It Takes A Church...

Liar, Liar, Pew's on Fire

I am off this weekend for a retreat with 50 Junior highers and leaders for our bi-annual Confirmation retreat.  This great group of young people are finishing up a ten week class preparing them to write a statement of faith and join our church as members.  This weekend, I will be hanging out with them with basically three messages: 1) We are all members of one another. 2)This is your church, too. 3) I am your pastor and not just your parents' pastor. 

One of joys of my church is how deeply connected our youth and young adults are with the rest of the congregation.  We are becoming a genuinely multi-generational church.  I also know that many, many churches in our culture today would do about anything to have either 50 kids even hanging around their church or anything near that amount of people joining their church at all.  I don't take lightly that we are in a wonderful season of blessing in our church and I feel the responsibility and joy of being a steward of that blessing very deeply. 

Further, the joy is all the more for me because this group of junior high students includes my son Brooks and his friends.   I have known some of these kids since they were in preschool and now I get to be with them as they prepare to join our church.  It is a real rite of passage moment for both the young people and their pastor (who is also a parent of one of the young people!)

I mention this for two reasons. 

1) To ask you to please pray for the weekend.  If the "children are our future" then I want them to become more deeply committed to Christ and the body of Christ for both their good and the good of the future of the church. 

2) I am profoundly aware that we must continue to make disciples and not just church members and attenders. It's not enough to get people to "show up and join up", we all must continue to "grow up". A recent article in Christianity Today magazine points to the amount of self-deception reported by Christians when asked a simple question like, "Did you yourself happen to go to church this past week."   According to the article, the Gallup people have been asking that question for decades and the answer is always the same: about 40% of Americans say that they have, in fact, been in church that past Sunday. But when that self-report study is matched up against church reports of attendance, the number of actual people in the pew is closer to 20%.  So, 1 out of every five people in the poll are lying about being in the pew.  Embarrassing really and sad, too. But what else do we make of that?

For me, this is a most interesting issue.  At exactly the time that many people are saying that church membership and attendance are increasingly irrelevant, there is still within our culture a great deal of internal pressure (the poll is anonymous) to be church goers.   Parents encourage their teenagers to join the church, teenagers at our church are encouraging their friends and we see our numbers swelling as a result.  People want to be in church, and think that things like worship and church membership really are important, even if they aren't living up to their own, even stated, intentions.

But, people like George Barna have rightly pointed out that the difference between good intentions and good discipleship is often quite large and made worse by our own tendency to think we are doing better than we are. 

So, while understanding and hopeful by even the desire that many people have to be a good church folk, I recognize that there is still much, much more to do with we want our church's on fire with genuine renewal.  Who knows? Maybe, this future generation are the "little children" who will lead us.

Resurrection and Heaven

Should have posted this last week as a follow up to my "K is for Kingdom Witness" post, but it also provides good "priming the pump" thinking about Easter, Resurrection and the Kingdom...

(T)he resurrection stories in the four Gospels aren't about going to heaven when you die. In fact, there is almost nothing about "going to heaven when you die" in the whole New Testament. Being "citizens of heaven" (Philippians 3.20) doesn't mean you're supposed to end up there. Many of the Philippians were Roman citizens, but Rome didn't want them back when they retired. Their job was to bring Roman culture to Philippi.
That's the point which all the Gospels actually make, in their own ways. Jesus is risen, therefore God's new world has begun. Jesus is risen, therefore Israel and the world have been redeemed. Jesus is risen, therefore his followers have a new job to do.
And what is that new job? To bring the life of heaven to birth in actual, physical, earthly reality…Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project, not to snatch people away from earth to heaven, but to colonize earth with the life of heaven...With Easter, God's new creation is launched upon a surprised world, pointing ahead to the renewal, the redemption, the rebirth of the entire creation.


NT Wright

K is for...

Back when Beth and I lived in Altadena, California, just down the street from us was a bakery called "Patticakes."  It was one of those amazing places where everything looks as good as it tastes and virtually every breakfast item included chocolate.  But make no mistake, nothing there was cheap.  Everything was delicious, beautiful and frightfully expensive.

I remember sitting there one morning eating a chocolate muffin and drinking a latte while a young couple came into to get a quote for a wedding cake.  The owner pulled out a book that featured articles from Bon Appetit praising her wedding cakes, showed them spectacular professional photographs of cakes she had made in the past, and then finally the price sheet. 

I watched this all and smiled.  The bride was looking at the groom pleadingly.  Her face saying, “Honey, wouldn’t this be beautiful?  This is exactly the kind of wedding cake I have always wanted.”  He looked like he was choking.  Being a guy, I know what he was thinking as he looked at that price sheet, “A cake?  How about a killer big screen TV?  It’s about the same amount of money.”  But he was a smart boy; he kept his mouth shut, even as he tried to calculate how many months salary would be gobbled down by people in less than 15 minutes. 

And right at the very moment when the unspoken tension was the highest, the bakery owner appeared with a tray of assorted pieces of wedding cake that they could sample. 

Two bites later, eyes rolled back in his head in chocolate induced ecstasy, the cheapskate groom was ordering this cake for everyone he had ever met. 

You see the difference was in the tasting.  Once we taste what we really want, the cost is not the issue.  Once we learn that we don’t have to settle for the life given to us by thieves and bandits who only want to sell something to us, use us, manipulate us, market to us, or make us live out their vision of life, we are able to really listen to the one who offers us entryway to the life we really want. 

For the life that God intended us to have.  For the life we were made to have.  For the life that Jesus came to bring us, and died to secure for us.  For the life of security, freedom, and well-being.  For the life that is both eternal and abundant. 

My friends, church is for getting a foretaste of the kingdom.  It is community that whets our appetite for new creation.  It is where we get a small sliver of the wedding cake of the feast of the lamb that will be for all of us who enter eternal life through him.  And the communion of the church is the taste that should linger on our lips as we live for Christ each day.

For the last of my alphabetical list of qualities that make a church a church I want to skip to the letter K and the most nebulous, perhaps the most important and at the same time, most humbling characteristic:  K is for Kingdom Witness.

In the Presbyterian Church Book of Order, we affirm that the church is “the provisional demonstration of God’s new humanity.” In other words, the church is to be the gathering that is a foretaste of what God intends for all the world. 

For the church to be the true church it must faithfully point beyond itself in both its faithfulness and its weakness. it must be a true "foretaste" of the reign and rule of God and at the same time acknowledge that the wedding has not come.

Just like Jesus himself both proclaimed that the Kingdom of heaven had come near with his appearance, each church proclaims by its life together that a new day has dawned and the new creation is upon us.  But, in the same way, that Jesus work is both “accomplished” but not consummated until his triumphal return, the church is the unconsummated and incomplete foretaste of the reign of God to come.  Each specific church and the one universal Church exists to witness to the “now, but not yet” reality of the Kingdom of heaven that has been inaugurated in Jesus Christ but will not be consummated until Christ’s return.  The church is the taste of the wedding cake from the eternal feast. 

It is the “now but not yet” quality to the life of the church that reminds us that the church is both intended to be something more than just an ordinary human gathering, but will never rise above the frail humanity that requires saving in the first place.  It is not a gathering of all the “most committed” or “most like me” or “most helpful to my Christian walk” people.  It is wheat and weeds growing in one field but still revealing the abundant feast of the bread of life that will come from it. 

The church that is the true church knows that it is an incomplete church.  It is a witness to a reality that is not yet fulfilled.  It points beyond itself to the reign and rule of God.  In the new creation, we won’t need churches because all of creation will be church. But a true church knows that its job is to give a taste that will make all of creation hunger for the feast and settle for nothing less.

E is for…

Jumping back into my lengthy response to George Barna’s Revolution and lengthy list of qualities that “makes a church a church,” I’ll recap:

So far, I have listed the following characteristics:

• Apostolic Authority
• Biblical (“Berean”) Faithfulness
• Covenantal Relationships
• Discipline

Today and tomorrow the last two and then a finale to FINALLY put this series to rest.

Today: E is for Elimination of Social Boundaries

Yesterday I spent an hour with an 87-year-old man who told me stories while dabbing his eyes.  We laughed a bit, he’d cry some more and I’d get choked up and then laugh a bit more.  The hour flew by.  For him, 1940 was ten minutes ago.  The memories were thick as he told me about the 16-year-old hometown girl that he looked at a little differently when he came home from college.  He smiled sheepishly as he described their sneaking off to get married on a whim as soon as she was eighteen.  About how he was too afraid to tell her father what they’d done and how he spent his wedding night alone after he took her home.  He showed me the picture that he carried in his wallet, a sepia-toned beauty.  And with a catch in his voice he said, “That’s the way she looked when I met her and she looked exactly the same the day I buried her.”  They were married 64 years.

Somebody once said that the church is the only place on earth where time and space intersect.  With one glance, if we look closely enough, we will see multiple generations all in one place.  If the church is particularly exceptional, we’ll see various races and backgrounds.  The stories are thick indeed.  Where else in our world does a forty-something young family man who comes from a broken home get to spend time with a friend who stayed married to the same woman for six and a half decades? 

In an article for New Yorker Magazine, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink! and The Tipping Point, writes an appreciative article about Saddleback Church and the power of it’s small group model.  He cites sociologists, philosophers and The Purpose Driven Life”  who make the same claim:  The small group IS the church. 

Now as a pastor who believes that small groups are so important that we are in the middle of trying to hire a pastor who will do little else besides usher guests to our church through a new member class and into a small group, I believe that the power of small groups is unmistakable.  Especially in a place like Orange County ,California, which Robert Putnam (author of Bowling Alone) calls “a desert in social capital terms, (“The rate of mobility is really high.  It has long and anonymous commutes.  It’s a very friendless place…”) the need to connect with people who share friendship and interests and will encourage us to faithfulness in our Christian life is essential.

But that still doesn’t make the small group the church. 

Because my small group would never include my an 87 year old man who has been married 64 years.  It also would likely not include a single mom, Hispanic day laborer, an ipod-wearing, text-messaging teenager or the empty nester whose grown kids have moved back home.  The truth is that my small group also doesn’t include the man who thinks that my sermons are too impractical, the woman who doesn’t think that I care enough about missionaries, the man who thinks that I have too little courage and too much concern for being liked, or a host of others who are not part of my little circle of connection and accountability but are really, really important to my life because they are part of my church.

My church, if it is truly a church, must always be bigger than me and those like me.  The church is the committed gathering of those who are made up of every tribe and nation (Rev. 5), who are neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free (Galatians 3), who are not joined together simply because of proximity or social status or even such good and necessary things like friendship (virtually every first century ecclesia was that!), but who are joined together because of Christ across social boundaries.

The church to be the true church is to be a glimpse of what heaven will be like in all the diversity evident in creation and all the fulfillment of the new creation.  This characteristic is not only a qualifier for my small group, but a challenge for my church.  For the church to be the church, no matter how small it is, it must be getting broader. 

P.S. My criticisms of the tendency to claim too much for small groups notwithstanding, the Gladwell article is a really helpful resource for anyone who wants to a) better understand the phenomena that is Saddleback Church and b) wants evidence for the impact that an effective small group ministry can have within a church.  I highly recommend it.

Birthday Blog Break... but I'm baaack

I didn't blog at all last week. I was in more of an "experiencing" mood than "reflecting" one.

Partly, because last Wednesday I turned 42.  I am now very much middle aged.  I can't help but feel like I hit the "turnaround" on a marathon out and back and am heading for home.  The truth is that I love life, especially my life, and that I would be very happy with the thought of living to 142.  It's not that I fear death, indeed, I see death as the nap that readies us for the new life that will never end (Rev. 21).  But I just don't want to miss out on anything.

On Wednesday I taught my Bible study and then a great group of folks sang to me. Friends and family sent cards, calls and emails.  For gifts, I got more running and riding gear than I need, but they'll come in handy next Saturday when my friend Charlie and I "race"  (and I use that term VERY metaphorically) at the Ford California 70.3 Ironman.

At church we we have been finishing up our Y-Malawi child sponsorship drive with World Vision.  We only have a handful left of the 365 children we set out to sponsor.  Some folks from the church are taking meals to a Marine wife who just gave birth to a baby while her husband is in the field.  Another Marine friend, Jon Moran and his wife Sheryl are blogging about the challenges of when a spouse is deployed into the war zone.  (Jon's blog: http://jarhedjon.blogspot.com and Sheryl's blog, too http://www.2006marinewife.blogspot.com )

We are in the middle of a wonderful season of seeking to deepening our faith and share our faith by using Q.1 of the Heidelberg Catechism.  At the 11 AM service, our sweet children's choir led the opening worship set and I ended the service with one of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis. "Aim for heaven and get earth thrown in, aim for earth and get neither." 

Last night Beth, and the kids and I took off after church to go to Disneyland for an "end of the birthday week" celebration just to ride four rollercoasters, eat dinner at a good restaraunt and see fireworks.  We kept them out irresponsibly late for a school night.  But my face still hurts from smiling. 

So, now back to blogging about "Christian Community, the mission of Christ and the life God intended for all of us."  If nothing else, my birthday week reminded me, that in order to write well, I have to stop writing long enough to live well.   

Our Only Comfort

Through Lent, I will be posting portions of The Heidelberg Catechism (as well as finishing up my series on Revolution or Retreat and the marks of the true church). This first Sunday of Lent, we begin with the first two questions of The Catechism. 

Q. 1. What is your only comfort, in life and in death?
A. That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Q. 2. How many things must you know that you may live and die in the blessedness of this comfort?
A. Three.  First, the greatness of my sin and wretchedness.  Second, how I am freed from all my sins and their wretched consequences.  Third, what gratitude I owe to God for such redemption.

For more information on the history and background of this Catechism (or “Confession of Faith”) see http://www.reformed.org/documents/heidelberg_intro.html

The Sunday messages on The Heidelberg Catechism Questions 1, 2 will be available Sunday afternoons until Easter here.

Dirty Foreheads, Right Minds

I am re-posting the entry for Ash Wednesday last year today and will be continuing the current series on Revolution or Retreat with the next post. Starting tomorrow, I will also be adding some daily posts from the Heidelberg Catechism to focus our thoughts and deepen the anchors of the Christian faith that we hold dear.

Today, we begin Lent.  May this season of spiritual reflection and learning be used by the Spirit to so work within the Church that it may be said that in each gathering, big or small, high church or low, that the prayer of Jesus was being fulfilled: "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

With these words, a small bit of ash is rubbed in the sign of the cross on the forehead of each person.  A mark of humility, a sign of mortality, an acknowledgement of repentance. 

While for many protestants the idea of imposing ashes or even attending an “Ash Wednesday” service is too, well, Catholic, for them, the truth is that what we acknowledge on this first day of Lent is nothing more or nothing less than being human. 

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, a forty day period of “fasting” and spiritual attention that is intended to commemorate Jesus’ own forty day wilderness period of preparation at the beginning of his earthly ministry.  During Lent, Christians prepare for the sublime feast of Easter by spending a protracted time in the fast of Lent. 

At San Clemente Presbyterian Church, we will begin Lent with a dinner together in our fellowship hall.  Then after dinner, an Ash Wednesday Service where two invitations will occur: 1) Everyone, young and old, whatever age and stage of life will be invited to come and receive the imposition of ashes, and 2) Every Christian, young and old, whatever age and stage of life, will be invited to come forth a second time and receive the Lord’s Supper. 

By coupling these two moments—one a tradition, the other a sacrament—we wish to convey a clear message: the starting point for all spiritual progress, all spiritual attention, all spiritual discipline, is in the acknowledgement of our own genuine humanity and receiving God’s generous mercy.  Like two blades of a pair of scissors both are needed: humility and grace, the truth of our mortality and the gift of eternal life, remembering that our bodies were fashioned of the dust and that the God of the universe took on the same creaturely form in order to bring us to life eternal.  And in receiving both the ash and the sacraments, we complete our first act of repentance. 

The focus of Ash Wednesday and Lent is repentance.  Again, many of us are confused about repentance.  Some of us think of it as “penance,” that is, atoning for our sins with acts of contrition.  But that is not repentance.  We can’t atone for what we have done and need not try.  Jesus’ work on the cross is our atonement.  Some of us think of repentance as sorrow and shame for what we have done, but that is also inaccurate.  Indeed, as I will explain in another post, the bible has a different Greek word for sorrow. 

Repentance is literally to “change your mind.”  In the famous words of Dallas Willard, “To reconsider your strategy for living based on the news of God’s Kingdom that is available in Jesus.” And that is what Lent is for, to reconsider your strategy for living.  To begin a new process of deep consideration and reflection about your life.  To reconsider what it means to follow Jesus, to plumb the mystery of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  To reconsider what your strategy for living should be, based on this good news.

And it all begins with this:  Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  You are not an angel.  You are not a mere soul or disembodied spirit. You are human, you are mortal, you are deeply dependent on the God who formed your body from the humus of the earth and breathed life into you with his kiss.  God has come to you, in Jesus, O Creature, and called you to have life eternal with him.  And so, with ash on our foreheads and the taste of bread and grape on our tongues, we begin a holy lent.