a message by two women. Workshops were on the schedule immediately following their message and I attended one on financial stewardship (or how to raise more money by including self-addressed stamp envelopes with your mail-outs).  Just before the session started, two guys in the row behind me were having a conversation about the previous session and they were both shocked and a little repulsed that two women had preached to us. I turned, assuming that they were being ironic or that they were old.  Very old.  But they were neither old nor being ironic.  They were late 20s or early 30s and very earnest about how troubled they were about women being turned loose to preach to men.
And I was shocked. After 30 years of ministry, it takes a lot, but that did it.

It was strange for me to feel so surprised by their conversation because I spent a long stretch of my Christian life as a complementarian.  Short version – we all share equal status before God but we have different roles and preaching and pastoring is reserved for men.  It’s hard for me to even write that last sentence now without being unfair to that position or judgmental about those who hold it…because I was one.  But after being born again again, I have come to believe that the complementarian position is wrong – not just intellectually, but morally.  And one of the things I have loved about my Canadian Tribe and my U.S. Tribe of churches is that we brought the Gospel into gender reconciliation and prevailed against the dominate culture because we have a better Story.

However, I’m coming to believe that telling women in our movement today that we are egalitarian is like telling my African-American friends that we’ve abolished racism.  Making room on the stage isn’t the same as making room in our hearts and heads.

And it’s especially not the same as putting women in key leadership roles where they will have male subordinates.

The story I still need to tell my daughter is that no matter how loud her vocation might be, as a single female, she has almost zero chance of finding a paid position as a senior pastor or almost any other kind of pastor.  There are two things against her: she is a woman, and she is single.  We might cope if she’s married and “under her husband’s authority” (stomach turn) but we really don’t know what to make of her if she’s single and feels called to lead men and women.  In fact, I think we’re suspect of single people anyway, marriage being the evangelical ideal, but that’s a post for another time.

She will be shocked. She will feel stuck.  She will feel judged.

So, here is my credo:

Single men and women are not broken or missing any pieces.  Jesus completes them, not any man or woman.

The Gospel applied will always mean that walls of division are dissolved in favor of reconciliation.  Therefore, gender is not the basis on which people are deemed appropriate for service in the Kingdom of God.

Vocation is affirmed by the Church and the Holy Spirit but not conferred by the Church.  We recognize the story you are in but we do not get to tell you what story you are allowed to be in.

Any reading of the Gospel that subjugates one gender to another is a misreading of the Gospel and it is neither beautiful or Christ-like.

If God has obviously poured out His Spirit so that “daughters shall prophesy,” who am I and who are we to tell God that they shall not? Women are gifted and called to preach to all genders.  If my understanding of other New Testament Scriptures leads me to another understanding, I must question my understanding.

We are doing violence to the body of Christ if you or I deny any woman’s vocation and gifts to the rest of the body.

I will happily follow any woman who follows Jesus anywhere our King and Savior leads.

I will not feast at the table of leadership and privilege as long as anyone is not given equal access or expected to be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the table. Therefore, I must intentionally, actively and consciously affirm and embrace the vocation of others regardless of gender.

We must stop lying to ourselves and especially to women that we are equal when our behavior, conversation and praxis communicates otherwise.  It should be women and not men who tell us when we have achieved equality and egalitarian practice.


To my daughter, I pray that you will find within the Church ways to exercise the gifts and vocation that come to you from our Father.  May your experience be one of inclusion and embrace and may you find the dividing walls truly broken and the stones that were once used to build them, turned into paving stones for a road both men and women can walk on together without worrying about who gets to choose which direction we are going.

I'm aware that I'm writing this as a male.  I would appreciate hearing from my sisters about their experience and their perspective on our beliefs and our practices in the Church towards gender and the egalitarian/complementarian argument.   

Women: My Confession and my Credo

I don’t know if this is my philosophy or my theology but it is what I believe and what I hope is my practice.  My Credo.

When the movie, Selma, came to theaters, we were living in the States again.  My daughter went to see the movie.  I chose not to prepare her for what she was going to experience.  She came home devastated.  She asked us if it was true that white people like us had treated black people like that. In school she had learned history but those brief lessons did nothing to prepare her for a very recent story of people who have been segregated, abused and lynched here in America.

There’s another story I haven’t adequately prepared her for: her own.

When my daughter was little, she would ask me if I would turn the church I was pastoring over to her when I was finished. And as she has grown into a young woman, the sense of vocation has not left her. Of all the things she talks about doing with her life, the one constant has been full-time ministry in one capacity or another. What I don’t want to tell her is how hard it will be for her, as a woman, to live that vocation here in America.

I am part of a network of churches that is connected relationally across the U.S. and around the world.  In each country, our churches observe their geographical boundaries as the boundaries of their own orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  So in Canada, for instance, our churches had a position on women in leadership that was egalitarian in belief, if not in practice.  Egalitarian meaning that leadership roles were assigned by God based on vocation, not on gender.  In the U.S., same network but different practice: we have staked out an egalitarian position but we have no requirement that anyone in the U.S. actually has to live by it.

I attended my first U.S. National Gathering of our network of churches about 3 years ago.  It was held at the “mother ship” in California. Thousands gathered from all around the U.S. as well as others from around the world.  One main session during the day featured a message by two women. Workshops were on the schedule immediately following their message and I attended one on financial stewardship (or how to raise more money by including self-addressed stamp envelopes with your mail-outs).  Just before the session started, two guys in the row behind me were having a conversation about the previous session and they were both shocked and a little repulsed that two women had preached to us. I turned, assuming that they were being ironic or that they were old.  Very old.  But they were neither old nor being ironic.  They were late 20s or early 30s and very earnest about how troubled they were about women being turned loose to preach to men.
And I was shocked. After 30 years of ministry, it takes a lot, but that did it.

It was strange for me to feel so surprised by their conversation because I spent a long stretch of my Christian life as a complementarian.  Short version – we all share equal status before God but we have different roles and preaching and pastoring is reserved for men.  It’s hard for me to even write that last sentence now without being unfair to that position or judgmental about those who hold it…because I was one.  But after being born again again, I have come to believe that the complementarian position is wrong – not just intellectually, but morally.  And one of the things I have loved about my Canadian Tribe and my U.S. Tribe of churches is that we brought the Gospel into gender reconciliation and prevailed against the dominate culture because we have a better Story.

However, I’m coming to believe that telling women in our movement today that we are egalitarian is like telling my African-American friends that we’ve abolished racism.  Making room on the stage isn’t the same as making room in our hearts and heads.

And it’s especially not the same as putting women in key leadership roles where they will have male subordinates.

The story I still need to tell my daughter is that no matter how loud her vocation might be, as a single female, she has almost zero chance of finding a paid position as a senior pastor or almost any other kind of pastor.  There are two things against her: she is a woman, and she is single.  We might cope if she’s married and “under her husband’s authority” (stomach turn) but we really don’t know what to make of her if she’s single and feels called to lead men and women.  In fact, I think we’re suspect of single people anyway, marriage being the evangelical ideal, but that’s a post for another time.
She will be shocked. She will feel stuck.  She will feel judged.

So, here is my credo:

Single men and women are not broken or missing any pieces.  Jesus completes them, not any man or woman.

The Gospel applied will always mean that walls of division are dissolved in favor of reconciliation.  Therefore, gender is not the basis on which people are deemed appropriate for service in the Kingdom of God.

Vocation is affirmed by the Church and the Holy Spirit but not conferred by the Church.  We recognize the story you are in but we do not get to tell you what story you are allowed to be in.

Any reading of the Gospel that subjugates one gender to another is a misreading of the Gospel and it is neither beautiful or Christ-like.

If God has obviously poured out His Spirit so that “daughters shall prophesy,” who am I and who are we to tell God that they shall not? Women are gifted and called to preach to all genders.  If my understanding of other New Testament Scriptures leads me to another understanding, I must question my understanding.

We are doing violence to the body of Christ if you or I deny any woman’s vocation and gifts to the rest of the body.

I will happily follow any woman who follows Jesus anywhere our King and Savior leads.

I will not feast at the table of leadership and privilege as long as anyone is not given equal access or expected to be satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the table. Therefore, I must intentionally, actively and consciously affirm and embrace the vocation of others regardless of gender.

We must stop lying to ourselves and especially to women that we are equal when our behavior, conversation and praxis communicates otherwise.  It should be women and not men who tell us when we have achieved equality and egalitarian practice.


To my daughter, I pray that you will find within the Church ways to exercise the gifts and vocation that come to you from our Father.  May your experience be one of inclusion and embrace and may you find the dividing walls truly broken and the stones that were once used to build them, turned into paving stones for a road both men and women can walk on together without worrying about who gets to choose which direction we are going.

I'm aware that I'm writing this as a male.  I would appreciate hearing from my sisters about their experience and their perspective on our beliefs and our practices in the Church towards gender and the egalitarian/complementarian argument.   

What I was Trying to Say...

Jesus has been called a lot of things.  I think one of the most important things he has been called is what he called himself and what was echoed by the writer of Hebrews. 

“Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” And “I and the Father are one.” Both from John’s Gospel.  Both are Jesus asserting more than a similarity with God the Father, more than a familiar connection.  Hebrews 1 says it like this, “Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. ² And now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he created the universe. ³ The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God…” (NLT)

A couple Sundays ago, I was wrapping up my morning message about the image of God and the idols we replace Him with. Jesus, I was trying to say, is the best revelation of God that we have.  One practical application of that truth, I was asserting, was that Jesus should be the lens through which we read the whole rest of the Bible. 

Here’s part of what I said, “If we look at any other parts of the Bible to determine what God is like we have to look at it through the lens of Jesus so that when it doesn't look like Jesus we have to go hmmmm I'm going to have to set that aside because that doesn't look like Jesus I can't ascribe that to God just because it says it because it doesn't look like Jesus. I need a greater understanding that I don't have right now because this is what Jesus said “have I been with you all this time Philip and yet you still don't know who I am.  Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father so why are you asking me to show him to you. Jesus reveals the Father.”

I know this was confusing for some. You can give the whole thing a listen here, and let me know what you think.

What I wasn’t trying to say was that we should all go “Thomas Jefferson” on the Bible and cut out all the bits that we don’t like. I wasn’t trying to say that we should toss out some of the hard passages that ascribe horrible violence to God. I wasn’t trying to say that Jesus replaces YHWH of the Old Testament. What I meant by “set that aside…” was simply this, my understanding of the Bible is undoubtedly fallible and my capacity for interpreting its meaning pales in comparison to Jesus’ ability to accurately image what God is really like.  Therefore, when my understanding of a passage paints a picture of God that doesn’t look like Jesus, I need to “set it aside,” ie. don’t build a doctrine around it, don’t change my worship because of it and don’t tell other people my “word of wisdom” because I’m clearly missing something.  If Jesus and the Father are one (and I think they are) and Jesus is the exact representation of God’s character (and He is) then the flaw is in my understanding, not in Jesus’ revelation.

So how does that come up practically?

When I read that women are to remain silent in the church, and I read that through the lens of Jesus, something doesn’t make sense.  Jesus elevated women, included them and encouraged them to speak up.  He sent the woman at the well back to town with a story to tell, he sent the women back to be the first to declare the good news, “Jesus isn’t in the grave!” So, while the plain reading of the text is quite obvious, its actual meaning must not be.  Because it doesn’t look like Jesus.

When I read the Old Testament and the picture of a war-like tribal God is painted for me, it has to give way to the revelation of Jesus in arriving at the best understanding of what God is really like.  At least that is what Hebrews seems to be saying.  I’m not saying that those passages should be ignored or cut out or tossed in the bin.  I’m saying that we need to “set it aside” until we can come to an understanding about their meaning that maintains the integrity of the revelation of Jesus as the exact representation of God’s character. Don’t make big decisions, don’t develop theology, don’t change your worship, don't feel justified in doing violence to your enemies - if it doesn’t look like Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

In some ways, what I’m advocating is that we use the same hermeneutic that Jesus seems to be using in the Gospels when he says things like, “You have heard that it was said…but I tell you…”

There’s a worship song that’s currently popular that says, “I’ve heard a thousand stories / Of what they think You’re like.” Well, God’s only told one story, Hebrews seems to be saying, that tells us what God is precisely like and that story is Jesus.

I hope this hasn’t added to the confusion, I know that’s one of my spiritual gifts, adding to the confusion.  Leave comments or questions below and I’ll do my best to sharpen the clarity on what I’m trying to say.  Or offer apologies if I’m somehow missing what the Bible says.

When a Movement Stops Moving

What makes a Movement a Movement and not an Institution or Organization?

It seems like there are a few key differences but I think what best sums them all up is the presence of what Walter Brueggemann calls, “Prophetic Imagination.” A Movement possess it, an Institution eliminates it.

Initially, it seems that a movement begins when a grass roots felt need is met by a catalyst, develops critical mass and is captivated by prophetic imagination – things can be different than they are now. The danger, as Brueggemann points out, is that which is developed from the prophetic imagination tends to become the enemy of that prophetic imagination as it settles into an institutional rather than prophetic shape.

Herbert Blumer described the four stages of a social movement, these have been refined or simplified by other scholars but maintain the same basic meaning.  They are: Emergence, Coalescence, Bureaucratization, and Decline.  The story of Israel, Brueggemann says, illustrates this movement.  It started with Moses and a vision of a “free God” and that life didn’t have to be “this way.” Then, as this new Movement pursued the prophetic vision and a “free God,” they eventually morph into Solomon’s monarchy, and a consolidation of power wherein the former slaves became the oppressors and the Tabernacle was replaced with a Temple and God was ‘permanently’ anchored in place. The Movement experienced both its highest and lowest point at exactly the same time, albeit from two different perspectives.

Eventually, it seems, Movement becomes Empire.

Then, two things happen.  1) The Empire has to marginalize the voices of dissent.  Ultimately, the Empire must eliminate the dissenting or prophetic voice as they clearly endanger the well-being of the Empire. And 2) The prophetic voices begin a race to the bottom to be sure they aren’t the last one standing who is compelled to tell the Emperor that he’s naked.

To resist the gravity that pulls us towards being an Empire, Movements need to be able to carry on what the catalyst started, to nurture the prophetic imagination, to be self-correcting – like science – and invite dialog, facilitate the prophetic imagination and reform accordingly.  But this is almost impossible because the Empire is convinced of their rightness, their efficacy and their sense of an almost divine approval by which they do what they do.  We can tweak the Empire, but we cannot dismantle the Empire, we’ve invested far too much of our resources and our ego.

So, what do we do to get a Movement moving again?

1) Listen to the Artists.  I don’t mean to say that we have them submit papers or proposals or give them 30 minutes to present something to our board or executive council.  I mean that we create Artist collectives and we engage in conversation, listen to the music, observe their dance, walk through their galleries.  Where the Arts are not fostered you can be sure that Empire is gaining ground.  To move, we must let the songwriters and the painters, the dancers and the musicians, the wine makers and playwrights, tell us what sort of future they imagine for us.

2) Listen to the Scholars. Why oh why have a body of scholars developed within the midst of a Movement and then not consult and listen to them?  Empire develops scholars to legitimize themselves and their actions, as needed.  A Movement consults and seeks consensus, it looks for the synergy that comes from a collective who may not agree on every point but who embody the heart of where we are going with a deep knowledge and understanding of from where we have come.  Scholars, however, are often early adopters of the prophetic imagination and this, quite simply, makes them dangerous to the Empire.

3) Listen to the Story.  Stanley Hauerwas writes about the effort of modernity as, “the attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story.” We have a story but the Empire is a revisionist or a redactor or simply in denial because it suits the Empire to be what is, what was and what is to come.  We need to revisit the work of our storytellers and realize that what we had at the beginning of our story may be because of what we did at the beginning of our story.  We should not think the way forward is through nostalgia or trips down memory lane, these actually serve to reinforce the Empire.  Rather, we need to let our story remind us of the prophetic imagination that once served as catalyst for our Movement and let that be all the permission and authority we need to begin to prophetically imagine what can be.

4) Empower the Imagineers.  Most of us don’t like tension.  But tension is where all the good stuff usually happens. Gather the Imagineers and create time and space where dreamers can dream and sacred cows can be put on the grill for burgers and steaks. Yes, this is scary.  Yes, it may mean uncomfortable change.  Yes, there will be some people who are committed to the Empire and they will threaten to take their toys and leave.  You can’t be a Movement if you’re being held hostage by people who threaten to quit and neither can you be a Movement if you put a gag on the dreamers – overtly or covertly simply by never making space to listen or to act on what comes from them.

Final word goes to Walter Brueggemann, from The Prophetic Imagination, “…every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.  It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

What future are you dreaming of?

Figuring It All Out

One of the great myths of the United States is the myth of the self-made man (or, thanks to feminism, woman).  It is a story we tell ourselves and we tell each other and we tell our children, to inspire confidence and attempts at doing new things, particularly in business or politics. It is a defining story for our culture and when you suggest that there is no such thing as a self-made anyone, you provoke the tender places that elicit violent reactions or icy cold reception.

As a pastor, I see this same sort of mythologizing among Christians who come to their “own conclusions” about faith and feel great confidence in the rightness of their preferences or of the conclusions they have drawn. These conclusions and preferences have no orientation, no “north star” other than the gravity of their own thoughts and feelings. This is a human condition, so it’s no surprise to see it in the attitudes and actions of believers. In large part, I think this is the unintended consequence of cutting people off from the Story we’re all in, the work of modernity that coopted faith for its own ends.

Stanley Hauerwas writes about this as, “the attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the story that they choose when they had no story.”

In the pond I swim in, we often refer to this as “the next move of God.”  We could just as easily call it the next wife, the next job, the next re-invention of myself: me 2.0. We talk about “what God is doing today” as if he’s started a new story – because that fits the narrative we’re already living in. Frankly, we prefer a faith practice that reinforces the things that we already believe, the feelings we’re already feeling, the conclusions to which we’ve already come. And by wrapping these all up in very spiritual language we externalize our issues and make noble our actions as we seek to follow Jesus the way we want to.

This path locks us into the inevitable entropy of disintegrated anticipation and the need to keep jumping to a new story as the last one fizzles, fails or falls apart.

Since I’ve been a Christian, not as long as you might think, we have Marched for Jesus, Willow Creeked, Wimbered, Alpha-ed, K.C. Propheted, Inner Healed, Watchmened for the Nations. We’ve been Purpose Driven, Spiritually Mapped, Soaked, the Father’s blessed us, we Cell churched, Shepherded, Globally Awakened, had the restoration of apostles and prophets, done Identificational Repentance and we’ve taken our cities for God.  We have been revived in Brownsville, renewed in Toronto, done 24/7 prayer, 24/7 worship, Youth Churched, fasted for spiritual breakthrough, made intercessors a separate group from everyone else in the church, taken Steps to Freedom, watched Transformation Videos, joined the Global Day of Prayer and discovered the moving pinnacle of worship in Integrity, Hosanna, Maranatha, Vineyard, Hillsong, Delirious, Passion, Jesus Culture, Elevation, and the soup du jour.

Some of the above has been amazing.  Some has been rubbish.

A friend of mine, a younger friend, moved to a large city and found himself in the midst of a number of people his age, believers, intent on following Jesus.  Of course, they couldn’t find a local church that exactly did it for them.  So they started meeting together in an apartment. As their numbers grew, they rented an apartment together, collectively, just to hold their meetings in.  They sat on the floor on pillows, sang acoustic songs, listened to insights they would share with one another, and from one guy in particular who people seemed to look to as an unelected leader or spokesperson for those who gathered.

At first, they didn’t take up an offering, they just helped out the poor in their neighborhood and among them. Once they had to rent an apartment to accommodate their growth as a group, they started to take up an offering, just to help with community expenses, and my young friend was made the “keeper of the bank account” because he was, and still is, gifted by God to handle and create resources.  In a short amount of time, my young friend was involved in two conversations.  The first was awkward.  The “unelected leader” of the group had found himself devoting more and more time to teaching and conversations and need meeting within their informal group.  He came to my young friend and wondered if there were any moneys in the community account that could be used to reimburse him for time missed at his regular job and cover some expenses incurred from doing his volunteer work with their group.  The second conversation was with their whole community, not awkward at all, but an epiphany of sorts.

They called a “community meeting” after their regular meeting for worship and insights. Some of the young adults wanted to discuss an issue.  Several of the young couples had started to have children.  In fact, there were a number of babies in their meeting and several women who were present were also pregnant.  They wondered together whether or not there was something they could do so that the young moms could stay in the room for worship but the babies were all nearby in some adjacent room or something, with someone designated to look after them, maybe on a rota of some kind so not just one mom or individual had to be in the next room with the babies all the time?

It was at this moment my young friend (who had grown up a PK) told me, that he realized they had become a church like the churches they had all come from.

As followers of Jesus, we’re in a Story.  It’s valuable to know the Story we are in because it will save us from thinking we’re “boldly going where no man has gone before.” It will orient us to the things that have always mattered and will always mattered.  The Story will help us sort out our wants that we’ve always projected onto God from the main and the plain of what God is doing.  Knowing our Story helps us sort out the phonies and their miracle claims because we know the Story and what miracles really look like. Immersion in the Story we’re in will carry us through the seasons when it seems like nothing is happening because we know we’ve been there before and these deserts always precede something better. Knowing our Story gives us heart for the long haul rather than spastic sprints from one “move of God” to another.

So, may we know the Story and not be taken in by the stories we’ve made up for ourselves when we thought we had no story.  And may we be saved from “self-made” thinking and find the freedom of being made by God, embedded in the brilliant Story that he has given us.