Holiness Reeducation

If you don’t get the picture, don’t worry about it. Just trust a Star Wars fan that it is really funny. This picture has me thinking about regret today. My personality is not one that is prone to dwell on regrets all that often, but my humanity certainly has left me with a multitude of regrets that I can pull to mind without too much effort.

Specifically today I am not so concerned with the follies of my youth or the wasted opportunities of immaturity. Today I am thinking about my regrets as a pastor. There are many things I regret from the past decade I have spent working in the church. Thinking of them has proven to be cathartic and encouraging for my ministry today.

I regret all the time I have spent trying to prove myself to others. Especially during the early days of ministry when I was eager to use my gifts and explore my calling I spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying about what others thought of me. I was trying to get a job and have someone believe in me, which are fine, but they distracted me and hurt my maturity.

I regret all the moments when I have allowed the measuring sticks of culture to be more important than the measures of God. Like the Storm Trooper in the picture I know my purpose, I know which droids I am searching for. I have wonderful clarity about what God has called me to do. But concerns about finances, the desire to see more people in the congregations I am preaching to, and the desire once again for the notoriety of others have too often pulled a Jedi mind trick on me. Sometimes this has only lasted for a brief moment and sometimes this seems to have taken over my focus for full seasons of my life. I regret wasting my emotional energy on such misguided metrics of success.

I regret all the missed opportunities I have had to pray with someone. The boldness to directly ask people if I can pray for them during our time together has taken me years to develop. Even now there are times when my desire to do so still is at war with whatever part of me knows it would be easy to simply let people walk away without saying something. I regret those moments of prayer that have been lost.

I regret all the noise in my life. I am still not nearly good enough at hearing the voice of God. I love the noise of life too much. I regret how long it has taken me to realize how noisy my life is.

I am sure I could go on, but those are enough thoughts for today. I am not paralyzed or burden by my regrets because I they are being redeemed by the grace of God each day. Each one is a lesson I needed to learn and need to be reminded of frequently. So there they sit, my lessons of failure. Thanks be to God that his plan for us always includes our lessons of failure.

Blessings-
Greg

It is beginning to spread, but to what end? That is the question that I am pondering today as the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread to other cities such as Chicago, Washington DC and a host of other locations. Similar protests have popped up around the globe, most recently in the Philippines. This is a movement born out of frustration and the ability to spread ideas through social networking and the media. All of it is becoming quite impressive, but once again to what end?

Slovenian philosopher and adept cultural analyst Slavoj Zizek (you may remember me talking about him in my series on the End of Evangelicalism?) recently visited the Wall Street group and had some interesting comments. An avid Marxist and critic of capitalism and its effects on the globe Zizek had some interesting things to say. This struck me as particulalry poignant.

“Carnivals come cheap,” he admonished. “What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know like, ‘Oh, we were young, it was beautiful.’ Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible way. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want?”

Carnivals come cheap, wow that is an important idea. If people truly want social change in our country it must move beyond events and grand standing into changing day to day living. If Occupy Wall Street has any real effect on our country it will most likely not be because of crowded protests, but instead because of alternative living. If we really want to change the way our country works we have to stop feeding the system. You want to effect capitalism, it is pretty simple stop consuming. Our voices, our votes, our money, and most importantly our relationships are our means of influencing the way our country works. But using them takes intentional choices about how we live and who we support and what we want from our lives.

Where we are right now as a country is the natural ending spot for the most individualistic and selfish consumer culture the world has ever known. Is anyone truly surprised that the system hasn’t worked? I am not sure Occupy Wall Street will do much more than lend a voice and give an identity to those who are frustrated, but it at least has some potential to motivate change. I am wondering how much this movement is similar to the Peace Movement of the late 60s that helped a generation that was disillusioned find an identity and voice. Of course that generation eventually shaved their hair, got jobs and contributed quite a bit to this mess, so maybe not.

Any thoughts? What do you see this movement doing, if anything? Is it important? Will it disappear next month and we will forget it?

Just a birthday shout out today to my precious girl. Can’t believe we are already halfway to 18. Too fast….

What happens when we not only put the cart before the horse, but sometimes put the horse in the cart? That is the question I have been pondering for the past week since my time with Mike Breen and the great folks at 3DM. One of the most thought provoking studies we did was looking at the nature of the early church in Acts.

Throughout Acts we see a continuum between the organized reality of church and the organic life of church. They met daily in the Temple (organized) and in their households (organic). They had effective ministries distributing food to widows daily that was supervised by appointed leaders (organized) and they cared for one another in their homes (organic). Throughout all of Acts both of these elements are present. Paul would use both when he went to a city to plant a church.

Most of us tend to be geared towards one end of this continuum more so than the other. Personally, I am really good at the structured part of church. I am good at efficiency, clarity, roles, expectations, systems. I am not as good at simply inviting people into my life and living life with them. With all the effort I put into the organized side of things, the organic can simply seem like too much work sometimes.

What struck me then, last week, was the analogy of thinking of this continuum like a horse and a cart. The organized end of church is the cart and the horse is the organic. The problem being, of course, that too often we put the cart before the horse, or put the horse in the cart completely. We spend a tremendous amount of energy and resources, as pastors and church leaders, building elaborate and extravagant carts while neglecting the horse that pulls them. We allow the community life of being church together to starve while we put rims, tinted glass, a mirror ball, and two new woofers in our cart. Our carts get so big, so unwieldy and so heavy that the horse can’t pull them anywhere.

Taking care of a cart and taking care of a horse are very different. You maintain and fix a cart. You keep it running so that it can fulfill your needs. But you feed and care for a horse. You make sure it is healthy, you groom it, you bond with it. Making disciples requires us to have healthy horses and lightweight, quickly maneuverable carts. We need the flexibility to respond to the call of God and to make room in our lives for others.

As for us at DCC, we are having a lot of conversations these days about cultivating an environment that feeds the organic side of being the church so that the organized part will do what it is supposed to. In the three years I have been here we have done a really effective job at fixing our cart, because it was busted up and not functioning well when I got here. But now we are seeing our need for simply learning to live life together in pursuit of a better understanding of Christ. How about you? Where do you find your church on the continuum of organized and organic? What does your cart look like? How healthy is your horse?

I am out in Lima, OH this week taking part in a learning community with 3D Ministries. This is the first gathering of the churches we will be partnering with over the next two years as we engage in rethinking how we make disciples as a church.

There was a lot of great ideas and theology of being the church shared today, but I thought I would share a few nuggets from Mike Breen’s teaching today as I begin processing what we heard. these may not be exact quotes as I tend to process what people say as I record it. A first century disciple I am not. I am sure I will add some more thoughts throughout the week.

-A great question – “Is there continuity between what we are teaching people to believe and what we are asking them to do with their lives?”

- The gospel is simple but hard to live. We want to make it complicated but easy to apply.

- Identity comes from outside of ourselves, not from within.

- You can’t approach God through obedience it has to be through grace. Obedience means approaching God through the law and that will always leave us angry because it can’t be done.

- Throughout the New Testament we find the call to be sons of God. Sons in this sense is not a gendered word. We are all made one with Christ, who is the son. Thus we are all sons. Women have to get over being called sons and men have to get over being identified as the Bride of Christ. (I loved this idea)

- We don’t need more obedience to receive power from God, we need more power from God to fuel our obedience.

- Paul teaches an integrated theology. What he does is what he says and what he says is what he believes.

Those are a small sampling of the great ideas we were engaging with today in our pursuit of understanding discipleship. I wish you were all here with me to savor this time with these great people of God.