the measure of success…

W. David Phillips of “backyardmissionary.com” had an interesting post where, as a church planter, he talked about “re-imagining success”.

He said, “At my last doctoral class with Len Sweet last week, he posed a question to us that went something like this: Provide for me the metaphors that will describe how we measure success in the church in the future. We are prone to measure success by how many and how much. And we determine who is a great leader by how many and how much.

So today, I want to share with you some of the metaphors we listed (and some I came up with afterwards), of things we can count as a measure of success. But I need to issue a warning. You will have to think about these and you may push back unless you realize the metaphor. So don’t react…Ponder…

He then listed 19 things that might mean that you were making a real difference in your community:

1. The number of cigarette butts in the church parking lot.
2. The number of adoptions people in the church have made from local foster care.
3. The number of pictures on the church wall of unwed mothers holding their newborn babies in their arms for the first time.
4. The number of classes for special needs children and adults
5. The number of former convicted felons serving in the church
6. The number of phone calls from community leaders asking the church’s advice
7. The number of meetings that take place somewhere besides the church building
8. The number of organizations using the church building
9. The number of days the pastor doesn’t spend time in the church office but in the community
10. The number of emergency finance meetings that take place to reroute money to community ministry
11. The amount of dollars saved by the local schools because the church has painted the walls
12. The number of people serving in the community during the church’s normal worship hours
13. The number of non-religious-school professors worshiping with you
14. The number of people wearing good, free clothes that used to belong to members of the church
15. The number of times the church band has played family-friendly music in the local coffee shop
16. The number of people who have gotten better because of free health clinic you operate
17. The number of people in new jobs thanks to the free job training center you opened
18. The number of micro-loans given by members in your church
19. The number of churches your church planted in a 10 mile radius of your own church

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When you read a list like this what touches your heart, your imagination?  What others might you add?

Becoming the Authentic Church

In a little booklet called “Becoming the Authentic Church” from Church of the Savior in Washington, D. C., Pastor Gordon Cosby and Kayla McClung make this statement: “…How to become so much like Jesus that our very way of life comforts the world’s brokenhearted and confronts the world’s broken systems… is a key question for all who seek authentic, faithful belonging.”

“Some of us have loved the church for as long as we can remember. We have given ourselves fairly faithfully to seeking the risen Christ in community, and we see things that are right and good about this universal body of believers. And yet, at the same time, we are aware of a growing inner dis-ease and discontent among many at what the church has not become. We find that we are not alone in feeling a deep and unequivocal caring for the church. . . and yet longing for something more.

We see the realities of our world and recognize that the church has not become a strong and mighty witness for scores of displaced refugees and starving, ill, ignored, assaulted masses. We are not calling the nations to bow before God in recognition of systemic oppression of the poor. We are not demanding that practices of reconciliation and justice be at the heart of national global policies, nor even at the heart of our own schools, work places and neighborhoods. We are not lending our corporate voice to the voiceless and our power to the powerless. In short, we are not filled with the fire and passion of Jesus Christ. We have not let our life together be poured out as a sacrificial gift of love, taking on Jesus’ nature and proclaiming with him and the prophet Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

They go on to propose that there are six hallmarks of the authentic church:

1.         The authentic church is an outward expression of God, who is love. In love and through love, the new community is created. God, who is by nature unlimited love, draws us to let our partial, limited love unfold in depth until we reach our full capacity for giving ourselves to God and to the totality of everything and everyone that God has created. In our present wounded, damaged, distorted condition, it is difficult to imagine what his sort of beloved community might look like or how we even would begin to commit ourselves to it, but we open ourselves to the impossible, trusting the Source of love to show us the way.

2.            The authentic church follows the authentic Jesus. Most churches claim to follow Jesus, but not all are following the authentic Jesus. Too often we fashion Jesus in our own image and then wonder why there is no radical world change. The authentic Jesus is not in pursuit of privilege and power and prestige, but makes his home among the lowly. The authentic Jesus does not condone violence but is the embodiment of love, embracing all people equally with mercy and the hope of transformation. The authentic Jesus confronts cultural addictions and the systems that create and sustain them. The authentic Jesus says no to the world’s power and yes to God’s power. There is only one real Jesus into whose being we hope to abandon ourselves, dying to our false illusions and letting our true selves be resurrected in him, who is the world’s hope. Together we seek to discover and live his nonviolent, healing nature.

3.            The authentic church is a place of extreme diversity. The world has been damaged severely by the lie that we are meant to be separate from each other, that we are not bound together eternally as the children of one God. The authentic church will be a diverse body, interconnected and interdependent…

If we think Jesus excludes anyone, we haven’t yet gone deep enough in discovering who Jesus is.

4.            The authentic church is serious about the work of reconciliation. We are the recipients of God’s atonement through Christ’s life, death and resurrection, but how can we claim to have atonement – literally at-one-ment – with God if we are not reconciled to the diverse family of God? The authentic church will create structures for the practice of reconciliation among those who often remain at a distance from each other. We will seek to know and be known by people whom society might call our ‘opposites,’ in order to overcome the barriers that we have been led to believe were inevitable. As we learn to trust each other, we will stop living in isolation and fear and will experience true communion.

5.            The authentic church shares its life with others outside its circle. We cannot keep what we are unwilling or unable to give away. This is more than telling others what or how to believe, and more than giving persons who have been oppressed the tools they need to make it in the world, hoping they sense that they are cared for. Living a life together in Christ means becoming the fullness of love, which simply cannot keep from sharing itself with others, and especially any who are excluded. The authentic church will gravitate naturally toward the weakest members of society. In our sharing of mutual weakness, we will find ourselves deeply at home with each other.

6.            The authentic church seeks justice. The church often has been too cautious about it’s calling to justice, especially justice for those who have been excluded from places of privilege. We have forfeited our God-given responsibility to act on behalf of the poor. Through the power of nonviolent love, the authentic church will bring pressure to bear on the systems of our world that are unjust. We will challenge those in political power to act on behalf of the powerless, empowering and lifting up the voices of those who otherwise have no voice. The authentic church will join with others who are working for systemic change, ready to take the risks of love, even risking persecution for the sake of justice.

One final quote from a chapter on “Corporate Practices of Worship”: We hope to discover fresh corporate practices that will draw us deeper into communion with God and each other and will aid our primary intention of loving each other toward wholeness, so as to be reconciled and freed to serve.

the funeral thing…

Funerals? Are you kidding me? You’re going to talk about funerals? Isn’t that just a little morbid and depressing??? Well, it’s not really about funerals, per se… it’s just about an idea I had while I was at my last funeral. To tell you the truth, this is about the music of your life… Whenever I officiate at a funeral, one of the questions that gets asked in the planning is: What music is going to be sung or played during the ceremony? The idea is that music is often a “touchstone” to help us remember precious places in the deceased’s life – the reminder of a song that they had loved… an artist they enjoyed… the song played for the first dance at their wedding… the one they had always thought of as “our song”… or music which expressed the philosophy they had lived by or captured the essence of their life. Often, for those who were raised in a tradition of faith, the hymns of the church gather up in themselves decades of memories, and singing them at the funeral is a tender reminder of a life lived in the comfort, encouragement and power of those words. As I was driving home from the last funeral I led, I began to wonder to myself, “What music would I want played at my funeral?” It was an interesting thought that took me down a lot of roads of reminiscence. What would express who I was, what my life meant, what I stood for, what I lived for? I suppose, all things being equal, that question will get answered one day. I really hope someone suggests, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and “Amazing Grace.” And, I hope they have a great band there, and they sing and dance to stuff like “Fields of Grace” and “I Can Only Imagine.” And then, when the celebration is over, and everyone’s eating potato salad at the party afterward and talking about the day, I hope someone pipes up and says, “Hey, wasn’t the music great?” And in that moment, what I really hope is that, what they’re actually talking, about is my life!

the “new community” of Christ…

In his book “Life Together” Dietrich Bonhoeffer develops this amazing thought -

“Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.

By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream…Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”

How challenging is it to imagine that one of the most “graceful” things that God can do for you is to assist you in becoming “overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves”?  Are you kidding me?  I don’t know what your experience has been, but speaking for myself, I don’t want to be disillusioned with others – I want them to be generally sane and have an acceptable level of moral, mental and spiritual health (so their not TOO difficult to deal with)… and I SURE don’t want people disillusioned with me!

The truth for most of us is that we don’t want other people’s illusions about us destroyed, because it’s what we present to them as our badge of acceptability. The thought that people might finally and definitively see that “the Emperor has no clothes” other than the free gift of acceptance by God because of what Christ accomplished at the cross is a very frightening concept- but it’s in that place that true love finally has soil to grow in.

Overwhelmingly, whenever I’ve heard people complain that “the church is full of hypocrites”, the charge had very little to do with sexual morality or accomplished purity – it had to to with the disconnect between the way we talk about love and the way that we put it into action.

Love is generally a wonderful piece of theology when we are philosophizing; something that stretches us (while at the same time making us feel pretty good about ourselves) when we extend it to someone whose brokenness didn’t affect us directly; but often in short supply when the pain of the disillusionment is close to home.

But, in order to find God’s grace at the point of my biggest failure I need to experience that grace in community . In order to heal well, I need the people that I’ve hurt, and they “need” me…

I walked into a bookstore one day and as I was browsing over the titles my eyes fell on Ruth Graham Bell’s latest book – “In Every Pew Sits A Broken Heart”. I stood there, unable to move as I was overwhelmed by those words, tears sliding silently down my face. I’ve been around long enough to know that that is the absolute, undeniable truth. And I’ve been around long enough that I know how hard it is for us to honor that as one of the “wonderful” parts of our community.

I wonder what the average person would think about church if they knew it was a place where, when you were at your lowest ebb, and you had done everything inappropriate there was to do, people there would be honest with you and hold you accountable for your actions, but they would never get off your bandwagon, and they would never stop encouraging you and loving you in practical ways?

Wow…

Tolle’s “A New Earth” Book Review

Greg Boyd, who is Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills church, has an insightful and thorough review of Eckhart Tolle’s new book, “A New Earth”.  Over two million people have signed up for a 10 week, on-line course hosted by Tolle and fronted by Oprah to discuss the concepts found in this book, so it’s pretty important to have an informed opinion in respect to it.

You can find the post here

Remembering your future…

16 times in the book of Deuteronomy the word “remember” is used. Remember, remember, remember, remember…

I think the reason it’s important to remember is because it sets the expectations of our hearts in respect to any challenge that we face. And, although I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, the only time we’ll stop facing challenges is when we’re dead!

So, here’s a question – what do you need to “remember”? Is there something that you need to remember about your potential, your purpose, the passions that God has put in your heart… your family, your marriage, your business?

Why not just sit back, close your eyes, and take a few moments to “remember” your future!

Expect A Miracle!

OK, so.. I’m driving to work yesterday morning and all of a sudden I see this sign.  Now, usually, this signboard is advertising real estate for sale, but today it’s different.  And it strikes me totally different. So I pull over and take a picture of it with my phone.

What an awesome message – Expect a Miracle… and not just any day, but TODAY!

It got me thinking (actually, probably closer to obsessing!) about expectations and how they work to prepare your heart and mind and body.

What if we lived every day with an expectation of miracles?

When I was a kid the Oral Roberts Singers would start his TV program with perhaps the cheesiest song on the planet – “Expect a miracle when you pray. Expect a miracle every day.  If you expect it God will find a way to perform a miracle for you each day!”

I’m not sure that I need a miracle every day… and I’m positive that my expectations doesn’t obligate God to perform… but there is something that happens in me – even at a cellular level – when I expect that my life will be marked by blessing, marked by the work of God on my behalf (Rom. 8:35 – 39) and marked by miracles.

That doesn’t mean that every day will be perfect – but no matter how challenging the circumstances, or how daunting the day, expecting a miracle changes everything!

One Prayer

I came across a very cool idea today – it’s called “One Prayer”.  Basically the gist of it is that churches are supposed to try to answer this question for themselves: “What would you pray if God would answer One Prayer for the Church at large?“, and then they preach one local, live message on that, and access 3 other church leaders preaching it by video. (You can check it out at http://www.oneprayer.com/)

It’s interesting to me on a couple of levels:  First, I’m very interested in what people would ask for if they could only ask God for one thing. (Kind of like only getting one wish from the genie you discovered on your beach walk this morning…)

Secondly, it’s very cool to think that there could be an international, intentional “seeding” of heart, desire and direction among a network of churches – because you can literally choose from hundreds of videos of different communicators (from world famous to start up house churches).  It’s a little like what we’re trying to do around the “watercooler” on Watercooler Wednesday – just taken to the Sunday morning pulpit!

So… now I have to answer the question for myself – If I could only ask God one thing, what would it be.  For me, my heart would cry out, “Authenticity”.  “Whatever you do with the Church, Father, make us real… make us authentic”.

How about you?  What would you pray for?

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Today’s post is part of the ongoing “Watercooler Wednesday” conversation over at Randy Elrods blog. Please feel free to jump in!

Ken Lee

You’ve probably heard by now of the Bulgarian Idol contestant who decided to sing a cover of the Mariah Carey song “Ken Lee”. If you’re scratching your head saying, “What?”, you’re not alone; the judges were like, “Don’t you mean “Without You”?

Besides being SUPREMELY funny (and that alone is worth the price of admission… my wife and I laughed for days after we watched the video) it brought up some interesting thoughts for me about communication.

She thought she heard the hook line of the chorus as, “Ken Lee – talibu dibu douchoo”, and, with all the gusto and bravado that she could muster, she sang away. When asked what language she was singing in, she confidently said, “English” (which made the whole thing even funnier).

It got me thinking about being a creative person, and whether I’m always communicating what I think I’m communicating, or whether there are times that I end up speaking a “language” that people can’t understand – just because she was courageous enough to sing it didn’t affect the fact that it was garbled mumbo jumbo!

Then, as someone committed to communicating spiritual truth in non-spiritual environments or to people who would consider themselves non-spiritual, it really caused me to consider the difference between what I think I’m saying and what people are hearing…

If you haven’t seen the video, here it is. It is, without a doubt, talibu dibu douchoo, Baby!!!

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Top 10 Tips for Living

One of our local rags had an article by Dan Millman, author of the book “Body Mind Mastery”. I have to admit that I’ve never heard of Mr. Millman, or his books, but the article included his “Top Ten Tips for Living”, and those caught my attention. I’ve re-read them and thought about them a lot over the last week. I thought I’d post them as part of “Watercooler Wednesday” because they’re a good self-assessment tool for us “creative types”. I think I’m going to print them out and post them on my office wall – I’m interested in seeing what wisdom my heart can “mine” from them.

1 – Things do not always go according to plan; so expect nothing, but be prepared for anything

2 – We can control our efforts, not the outcomes.

3 – By making the effort, we increase the odds of achieving our outcomes (We make zero per cent of the shots we don’t take.)

4 – Despite what we feel or think, our lives will be shaped largely by what we do. Thoughts and intentions provide a map, but only our actions move us towards our goal.

5 – Show up – getting started is halfway there.

6 – Pay attention – notice your mistakes and learn from them.

7 – Live your truth – become the director of the movie of your life.

8 – Trust the process – faith is the courage to live as if all that happens is for our highest good and learning.

9 – Do your best – don’t go for “wining” or “success”. Just aim for excellence.

10 – Dont be attached to outcomes. We control effort, not outcomes.

I’m interested in which ones catch your attention, and why. I was especially drawn to #4, because I’ve found over the years that while I have lots of creative thought, and lots of creative “insight”, it really isn’t what I feel or think that is the key factor… it’s what I do with what I think and feel that translates that creativity into any thing of value.

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Today’s post is part of the ongoing “Watercooler Wednesday” conversation over at Randy Elrods blog. Please feel free to jump in!