Ed Stetzer is a guy I’ve read a lot lately and he hits on a point that I think is very important.  In this interview he challenges the church not to develop an “or” type of attitude that says we can be about evangelism OR social justice OR church plant, but not all three.  Rather, we should be looking to ways to see people transformed, churches planted and social justice take place as part of the Mission of God, but not one or the other.  Ultimately, as he points out, these things are cyclical.  As we engage a lost world by living and working to heal the mess in the world and we are faithful we will have opportunities to evangelize, evangelism is the first step in discipleship, which allows us to plant churches, which calls us to work with those planted churches to pursue change at the deepest levels in our community.  This means confronting sin and addictions in our community in whatever form they take where we are, helping the poor, the disadvantaged and the abused, being faithful to proclaim the Gospel as God provides opportunity (which He will do), and seeing churches planted and men raised up to lead them.  The trick is that there is not necessarily an order to these things.  If however, we do not see ALL these things taking place we should probably be re-evaluating where we are in terms of the health of our local body.  We cannot do one of these things first or to the exclusion of the others.  Rather, we need to seek Spirit-directed opportunities to pursue them all, as a body of believers.

That’s a long paragraph.  Hope that musing makes sense.

In Christ,

Mark

The book’s title comes from the results of the survey and causes Kinnaman to conclude that the attitude of Christians towards non-Christians has largely been rather un-Christ like.  I hope that sentence makes sense.

Ultimately,  I think the thing I’ve walked with from what I’ve read so far is this.  As Christians, relevance into our world ultimately  means honesty.  We cannot and should not change our message.  We are all sinners, Jesus came to die and rise again, He redeemed us from our sin, and we need to live out this Gospel and the Good News of Jesus’ Kingdom to the world around us.  That’s our message.  It’s not open for negotiation.  I think however that so many times we at Christians pass ourselves off as perfect because its the “church” thing to do.

Let me illustrate from the book.  By far the most difficult issue that non-Christians have with Christians is how we handle homosexuality.  Most people in my age bracket and younger have been exposed to homosexuality in a very different manner than how previous generations were exposed to this behavior.  We are right when we call homosexuality sin.  We are wrong when that’s all we talk about and do not deal with other kinds of sexual sin in our midst.  I was blessed growing up in that I had parents who taught me well in this area.  The VAST majority of people I know have had little to no instruction in what it means to have a Biblical view of sex and sexuality.  We cannot comment to the world on homosexuality when we have not clearly formed and lived out a Biblical view of sexuality.  That does not mean just saying “don’t have sex before you are married”.  That includes thought life, addressing pornography, marital union, the reasons for marriage, premarital sex, repentance of sexual sin, accountability and a host of other things that the church at large tends to ignore.

What the world needs to see is a church repentant and humble, not our “God hates fags” signs.  What the world needs to see are Christians repentant and humble, not our addressing one area of sexual sign and not really addressing another.

All in all, I find UnChristian a pretty good read.  I think Kinnaman plays a little politics with his solutions in most chapters and rarely gets blunt, but that’s okay.  He’s a researcher and one could argue that drawing some of the conclusions falls beyond his purvue.  It is certainly helpful to think of how we need to address the world around us and to know that the issues are.  Mostly I think UnChristian shows us how we’ve failed as Christians to address our world and that is always a helpful thing to learn.

In Christ,

Mark

An excerpt from the chorus has me thinking today:

“Just to know that you are near is enough”…

We’ve had a challenging year emotionally.  one of the things I’ve had to ask myself is if being close to God is really enough for me.  It’s not that He’s not sufficient, it’s more a question of whether I’m willing to let Him be sufficient.  Am I willing to know that God at work is enough, even if I want to see the outcome yesterday.

Hope is something that is worth waiting for.  In the midst of hoping for an outcome, God being near is more than enough.

In Christ,

Mark

He recently posted this.  I think he hit the nail on the head.

http://www.jdgreear.com/

2.  Praying.  A lot.  This is what can happen when you have a 50 minute one way commute.

3.  Listening to the Robbie Seay Band.  Song of Hope has been very encouraging.

4.  Reading.  A lot.  I’ll probably start posting some book reviews.  I started reading in preparation for church planting assessment in March.

5.  Not posting here.  Yeah.  I’ll try to remedy that slowly, thought not as slowly as since the last post.

I’ve got a huge reading list and a lot of interesting things to think through.

In Christ,

Mark

I watched this video several times to remind myself of how things work.

http://www.broadcaster.com/video/player.php?clip=546
Mark

Can’t resist throwing this out for people to note…

Mark

I have the opportunity to teach for three straight weeks, with one down and two to go.  I miss this greatly.  It’s one of the things I’m wired to do in life and not having the opportunity to do so is rough at times.  This has made me think on how God has gifted me as a person, how that can change depending on what God has a person doing at the time and so forth.

I’m going to try in the next day or so to toss up here what I’m teaching on, I rather enjoyed getting ready for it and it’s been a fairly fun topic to think through.

Jesus As King….

In Christ,

Mark

I had an epiphany tonight.  These are rare and definitely need to be blogged about.  Some might say, why not wait until things are clear in your head.  If I did that with this I’d lose it, and I really really need to be told if this is crazy or not.  I don’t think it is, but in my present mental state I can’t be sure.

I need to start with a story.  This is a personal story, and one that is somewhat uncomfortable for me to tell.  This last year has been incredibly diffucult for Jen and I.  Little has gone right outside our home.  We’ve kind of called this the perfect storm.  In July 07 our renters in our duplex stopped paying rent for three months.  This meant to keep paying the payment we had to drain our meager savings.  Washington state is way to renter friendly.  Eviction is a painful and time-consuming process for a landlord.  Due to this, we kept negotiating with the renters, trying to allow them the time and means to catch up.  They made no effort to truly do so.  We got partial rental payments in October, the same month I resigned from the church.  This meant my income went down and was going to go away entirely by the end of 07.  We had little choice but to assume some debt in order to get the duplex to the point it was rentable again.  We went from debt-free except for our house, our duplex and our flip that we did with some friends that we’d been unable to sell to debt that now stands at a rather difficult number to comprehend.  While we had little choice about assuming that debt, ultimately the groundwork was laid for that debt coming to be, both in the duplex, the church and life in general because of a character flaw I’ve recently discovered in myself.

I believe people.

Some of you just started scratching your heads.  Believe me when I tell you this is a character flaw.  It is also a theological flaw.  You see, people are sinners.  We are all jacked up by nature.  What people say and what people do are all to often two different things.

You might respond with, for I did in my own head as this has come clear to me over the last couple of weeks, “but most people are honest and try to do what they say they will do”.  Life doesn’t really show that to be true.  In fact, life and Scripture show us that all have sinned.  We are all jacked up.

My own failing came in the fact that when people SAID one thing but DID another, I believed what they said instead of what they did.  I find myself doing this in all my affairs and its troubling.

I work currently in a sales position.  I am paid commission.  There is something of a stigma to commission sales.  There does not have to be, and accordingly I try very hard to be honest in what I say and do.  It’s safe to say though that most people start with the assumption that a commission salesman that they encounter is dishonest.  One of the things I have had to come to grips with is that people lie to me every day.  Almost all of my customers lie to me, even most of my co-workers lie to me.  This is a very painful thing to realize.

The thing is, my realization did not stop there.  I have been letting people lie to me my whole life, and I knew it, and I didn’t change accordingly.  I did not call bluffs, untruths and half-truths in the people around me the way I should have.  I have the ability to see that words and actions have not always matched, most of us do, and yet I have done little with it.

If Central Valley was really concerned with being a church concerned about the mission of God then they would have acted like it.  The changes that I challenged them with, that I truly feel were what God wanted for them, were changes that could have and should have been instantaneous with the realization that God was not being honored in what was taking place there.

If my renters were really concerned about honoring their leases, they would have found a way to pay their rent and not ducked and dodged constantly to avoid talking to me.  When I did talk to them, to allow their excuses was to validate their lies.

If the customers that come to me lie to me, it is not my job to let them lie and persist in untruth, but to carefully and graciously challenge that untruth.

The trick is in these stories that the problem is not with the people.  The problem is with me.  I am the one who thought I knew what was taking place.  My logic let my renters walk on me.  My logic reduced the issues at Central Valley to inter-generational issues instead of Gospel/Scripture issues.  Me.  I was the problem.  I did not live my theology.  All men are sinners.  Everybody lies, even the wonderful Jerry lies to quote Jim Carrey.  My lie was to myself.

This lie has to stop.  I do not know if I can handle another repetition of it in a financial or emotional sense.

Truth with Grace takes on a rather large signifigance does it not?

I would REALLY, REALLY appreciate your comments on this, public or private.  I’ve got a lot to wrestle with here.

I’ll try to post some processing things on this soon to show how I arrived at this.

In Christ,

Mark

We were at a birthday party at a local pool for one of Daniel’s soccer teammates.  Neither of the boys can actually swim yet, but apparently quite a few of their friends can.  They were thus determined to go down the slide like most of their friends.  The only problem was that the slide emptied into about nine feet of water and my boys have Williams genes and are thus considerably shorter than nine feet.  There is about forty-five minutes left in the party when Joshua comes up to me carrying a couple of noodles.  These are long, foamy somewhat flotation devices and asks me if he can try going down the slide holding the noodles.  I agonize over this idea and allow him to try.  I cannot fault his ingenuity at least.  He gets to the top of the slide the first time, decides its a bad idea, climbs down and proceeds to jump into the nine foot deep water using the noodles 7 or 8 times to make sure he can handle the slide (his idea, not mine).  After these forays, he climbs back up the slide, goes right down, shares his newfound knowledge with his older brother, and they both spend the next 30-40 minutes doing nothing but giving Dad a nervous breakdown as they slide down the slide every way they are allowed to do so despite the fact that they can’t swim.

As I stood on the side of the pool paying very close attention to each time they hit the water, I had a conversation with my wife and a friend who was standing close by.  As a parent, you want to give your children reasonable limits.  You want to teach them to make smart decisions that are not guided by peer pressure, but at the same time allow them to use the gifts and abilities that God has given them.  My job is not to keep them from getting in over their heads.  My job is to pull them out when they do and teach them how not to be so stupid the next time.  Some might say that “of course its your job to keep them from getting in over their heads”.  On some things yes.  Far better I teach them to have the courage to handle a difficult situation the right way.  I’m not going to be standing on the side of the pool all the time to make sure they don’t drown.

I think it is strange how often God does the same with us.  I have long prayed that God would do things in my life that can only be explained by His work.  I have found that connected to such prayers can be some crazy things.  Sometimes I get the feeling like I’m jumping in the deep end, because what God wants me to do is to learn to function in what He has prepared for me, despite the fact that I know its over my head.

Hey, here’s to water over our heads.  You never know what you will learn, even if your standing on the side watching your two crazy sons.

In Christ,

Mark