Democracy Watch

These days a plethora of images revealing the state of democracy worldwide are staring us in the face. I am far from a political scientist, no pundit of all these power-broker dynamics, and about to comment on systems and cultures that are diverse beyond imagination. Hence, these thoughts are presented for our thoughtful and Christian discernment humbly, perhaps presumptuously, but wholeheartedly nonetheless.
Image #1 – The White House Sweepstakes
As a Canadian observing our friends in the world’s current Empire work their way toward the crowning of a new Emperor I am struck by the sheer simplicity and complexity of it all. Watching home-based caucuses in Iowa consisting of Skeeter and his cousins given as prominent a role on CNN as a University polling station is remarkable…and strangely intriguing. At the same time, candidates spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting their image and a smattering of their vision over and against the in-party enemy causing one to wonder if this isn’t simply a grade school popularity contest on steroids (oh, sorry, that’s baseball). And then there is the dainty dance between the political and the religious. Again, as a citizen of the Great White North, it amazes me to see candidates of both American parties speaking in churches on Sunday mornings with as much ease as they do at the union gathering on Monday. In Canadian society such a move would be outright political suicide. In Canada politicians have to closet their religion – especially if it is Christian – and lock the door to remain credible. For all the talk of the separation of church and stat both appear keenly jealous of each other under Uncle Sam’s watchful eye (the First Amendment, by the way, seems quite misunderstood in the USA – at least to this Canuck – and misapplied in Canada, where the constitutional clause doesn’t even exist and yet we love to claim it as a popular Canadian “value”). The White House sweepstakes, for all its peculiarities, seems to reveal that the interests of the democratic state and religion are inescapably linked…or are they?
Image #2 – Eastern Experimentation
Some of the most recent experiments in western democracy are observable in Eastern locales. Places like Pakistan, where assassinating the opposition is one way to make your point; Iraq, where the long, hard road to a new world order is daunting at best even with the dictator six feet under, and Russia, where a President completes his full term and then finds a way in through the back door to hold on to Czar-like power, reveal that planting democracy – at least the western version of it – in lands with different histories and cultural thought patterns is like trying to teach your weathered hound dog to beg like a toy poodle. We are in the midst of – are you ready for it – a long term experiment in democratic global domination; what if it doesn’t work? Have we hitched our horses to a wagon designed for paved roads and now we’re in the gumbo of the prairies in a downpour? And, for the Church, has our identity become so linked to this political vision that we’ve lost our own distinct mission and prophetic song with which to love and embrace these peoples who are so different and yet so similar to ourselves?
Image #3 – Kenyan Chaos
December 2007 democratic elections in Kenya, a relatively stable and predominately “Christian” African nation, really didn’t go well. Fourteen years after Rwanda we sit teetering on the brink of another tribal disaster fed by imperial and tribal colonialism, monarchy, and now democracy. It’s all mercilessly hodge-podge, confusing, regrettable, and seemingly unstoppable. The reach for power and the slippery grip upon it can cause peace to disappear in the time it takes to mark a fraudulent ballot. We in the West watch images of machete-wielding mobs and shake our heads at their inability to appreciate what we’ve brought them…or is it the other way around?
I’m not saying the solutions are simple or that democracy is inherently evil, far from it, but I do believe the time has come for Western Christians to reconsider our politics and our mission, for it seems the two have become tragically enmeshed, on both the right and the left, and among conservatives, liberals, and anabaptists alike. From the White House – whose resident depends on some form of religious ascent – to the East – where our politics is assumed to be Christianity in action – to Kenya – where our form of governing only awakens old divides, we seem to have concluded that the world is us and we are the world. We can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t want it our way. We have assumed our politics rules the day. But, if we are Christian at all, we must say this is not true. Neither we nor our politics rule, only the LORD Almighty does and he has never been bound by any particular form of government nor opposed to using any form for his greater purposes. What he has done, time and time again, is seek out and form a people within the nations who are citizens of another politic altogether, who fix their eyes on what is unseen, and who receive the high and holy task of being a blessing to the nations because of their faith in and allegiance to One high and holy King alone.

X = Bridge

Driving along in my automobile, my son beside me at the wheel, we are listening to a radio station play “classic” tunes from the 1980s! Besides the fact that “classic” and “1980s” should never be used in the same sentence—Do you remember the synthesizer, leg warmers, New Coke, PTL Club and the Hyundai Pony?—I nostalgically sing along and answer a child’s questions about the good old days.

Despite the Duran Duran influence, this was a divine moment as I became keenly aware of the synthesizing of my thoughts into crushing reality: I was born in the last century and I am old.

Many of you will think this a ludicrous statement. At 35, I am a spring chicken, a young pup, a mere bud on the branch, to probably the vast majority of those reading these words, but that is precisely what troubles me.

My generation—labelled X—is increasingly caught betwixt and between, and indifferent about both poles. We are halfway, but we’re not sure what we are halfway from or to as we begin to find our legs, voice and place in the world, let alone the church. Many of us are floundering because the world of our parents and the world swallowing us up are equally strange. Communism has been traded for terrorism; Pacman eaten up by Halo; the Walkman overtaken by the iPod; Ethiopian famine eclipsed by AIDS; and the VCR, which we’re still teaching our parents how to run when we don’t even use them anymore, by the PVR.

Let’s just say we who inherited the radical challenges and culture-quake of the Boomers are really caught between two worlds. We don’t understand the traditional world our Boomer parents sought to dismantle—even the most conservative of our parents dismantled something—nor this strange place in which we must raise our children, which is maybe why many of us are unsure about having kids at all.

The X of my generation marks confusion. This, however, reveals a challenge I throw at my generational comrades in hopes some catch it: Can we Christ-following Xers already turn our attention to the first true post-Christian generations? It will be our turn in the next few years—if it isn’t already—to embrace the leading and shaping of a church and culture. Like others before, we will be tempted to champion our right to build it to our specs. Dare we lay aside this right?

Thankfully—and what a gift of grace this may turn out to be—we mostly laugh disparagingly at our “good old days.” We can’t take them seriously. Perhaps we knew even then that the times were in transition as we created a culture symbolized by Michael Jackson’s moonwalk (going backwards while appearing to go forwards).

Our mission may very well be to embrace the cost of laying ourselves down as a bridge. We are a demographic caught between a fading age and an emerging, yet fuzzy one. What great joy it may be for us to lie down and get walked on! First, by our Boomer parents, who will mourn a world that is no more. Then by our children, who need us to be a sure Christ-centred foundation, their link to a new day in which the naming of Jesus Christ as Lord is an affront to the Empire.

Because we don’t know who we are or where we fit, I propose we are the perfect generation for this glorious task.

Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

After returning from a morning walk through the heart of Ottawa. Me, myself, and the Lord had a very good conversation, though I talked too much. Here at the core of all things powerful and pompous I am internally seething.

It’s a sad kind of angry; a mournful rage has built in me after I had dropped my family off at friends one night. I was overcome, crushed actually, by a profound loneliness. Not solitude – that’s a gift of grace – but true aloneness and the troubling sense that this capital is not the center from which life in Canada springs, but the melting pot into which our collective angst is democratically mixed with one great big sorrowful, though stately, sigh. You might not describe it that way. I am, after all, only one person and this may just be my personal dysfunctional moan transferred onto the rest of you without consent.

Still, I need to confess something and maybe my vomiting of the soul (what the Puritans called confession and repentance) can become yours and ours together. I confess that I am a selfish prig and fail far too often to share the holy rage of God for the way things are, how they stay that way, and my culpability in the whole bloody mess. It is disturbingly true that talking is easier than walking and that sight can be blind and feeling callous. I want to cry. I want to weep over my own sin, my own complacency, my own unwillingness to engage the Kingdom of heaven as it is birthed in my heart and mind’s eye by the Holy Spirit. I am disturbed enough to change the world so long as my experience of it stays the same and I can fit it between commercials. Woe is me in a world of mass distractions.

Here I think is the crux of my laptop confessional: I want the world to change, but I don’t want that change initiated in me. I wouldn’t even mind bringing about change, so long as I can be an arms-length lobbyist or consultant who can maintain a sterile, safe existence and leave others to work out the ills I point out. Yet, troublingly, it is in me, in the capitol of Phildom, that the mustard seed of the Kingdom must first find fertile soil and root. If it does I know things will be different, which is what my entire being screams for. But can’t someone else be the prophet or evangelist? Won’t someone else visit the prisoner? Can’t someone else build that relationship? Won’t someone else shelter the orphan? After all there’s a hockey game on tonight that will help me forget all this for a while, and maybe even longer if I’m lucky.

I so don’t want my personal discipleship, and the tidy packaging I’ve stuffed it in, to crash head-on with the residual effects of sin in the world (my thanks to Bill Janzen at MCC Ottawa for feeding this insight). That would only bring about the confusion of both – the unwanted realization that my discipleship is cheap and my view of sin too indifferent. I want a personal Jesus not a powerful one with his peace-wielding sword. I don’t want the violent peace of the cross to disrupt my journey toward a restful retirement. And yet my life of following Jesus, if it is genuinely about taking up my own cross, must ultimately conflict with the stuff I don’t like about this world and don’t like about me. Heck, it must even collide with the things I do like and rather enjoy. Jesus would have that all of me be relentlessly engaged in the thoroughness of his love and transforming infiltration of all things – of things personal, corporate, sacred and secular. Will he be Lord of all?

I believe this is what he seeks: selfish prigs who increasingly lose themselves and their priggishness in Him and discover a bittersweet satisfaction in holy rage; who smile with tears because life as we’ve accepted it, or even named it, is not life as he intended it and who willingly make the confession of a guilty bystander and thereby stand by no more.

A bureaucracy of barrenness

Professor Barry Walters recently proposed in the Medical Journal of Australia that a lifelong carbon tax be levied on families having more than two children to compensate for the inevitable carbon footprint this extra life will stamp on the planet. Even further, he suggests carbon credits be given to those willing to embrace sterilization or a tithe to Trojan condoms. It seems this obstetrician is determined to make multiplication as difficult, joyless and fearful as the church has.

Most institutional-infected denominations have made it very cumbersome, almost discouragingly daunting, to plant churches and multiply. In effect, we have taxed the church away from her mandate—indeed her purpose and great pleasure.

I have had the privilege of walking with a “fellowship of the king” in southwestern Ontario that is trying to understand what it means to drop anchor, reject church contraception and be a multiplying kingdom community. They are incredible people who have not been afraid to raise and adjust their sails while reading the signs of the times, so we not just multiply, but have multiply-ability.

Is it time for some reproductive conversation around your potluck table?
Alan Hirsch, in his treatise The Forgotten Ways, says, “. . . we have now reached the vexing situation that the prevailing expression of church (Christendom) has become a major stumbling block to the spread of Christianity in the West.” In other words, what we have made church to be institutionally, structurally and economically, is the equivalent of championing contraceptives and sterilization over new life. We have virtually made ourselves bureaucracies of barrenness.

If we can only imagine that a real church requires a multi-function building, a “seminary-strained” pastor, denomination-speak, boatloads of committees and programs, and even our charitable status, then we may well have imagined the impossible and even worse. Since God can at least do the impossible, we may well have sterilized our own imaginations and traded faith for flummox and fear.

Can you imagine the current form of your local fellowship quickly, effectively, joyfully and with faithfulness to the Trinity, multiplying into a neighbourhood near you? Does the prospect give you a headache? Have you even talked about it? If you have, how long did it take someone to point out that the whole idea, while noble and even strangely enticing, just won’t work? Let’s be honest, what we have created is over-taxed and sterilized; we are virtually un-multiply-able.

The good news is that the problem is not the message, but the medium.

Need we be reminded that the early church multiplied quite nicely without any of the “necessities” we cling to? They had true multiply-ability. If you pay close attention to the wildness of Acts, you notice that multiply-ability is the very breath of the Spirit that often needs storms to be released. There is something inherent in Jesus’ people that will spread like wildfire if given the opportunity.

This, essentially, is what we are re-learning as a fledgling multiply-able community—to trust ourselves and our ways less and go with the DNA and fire of the Spirit more. We are asking more often: Is this multiply-able? Is what we are doing here reproducible or are we unwittingly sterilizing and over-taxing ourselves?

Is it time for some reproductive conversation around your potluck table?

To whom will you sacrifice your children?

I write this at perhaps the only time of year that our culture recognizes the worth of sacrifice—Remembrance Day. Images of battlefield horror may be the glorification of all things military or the uncensored documented proof that all things are broken. Love or hate the day, this individualistic, consumerist, me-first society can surely use the reminder of sacrifice for a cause bigger than itself.
Ironically, the most somber of silences at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is quickly followed by that most maniacal of marches towards the 25th day of the 12th month. How quickly we move from one form of child sacrifice to the next. In the former, we remember sacrifices made for the state; in the latter, we gorge on sacrifices for the self. In November, we were a people willing to lay down our lives; in December, we are gluttons for sales and easy credit.
Martin Luther once made the chilling statement, “Idolatry involves a question of what you would sacrifice your children for.” The state or the self: Which idol is receiving our children these days? Perhaps, and probably, it is both. The power of any idol is its diabolical clout that convinces us to give up our young in its name.
Now before we get uppity, snap our suspenders and declare ourselves free of such silliness, perhaps we need to be reminded of one limb of the church’s love affair with the political left and the other limb’s desperate dependency on the political right. The state still begs for—and consumes—our offspring. And then there is the surrendering of our kids to the selfish amusement and titillation of an age of decadence and excess with very few questions asked beyond, “Will that be cash or credit?”
As followers of Jesus we know the walk by faith is one of sacrifice—the self-sacrifice of Christ for sinners and the reciprocal sacrifice of the self marked by the taking up of our crosses in an about-face. You cannot be in Christ without accepting the sacrifice for you and making a sacrifice yourself. In contrast to the demands of the state, we are commanded to love even our enemies and name only one Lord. In contrast to the self, we are commanded to give up all that was once for our profit.
Yet even here, beneath a good God’s mothering wing, we do not escape the disturbing image of child sacrifice. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas says, “No ethic is worthy that does not require potentially the suffering of those we love.”
The Trinity gives up the Son. And how many toddlers did Bethlehem lose to the Father’s decision to shine on David’s city? If you choose Jesus, those you love are forced to live with the ramifications of your decision. To choose Jesus under Nero meant the potential suffering of your offspring. Household conversions meant embracing an ethic your loved ones could die for.
Does this still happen? Living with such an individualistic society and spirituality, we forget that it is still the case that what adults choose is what the next generation is forced to deal with. Since, statistically at least, Canadians are abandoning Christian faith faster than the Maple Leafs, it makes you wonder what god and ethic we have sacrificed our children for. And for those who have named Jesus as Lord: Do you still believe this Christmas that he’s worth the sacrifice?

Temple Raising

In a TV interview historian Michael Wood reflects upon the world’s great historic civilizations and observes that their impressive building programs were implemented in the dying days of their influence. The places modern tourists visit were in fact the last gasps of inflated kingdoms suffering an incurable wound. I doubt the Aztecs designed their temples as the perfect image for twenty-first century tourist brochures. At the height of power they were unsuspectingly raising their own tombstones.
You have probably seen great European cathedrals like St.Paul’s in London or St. Vitius’ in Prague. Though awesome in grandeur the eerie lament of an abandoned faith echoes mournfully midst the ancient pillars. That same dirge is haunting rural and urban Canada where buildings once full sit empty, with the occasional well-intentioned few searching for ways to “save the church” – a thought rich with tragic irony. Our building-centeredness has served as blinder, blunder and burden.
And still the Canadian Church, never more in decline, has entered a new era of temple raising. Will we never learn? Why are we so determined to sink obscene amounts of God’s money into temples he does not inhabit? Why have we assumed this is the only God-inspired model we must follow into eternity? Is it not clear by now that this is a human religious enterprise and not necessarily the heartbeat of our Father? Who are we building these big box monuments for? And, will our children or grandchildren when they bear grey hair care two pence about keeping these new basilicas up to code in a new economic and environmental reality, amidst a culture that will be – actually already is – avowedly secular and indifferent to our steeples and welcoming foyers?
Our culture is headed away from Christian faith at breakneck speed so why do we think wads spent on ourselves will spark some great revival? It won’t. In fact, such decadence may in fact feed and speed the exodus. The issue, really, is not the buildings themselves – they had their use and may yet still, though I hope in a radically different way – but the entrenched Christendom idea of the church that yet binds us. Far too much “church-life” is spent trying to coax people into our hallowed halls. Church buildings have ceased being remotely meaningful to the life of most communities. This is no great loss, for the Church is the body of Christ and her people God’s building. If we wake up we may yet live justly, mercifully, and humbly the radical hopeful kingdom God’s people can build for a society both justifiably critical of our self-centeredness and aching to see what they subconsciously dream we’re capable of.
Can we honestly not read the signs of the times and deduce that our current blueprint is nothing more than the temple raising of a fading empire and that God’s Kingdom does not depend – indeed never has – on church buildings? Is it really a feather in our cap when a non-believer compliments us on our nice church? Isn’t this merely a sign that they have yet to encounter the Church at all? A new imagination is desperately needed that will risk thinking, listening, and conversing with the body of Christ international that has no choice but to live in true fellowship, plant seeds and engage their troubled contexts rather than raise temples. This is no longer a “build it and they will come” world – if it ever really was. If we don’t learn this soon we are primed to join others who built big just before becoming historical curiosities.

Where is the Church?
Surely many will immediately think of the crossroads upon which a particular meeting house is found and point down the road with a mapquest description about how to find a building? Where the Church is, in this case, is land-locked.

Or, perhaps in response, you think of some pet burr in your saddle – which may explain the uncomfortable gait of some cowboys. You wonder where the Church is when it comes to a pressing issue of the day or hour. What is the Church’s stance on this or that and why doesn’t the Church – and we really mean someone other than us – do something about the mess. Where the Church is, in this case, is in her position papers.

I’m weary of such shallow churchianity. After all, since the Church is not a building if asked where the Church is you should point to yourself and your believing neighbour, don’t you think? And, if you wonder where the Church is in regards to some social tsunami you might consider a conversation with the mirror or look at the collective statement of lives shared in the fellowship of the King. What does the witness of our lives declare about what the church stands for? This may not be a comforting revelation.

The point is that the Church is found where Christ resides – in his people, and specifically, how they live his glory. As such, where the Church is may be in very unexpected places and, frighteningly, where we assume she is may in fact be a mirage.

I know a family, an amazing clan, and if you ask me where the Church is I’ll give you both directions to their home and tell you to watch their lives speak about what the Church stands for. They would be completely embarrassed if they knew you were reading about them, so don’t tell, but that alone highlights the subversive nature of their witness. They, like Christ, do not do what they do for accolades, but because something within demands it. They exist for the glory of Another, seeking to live faithfully in their troubled suburb of Nazareth – or just beyond the middle of nowhere – and fighting, yes fighting, a great battle they often wonder is worth the blood, sweat, and tears.

This family has adopted four incredible children; biologically contributed a couple more, are fostering three others, and dreaming of ways to serve the hungry more effectively in our community. They are not perfect, maybe a little crazy, but they are where the Church is. Their home is the Church. They are incarnating the selfless love of God and yet, tragically, pathetically, there are those who might click their tongues midst the gossip about such sorts in a church building lobby. Where then is the Church?

Believers like this bear an incredible weight. They not only carry the thankless task of loving what often bites back, but they – and others like them – are carrying the weight of the integrity of the Church before a culture that is ignoring our fairweather song and dance, but cannot ignore the long-suffering of those who see hope and give it.

In the current cultural reality it will be homes and hearts like those of our friends who, centered on Jesus and his people, embody that pure and faultless God-ward life found in a long obedience of sacrificial embrace and not in the tidy and trendy buildings, programs, and rhetoric we engage in that leaves many still asking, “Where is the Church?”

THE ANVIL

The Church leader of yore, Theodore Beza, once said, "Remember that the Church is an anvil that has worn out many a hammer."

We can easily be discouraged and silenced by the apparent death of the Church in Canadian and western culture. Don't sing the dirge quite yet. Right now the Church is being hammered by ideologies of materialism and humanism that boast of the end of Christianity. Don't name the pallbearers quite yet. If God is in it...and 2000 years plus proves he is...then what is happening right now is simply another polished hammer that will soon wear out. Without a doubt much of what the Church has come to see itself as in the west will be smashed by these current blows (this will actually be grace in disguise), but what is truly of the Rock will remain. The anvil will always outlast the hammer.

And this begs the question: Are you part of the anvil or hammer?

WONDER

So, I just returned from Colombia. My time away and the realities of catch-up mode since my return have meant little action on this particular page lately.

I simply want to reflect briefly on one of the many lessons I learned during my time away: Jesus transforms lives!

For those of you, like me, who grew up without tyring too much of the wild life it can be easy to forget how desparetly we need to be changed from the inside out. Hence, we can underestimate the radical life-quake that comes when a person says with conviction, "Jesus is Lord!"

For those of you who have forgotten this transforming reality, and for those of you who think it's just a bunch of bunk, I can only say that I saw, touched, and heard first hand the truth of what I speak. In Colombia I met people whose lives have been so rescued from the gutter of life, from the trash heap of society, and from the grips of evil that I could only weep. It's not just that they became nicer, or willed themselves into new clothes, no, they were completely and utterly morphed into new people - that's what they said! It's almost like they were born again! Hmmm...

So, the simple truth for you and me this Christmas: That baby transforms people when he is born in us!

I bring my offering yet again...and wonder and hope and smile.

DROWNING IN OUR PLEASURES?

So, I'm off to Colombia this week to once again have my eyes and ears tuned to things beyond my own parcel of real estate! Inevitably these trips to other places always remind me of a couple necessary truths...
1. God has people who belong to him and are doing incredible things for Jesus everywhere!
2. People with less than me often live more free and selfless than me.
3. I am part of a culture that is drowning in it's own over-abundant pleasures.
Copy and paste this for more on this topic...
http://christianity.ca/faith/faith-and-thought/2006/11.001.html
4. I love being part of what God's doing in the world - including the part he is doing in me!

Where are you being tuned? Where are you being rescued from drowning?

TRUTH BE TOLD

Let your "yes" be "yes" and your "no" be "no."

Those words of Jesus sound so simple, don't they? Of course I mean what I say and say what I mean - or do I? The discipline of truthfulness and truth-telling is very difficult in this age of spin.

It disturbs me how often I use my words to justify who I am, why I'm doing something or why I'm not doing something. It irks me that half-truths are easier to tell than full-truths. Many of us don't out-right lie, we just withhold or speak our minds behind the back of one who deserved the truth of our thoughts. Even husbands and wives can live in secret from one another - daring almost to live in hiding where they are to be most fully seen. To be a Christian is to know the truth that sets free and live the truth of that freedom.

How can we be the Church if we aren't full of truth? How can we be a body if the right hand deceives the left? It saddens me when distrust infects the body of Christ - when brothers and sisters reject the harmony created by our diversity for a hiddenness, a facade, a camoflouge, a less than truthful co-existence that not only denies the truth, but actually fears it. I think that is actually more to the point - we fear the truth because to speak truth is to come out of hiding and then we have to completely trust God to embrace us and we throw ourselves upon the grace of others with nowhere left to run. In living truthfully we are exposed bringing to life that nightmare of standing in your underwear before the gathered throng.

I pray for more truthfulness in me - more "yes" and "no" that comes from His Truth alive in me.

LOVING DIVERSITY

Recently I have had several conversations - face to face, phone to phone, or keyboard to keyboard - in which I heard the insecurity of very wonderful people. For some reason we seem very reluctant to share our views, thinking that in doing so we...
a) Will have nothing intelligent to offer, and we don't want to look stupid.
b) Will be rebuked for half-baked ideas, and we don't want to be put in our place.
c) Will be seen as the opposition, and we don't want to create conflict.

I want to emphasize how incredibly beautiful the diversity of the body of Christ is. Paul and Barnabas (Acts 15:36-41) worked through their differences, stood by their personal convictions and multiplied their effectiveness (perhaps this is a generous reading of the text, but I personally believe that they parted on good terms given later references to Barnabas by Paul in his letters).

People - we're all different! And this is a profoundly good thing! Unity is not found in uniformity, but in the diversity of God's gifts planted in a diversity of individuals who in their own unique way offer themselves in humble servie to one another and to their King.

We ought never be ashamed for speaking what we see or sense. Yes, we ought to remain teachable and willing to adjust our sails, but we need never feel like we're stepping on toes by "calling it as we see it" when we're willing to welcome the other's view as well. It is in this way that we begin to realize the presense of the Spirit who leads us into truth and a unity of heart and mind. It is in this way that we will rediscover the discipline of living in Christian community.

So, be you and let others be too - we may just become more whole in this beautiful dance of the redeemed.

ICING MY GOOSE EGG

How's your embrace of people? How's mine?

Our culture is ultra social and ultra lonely. This saddens me deeply and is causing me to ache for genuine community - for the Church to be about the embrace of people for Jesus' sake. I've got a long way to go.

Copy, paste and go here...

http://www.christianity.ca/church/outreach/2006/10.001.html

I FORGOT TO LAUGH

Laugh. I think I'm forgetting how.

Today my son ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. He's asked me this before, but this morning at the kitchen table it struck me in a new way that I am none of those things my child-heart was captured by. As I reflected on his question throughout the day I came to the conclusion that I have grown up to be a leader. I didn't choose this vocation, it chose me. And along with this vocation that chooses you can sinisterly arrive the laughter thief.

You see, as a leader, I think about people. I think about problems. I think about possibilities. I think about change. I think about the status quo and then think about how to remove the static. And, as a leader, the dilemma is that you don't just think about these things, you act on them. At least you better, because that's what people need and expect and at the same time what they don't want. A leader is there to take people, whom they deeply care about, through problems to possibilities. A leader is there to create a culture where a better life is shared. And, a leader is very often lonely on the journey to a promised land that can be only a speck on the horizon and as a result you can forget to laugh.

Why? Because you can't accept life as it is and life as you live it as the leader is still life as everyone else experiences it - with its pain, disappointments, frustrations, and of course joys. But, since you're not free to live solely in the now it can mean a heavy heart which does a laugh no good.

Laugh. I want this reborn in me again. Not at the expense of my vocation, but in order to make it alive. American artist Ralph Kozak beautifully captures what this can be like for one who bore more than I'll ever have to and has transformed more than I can every dream.

So it is possible. Lord, teach me your laugh.

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES?

In light of the evil that invaded an Amish school room in Pennsylvania what does it mean to love your enemies? How is it that we are to live as Jesus' apprentices when you just want to scream and dish out vengeance?

Without doubt we will soon here the Amish community in Lancaster County verbalize forgiveness and the media will marvel at the wonder of such grace, which of course is entirely "pie in the sky" for those of us in the real world. Which camp will you be in?

Justice in this tragedy will never truly be served. Not here. The killer is gone and his family remains to bear the shame. Children died, reminding us once again that something is terribly out of sorts in this world. Sin is. Evil cannot be glossed over. Hell sends postcards. How ought Christians respond? Will we respond as a desparate world expects or as they hunger and thirst for? Will we be windows to a world not made by hands?

If you love those who love you what reward will you get, even pagans and child-executioners do that. Love your enemies, bless those who curse you. These be hard words, but they point to a way of life that is not bound by evil and will shine like a lighthouse in a world of eye for eye.

TROUBLESHOOTING THE KINGDOM

What is the response of the Church to the myriad of obstacles that oppose the advance of the Kingdom of God in the world? Any disciple of Jesus is aware that we very often respond very poorly to this ever present challenge.

I see five different ways in which we tend to respond to obstacles...

1. Ignorance is bliss - in this case we don't think; don't pay attention to the cultural realities we live in, live in a nostalgic past, and are duped into believing that obstacles don't exist at all. We think this is a faithful position for we're clinging to that which was handed down to us, when in fact it is highly unrealistic, even insane, and not blissful at all, but the place where the blind lead the blind.

2. Retreat and run for cover - in this case we are clearly aware of the obstacles and respond by fearfully running for cover, barring the doors, and segregating ourselves from a corrupt culture in the name of preservation and holy living. Here we observe culture for the purpose of knowing what to abstain from in our spiritual bubbles. This may appear wise, even understandable, but it hides the light under a bushell and produces legalists of the first order.

3. Can't beat 'em, so join 'em - in this case we recognize that the current of culture is truly an obstacle and so we accomodate ourselves to the drift of the world around us. We believe this makes us relevent, when in fact it makes us unnecessary and leaves us without anything to say that prophetically challenges the culture we've swallowed hook, line, and sinker. We end up being irrelevent even to ourselves.

4. Can't join 'em, so beat 'em - in this case we are not living in ignroarce. We also see outright accomodation as an untenable position, but neither is retreat, and so we fully engage the obstacles by beating up those in the opposite camp. We become champions of the "us" versus "them" and become placard waving militants who are constantly berating rather than embracing. We see evil in everyone who doesn't see it our way. We end up incapable of love.

5. Troubleshoot - in this case we clearly recognize the cultural obstacles that stand in our way, but we creatively search for ways to join the debate, live the Christ-life, love our enemies, and advance the Kingdom by all means possible. We are not ignorant of reality, but neither are we naively swallowing every seductive sales pitch or so selling out to the culture that we present no discernably different voice. We look for ways in the power and wisdom of the Spirit to turn obstacles into opportunities that will bring all things under Christ. We have eyes for where God is at work; where he is present; where his Truth is, even if it is presently unseen.

So, how are you joining the advance of the Kingdom of God's light? How are you responding to the obstacles of these days in which you live?

LEADERS IN BALANCE

I've been reflecting lately on what it means to have balanced leadership in a local congregation.

First, what purpose do leadership gifts serve within the body of Christ? To answer that we need to turn to Ephesians 4 where we find that the gifts of apostle (course-charter and initiator of new Kingdom advances), prophet (those who remind us "thus saith the Lord"), evangelist (they gifted in moving the Church toward effectively sharing Christ), pastor (the nurturers), and teacher (they who awaken our understanding of God's word and make it applicable to daily living) are given to the Church in order to move the body toward maturity and unity. These leaders are called to equip the saints for ministry, not to do ministry for them. They are coaches and trainers, not the athlete before the spectator. Balanced leadership, then, would mean a body calling out people with these gifts and releasing them for their God-appointed purpose.

Second, most congregations hire, after the first or lead pastor, one or more pastors who are generally asked to oversee a specific task or demographic within the body (youth, children, worship, etc.). In essence we add supported staff as new programs are birthed or as problems arise that need fixing or as our volunteer pool runs dry. This is not balanced biblical leadership. Balanced leadership would actually mean having supported leaders that function as apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers for the equpping of the saints. So, rather than think of balance according to programming function, can we begin to think of balance in relation to these gifts? We may ask a pastor-gifted servant to oversee youth, but the purpose would be the nurturing and discipling of youth and the equipping of youth for that purpose, not to run a cool program to entertain. The focus here is on balanced equipping of the body to become an initiating, Truth speaking, Christ-sharing, care-giving, and Truth instructing people.

Third, in our own context at Zurich Mennonite I am wondering what this would look like? How do we begin to balance our leadership as above? I see myself as primarily a prophet-teacher and Associate Pastor Tim is an apostle-evangelist (to clarify here: I believe each leader is capable of all the gifts to degree, though one or two will be dominant and the primary place where that individual truly is a "gift" and feels alive - in this sense I would secondarily be an apostle while Tim would be a teacher [according to what I have observed]). So, it would appear we as a body are not as well equipped on the pastor-nurturer side of things and ought we consider what it might look like to call out supported leaders in this area to provide a little more balance? We have taken baby steps toward this by calling out a Leader of Pastoral Care on a volunteer basis for a mere five hours a week, but is this enough to provide true balance?

Balanced leadership fosters a healthy, maturing Church - that's God's plan. How do we move further in this direction?