A Question Only a Shepherd Could Hate

 

One day last spring every church leader in America was slapped in the face with several new realities: an unusually nasty virus was loose and it was sneakier than most. It seemed to prey on the most vulnerable though no one had guaranteed immunity. If people who normally travelled different paths got together it was easily transmitted and you didn't even have to make physical contact. Like Pig Pen's dust cloud it was in the air around us. Oddly, you could pass it on without knowing you even had the awful thing. There was no cure and it killed people. A lot of people. Nobody liked it, but we all adjusted.

Did I miss something?

The only difference between then and now has been the fast development of a vaccine, but outside of  a few people on television with underdeveloped biceps, almost nobody you know has gotten it yet.

So, why are many church leaders rushing to put people back into buildings? The plague is still in the air and it's still very dangerous to humans, even an endangered and diminishing sub-species like church going humans. 

Here's part of our shared national experience over the last nine months: getting tired of the routine, flaming failures of pagan politicians to follow guidelines dictated to us little people, First Amendment split decisions from the Supreme Court on the legality of closing/opening churches, garbled messages from various well compensated, self appointed experts. We've seen it all and we're tired of it all but none of it changes the lethality of the virus for some nor how it can be spread by us all. 

Nothing has changed. So why the push to re-open churches?

Every church leader at every level has a pastoral role. Pastors are shepherds - remember the rod and staff? They aren't for decoration. The primary job of shepherds is to protect. Fail at that and the rest of it doesn't matter.

Is making a statement, securing the brand, raising money, keeping a staff busy or making people feel safe in a familiar worship environment worth risking those we promised to protect?  The swelling tide of re-opened churches currently being body surfed by a lot of pastors indicates somebody is putting something above protecting the people. Under pressure from somewhere it appears many pastors have thrown down the tools of the trade. When the wolf shows up, a staffless shepherd is just a guy in a field. He or she has got nothing and the sheep are toast.

Here's what we know about church culture in America: it's not working. It's certainly not growing. Churches gain or lose at each others expense, pretty much, without making a dent in the larger culture. Bright girls and boys tell us that only 30% of adults will consider entering a church. That shrinking pond is the one most churches are fishing in and the competition is starting to get fierce. The growing 70% who will never enter any church no matter how sincere the people, sharp the pastor, beautiful the sanctuary, tight the worship team or aromatic the coffee, are saying loud and clear that what most churches have been doing lately isn't working for them. Our mandate is to "go into all the world" but the world is yawning in our faces.

Rather than joining a mad rush to get back to business as usual, opening buildings and organizing people once again into nice neat rows with a close-up view of the back of a bad haircut, wouldn't it be better to use this time to reflect and strategize, to pray and search the scriptures and develop a plan for re-starting rather than merely re-opening? Perhaps we could be better positioned to finally take a big swing at long term change in the hurting communities where the Holy Spirit has placed us. We can prepare get to kill a lot of giants without abandoning our primary role as protectors.

We've been handed  a sealed crate of rare, mountain fresh air capable of blowing several decades of sameness, staleness and spiritual sterility out of the sanctuary. That's a re-start. Or, we can take the easier route of simply re-opening and go back to what wasn't working before.

Covid Lessons for Pastors: What I Learned on the Way Through a Pandemic

 "He who dines with the devil should have a long spoon".  

                                                                                        

Both Chaucer and Shakespeare borrowed from this 14th century French proverb. When approaching combustible people or hot topics, they saw it as a clever word of caution and a necessary caveat. Watch yourself around certain folks! Duly warned, I wade into the feeding frenzy over the opening/shuttering/navigating of California churches during the Covid crisis. From my modest perch as just a pastor I've kept my eyes open and here's what the last seven months have taught me:

1. Shepherds can get eaten too. The first job of a pastor/shepherd is protecting the flock. False doctrine, well groomed but snaky TV religion hucksters, dirty demons, a sickness inducing culture all try to scatter and feast on the sheep. There's also the ever present lions and tigers and bears. Prolonged isolation, loneliness, anxiety, months of numbing uncertainty, restricted human contact, along with an uptick in the circulation of silly ideas have all been part of the everyone's pandemic experience. The increased presence of well funded spiritual predators, topped off with the extra craziness of an election season, adds layers of difficulty to the pastor's already difficult primary responsibility of protecting the sheep from harm. The importance of the pastor's protective role is not diminished but is probably heightened by the unusually taxing, unprecedented life altering challenge we are living through. You can be a smart pastor, eloquent, well connected, innovative and respected but if you fail to protect the people you've been entrusted with you won't even qualify as an also-ran. You don't deserve to. Protecting others is hard work.

All church leaders know that the wounded never wait, but the Covid experience increases the risk of  pastors and other care givers also joining the ranks of the wounded. Adhere to health directives and close the sanctuary or creatively, cautiously try to maintain healthy smaller groups and somebody won't like it. Try Zooming a Bible study and somebody will balk. Responsibly cancel indoor services and step cautiously into re-opening with outdoor services. Some won't return until the building opens. Choose mandatory masking or optional masking, singing or silence. Weighing it out in the most careful, granular fashion possible won't save a pastor from criticism. Selecting any option or no option means there will be discontent from somebody, predictably followed by voting with the feet and maybe hostile mud slinging from armchair generals, both in and outside the church. The brilliance of the generous generals' advice is matched by the stunning absence of their skin in your game. No matter what you do there will be plenty of losses and even your wins will carry an asterisk. Years of work and prayer, hours of emotional investment and trust building can evaporate with the easy second guessing of one misunderstood move. It happens whether you're closing or opening the church. It's rough out there and the toll taken on shepherds trying to protect the sheep they love is unlike any other.

Daily, even hourly, heaps of statistics on the economic and physical damages of the pandemic have buried everyone in America, but the emotional, psychological and spiritual price we've all paid and will continue to pay is largely unreported and unknown. Maybe it can't be known. What is certain is that some of Covid's bills haven't even been opened yet. As interest compounds on these unpaid expenses they could become a shadow casting debt-curse bringing harm to the next generation and beyond. This thing isn't finished with us.

Pastors, by nature a breed that absorbs a lot while disclosing little, aren't immune to Covid's non-viral side effects. Pastors, this thing has hurt us. Just as many small businesses will not survive, I suspect many church leaders, especially in smaller settings. will also not survive. As casualties of the upheaval, some excellent shepherds will get out and find something else to do.

2. To some people, you're a big fat nothing.  Some pastors, along with legal eagles eager to represent them and smiling public figures happy to slap backs in hopes of votes, sense that our churches have been singled out by health officials, office holders and bureaucrats for harsher shut-down treatment than other enterprises where people gather. 

I don't think government leaders targeted churches so much as ignored them. 

In the initial shut down orders in March, it's unlikely that a malevolent, religion hating cabal saw an opportunity to strangle the baby in its crib by ordering places of worship closed. It's closer to reality and maybe more painful to imagine that people in charge simply never thought of churches or church goers. Unfamiliarity with the church universe was evident in the very wooden, byzantine, old timey sounding California church guidelines released in May and June. They aren't picking on us. They don't know us. We aren't on their radar. Let that iodine sink into the wound.

Don't let those rare but much photographed election year church appearances from candidates or their out-of-context Sermon on the Mount quotes fool you. Ambitious politicians and their more ambitious handlers don't give churches or church leaders much of a thought unless it's election time. Hey, don't get offended that you're not invited to the table and for sure don't be surprised to see highly placed pagans acting like pagans! Cheer up, that's a sandbox you don't want to play in anyway and the Bible is clear that God prefers to tabernacle in our weaknesses, not our strengths. That's where He does His best work.

3. Some churches cheat.  Some restaurants cheated. I noticed that some gyms and hair salons never really closed. Same for some churches. While most of us struggled, they cheated. Currently in our area, the local Public Health Department allows indoor church services at 25% seating capacity or 100 people, whichever is smallest. Not largest. Smallest. Masks and distancing are also required and congregational singing is not permitted indoors if you care more about protecting people than protecting the brand. Even if you don't care more it's still not permitted. If you want more people you have to endure the hassle of moving it outside and braving the elements like the rest of us. Still, some churches quietly open without regard for the guidelines. Guidelines are for chumps. 

There's a bunch of church cheating going on. More than sneaky, it's dangerous. We're dealing with an unusually transmittable virus that has no cure and kills people. In despicable fashion, cheating churches have cast the lure of having greater faith or the patina of brave defiance of godless government to attract fish from other ponds. Remember the first rule of shepherding? Protect people? Oddly enough, that gets tossed when your first concern is larger groups of people and not individual humans. I can't do much about the church cheats, but I've been watching and at the next ministerial breakfast, I'm bringing the longest spoon I can find. Maybe I'll stay home and read a book.

4. Obstacle or Opportunity?  My thinking about ministry has changed in the last seven months. I now see what a great tool has been handed pastors in the goofy world of social media platforms. Prior to the shut down of churches, live streaming was something I had little appreciation for really. It was something cool kids and tech nerds touted because it was the newest shiny object the magpies were squawking about. I was dead wrong. For months the use of live streaming, Zooming and staying connected via social media have been our only options. We have been forced to make them work and the results have been surprising. We are getting pretty good at it and many people are being reached. Whatever the church looks like post pandemic, we will continue to put at least as much time and effort into our online presence as we are currently. Live streaming can never replace an in-person experience with God and His people, but it may be the new, welcoming front door of the church opening into a very broken world. Other pastors have discovered what we have and some are finding more and better ways to stay in touch that we haven't touched yet. The quality of life in their communities is being enhanced in ways that makes much of Christ. There's more than one way to be His body.

It's a much published fact that the church in America has been losing impact for some time. Many prominent and not so prominent pastors are demanding Covid restrictions be lifted so churches can get back to normal. Doesn't that strike you as odd or short-sighted? Why would we want to return to what wasn't working before? If church leaders learn nothing during this forced shut down about better ways to do church, it's clear the decline will continue. If we only want to get back to our failing, tired, deck chair shifting way of handling Jesus' transforming message of good, decline is what we deserve. 

I'm not in favor of merely reopening churches. Let stuff die that deserves to die. Instead, let's restart churches, refashioning and re-launching them by throwing overboard the bloodless, tedious, 'new' ideas that are only repackaged failed ideas. We have a chance at making space for an infusion of genuine spiritual power and Presence. We don't need something new but something very old. 

Book of Acts anyone?

Here's What You Do With Racism

Last night some church friends sat on our back porch and briefly explained, as their three young girls squealed and did cannonballs in our pool, why they had changed schools.

Bigotry. Prejudice. Racism.

Daily the girls were forced to acknowledge the obvious fact that their pretty skins were slightly darker than most kids in the school. At their tax payer sponsored school a daily dose of bigotry came with classwork, quizzes, lunch and recess. They also got to hear classmates call them names coined by long dead buyers and sellers of human flesh - names meant to degrade, subjugate, humiliate and psychologically rape earlier generations with dark, pretty skin.

There were rounds of meetings as mom and dad sought the school's help. After all, it was enlightened Bakersfield, California in the twenty-first century, not backward Birmingham, Alabama in the nineteenth. Lots of promises came attached to little action. School staff seemed unsure of how to do the obvious right thing.

The difficult sessions ended and the matter was happily resolved when the parents requested and received a transfer and the girls began attending a more diverse school with a wiser, better equipped staff. The problem magically went away, saving school officials awkward confrontations with bigot moms and dads who had done a stellar job passing on their callousness, unkindness and bigotry.

A seamless and happy partnership of bigot parents and seemingly feckless educators made certain the soul corrupting bacteria of ignorance had found a next generation host and would thrive a few more decades. A sanitized version of it all now sits quietly in an already forgotten file folder.

How long is this stuff going to go on?

Almost sixty years ago, as I began to read, I asked my mom why different color people had to drink at different water fountains. Almost that long ago, a family friend died from a stroke because police found him incoherent in  his car and jailed him for being "just another drunk n***r." I've seen it in schools, stores, restaurants, the workplace, in tasteless jokes told by people who assumed I was an insider and fellow traveler. I've seen it repeatedly in a sport I love and in the church world I know too well. The mouths and offices of squeaky clean church leaders and the board rooms of prominent churches alike have been too often filled with the vilest vomit of bigotry and willful hatred. It's not hearsay. I've heard it myself. We've drawn a line in the church I'm part of that's cost us as people put out for repeated ugly racist jokes and name calling have continued to cause grief.

How long is this stuff going to go on? When will it end?

Jesus gave a good answer in Luke 10 with an original and intentionally racialized story. The humanity of two men was tested when one of them was savagely beaten and left dying in the street. They were from very different ethnic backgrounds and the Bible claims that in their everyday world, the animosities ran so high that they "had no dealings with each other". At great expense, inconvenience and with social stigma attached, one man crossed a great divide and saved the other man's life.

Jesus said, "Go and do the same." To all of us.

Thinking about what three beautiful little girls lived through in my city has kept me up all night, feeling sick inside. I've seen some variation on this theme my entire life. When will it end?

It ends the day we set aside our own agendas, stop waiting on somebody else to do something and start initiating mercy like Jesus said. Put yourself out there. Let it start with you. Stop talking so much and do something for somebody.

Initiate mercy.

Re-Opening Alta Vista Assembly

Re-Opening Alta Vista Assembly
A word from Pastor Pete Baker to the church family
 

What has happened to us:
 

• We never stopped being the church. During the shut-down our leaders have set the example and stayed in contact with many in the church family. Many have continued to encourage, reach out and pray for one another even without the Sunday services, Thrive meetings and mid-week outreaches and activities. A lot of good prayer has happened and relationships have deepened. We’ve continued, in smaller form, to get food into the homes of those most in need. We’ve significantly helped the orphans in Bukemebe, Kenya during a particularly severe season and have continued to honor commitments to our many missionaries around the world. Viewership of the daily Face Book video encouragement by our good leaders, the Face Book/You Tube Sunday services and mid-week Zoom Bible studies is often 5-6 times the number of people who would be in our sanctuary on Sunday. Alta Vista Assembly has continued to have an impact, fighting above our weight class,  and other churches have closely monitored what we are doing and saying and have sometimes taken cues from us. This has not been lost time for our church.
 

• Our last Sunday service was March 15. Even before the California Department of Public Health issued a statewide stay-at-home directive on March 19, Alta Vista leaders wisely decided to close the buildings to all activity following the March 15 service.
 

• On Tuesday, May 26 the state released guidelines for church re-opening earlier than anticipated. Our actions will be based on that 13 page document.
 

What we cannot do right now:
 

• We cannot resume our normal schedule yet, nor have large gatherings in the sanctuary. We are allowed 25% of capacity - that’s 22-24 people for us.

• We cannot have public singing or responsive readings.

• We cannot pass communion plates.

• We cannot shake hands, hug, hold hands or lay hands while praying.

• We cannot have meals, serve food or coffee.

• We cannot pray at the altar.

• In recent gatherings where churches ignored these practices, there have been outbreaks of the virus. Several pastors have died. We all have to do our best to stay healthy and keep each other healthy as we re-open, that’s why we will carefully follow the guidelines. We can do this!

What we will do:
 

• First, just know that for now, church will look different. We will offer a variety of small group meetings in the sanctuary on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday evenings at 6:30 PM and Sunday at 10:30 AM. These will be led by different leaders, dealing with different topics taken from Right Now media. Video and discussion format will be used each night. A short message will be given on Sunday mornings. This is church for now, but YOU MUST RESERVE A SPOT by going to the Alta Vista Face Book page and choosing the time you wish to attend. Sorry, but reservations are essential to avoid violating capacity guidelines and possibly creating a health risk.

• Sessions will be 45-60 minutes.

• Family members may sit together. Non-family members are asked to maintain a distance of at least 6 feet.

• Each person should bring a face mask

• Hand sanitizing stations will be in the foyer. Everyone should sanitize their hands upon entering and upon leaving. Disposable gloves will be available for those who wish to use them

• National and district Assemblies of God leadership are not requiring us to re-open. As a sovereign General Council church in good standing we are free to chart our own course in compliance with guidelines.

• This is the first step in a gradual re-opening. After 2-3 weeks state health officials will re-evaluate the numbers and may offer different guidelines. Our intention is to continue the nightly small groups and decide what is best for our church family.

Precautions we will take:
 

• If you are sick, have a compromised system or underlying health risks, please stay home.

• Activities will be limited to the foyer area and sanctuary. Fellowship hall and classrooms are not to be used for any activities or meetings. Except for a children’s activity on Sundays, no exceptions.

• We are encouraging families with children to make reservations for Sunday mornings. It will be easiest to accommodate them all on one day. 

Timeline: We want to begin this schedule on Monday, June 8 at 6:30 PM

What informs our gradual re-opening:
 

• A lot of information has swirled around us the last three months. Here is what we know for sure:
 

1. The virus is easily transmissible and a carrier may be unaware she/he has it. Doctor friends have told me it’s the perfect virus.

2. Some people get seriously ill and it kills some people.

3. There is no cure at this time

4. It’s still in Kern County

5. Distancing, mask wearing and hand washing are excellent ways to avoid spreading it.
 

• As a shepherd I want to keep you safe. Re-opening in small numbers and with precautionary practices in place will do that, even if it’s uncomfortable or different. We aren’t trying to be trendy. Using what we know for sure we are trying to be wise, keeping everyone safe and honoring Christ at the same time. Again, we can do this! 

• You are aware that other churches are taking a more aggressive stance. Here’s the awareness that guides my thinking: if we are careless and one of the church family were to contract the virus in an Alta Vista activity and become gravely ill or die, I would never recover from that. Defiance is simply not worth the risk of losing a valued member of a very special family that God has put together.

What I think is happening:
 

• God may have given this three month interruption to His church as a gift. Could this be a dress rehearsal for a future, more extended time when we will be unable to meet as we are accustomed? For some time I’ve talked with you on Sundays about a time when we may not be able to do church the way we always have. We now know what that’s like and may experience it again. I believe churches have been singled out for unfair consideration and treatment by public officials. Negligence and oversight or intentional? I don’t know, but having happened once increases the chances of it happening again. Pushback should not be our response. Continued prayer and preparing for how we do church in the future should be.
 

• This is an election year and you probably saw it coming: the virus and response has become a politically polarizing struggle. I mention it to say you were right if you did and, as your friend, to remind you to be careful who you listen to. Don’t let other voices drown out the gentle voice of God. Go deeper in the Word and prayer. During difficult times, let the gentle, trusted, nail scarred hands of Christ shape your heart.

A final word
 

We didn’t waste the shut down and we aren’t going to waste the re-opening. Let’s treat it as dress rehearsal for a future challenge. It’s time for everyone to step up and show support for what your church is doing. Our online presence has reached hundreds and hundreds of people who never walked through the sanctuary doors. Online preaching wasn’t my first choice. Clearly I was wrong. Is it possible that God has engineered it so we would launch into doing church in small groups for now?

“Let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage each other, especially now as the day of His return is drawing near.” (Hebrews 10:25)
 

For now, a small group is the only way we can safely honor God’s command to gather with His family until larger groups are allowed. For some people it’s fashionable to avoid church and others may have gotten used to staying home. That is an error of disobedience that could have unforeseen consequences. Look again at what God has stated so clearly in scripture. This isn’t the time to let others shoulder your responsibility, waiting until large Sunday morning gatherings are allowed. Small groups are all we’ve got and that’s not such a bad thing - in fact it’s very scriptural. It’s the era of the shared burden for our greatly favored church and if your health permits, jump at this chance of exploring a different way of doing church. 
 

Make a reservation for the small group of your choice today.

Re-Opening California Churches: A Letter to Leaders

The word for the day is epidemiology.

I trusted the computer to spell it, that's how much I know. I'm hardly an expert. I can't speak as a constitutional scholar, First Amendment lawyer, public health authority, economist or infectious disease doctor because I'm not expert in those things either. Through no fault of our own, we are in the swirling vortex of a world health crisis. It has lots of shifting, slithering tentacles and my humble thoughts on most Covid 19 related topics aren't very precise or well formed. I can repeat a few things I've heard, but after that I'm tapped out. My opinions on Covid 19 issues are only that. I'm not much help during a pandemic.

When I was very young my mother worked nights. That was lucky for me. Fourteen months after I entered the picture my brother was born and fourteen months later along came another brother. That put our night shift mom at home a lot during the waking hours of my first years - more luck - and allowed the three of us to be on the receiving end of her careful and almost complete attention. Boatloads of luck. While Pop was working, an older sister and brother were being drawn, quartered and psychologically flayed all day long by the Sisters of Perpetual Reprehension at our parish school. That left three curious little sponges to absorb, for hours every day, the best our smart young mom had to offer.

With it's animal collection, woods, mushroom patch and big garden, the little green and white frame house at the end of a dirt road was the perfect classroom and Mom was the perfect teacher. She talked to us and read to us - a lot. For me the best thing that happened during that perfect season occurred two years before my own school adventure began. Mom initiated me, her third of what would end up being eight, into the magical world of reading. I could read when I was four - all credit to her patience - and it wasn't good luck this time. Learning to read and learning to love reading was a clear case of divine Providence smiling big on me

A lifetime of challenging reading later, I've become pretty good at one thing: I can read a text.

Reliable voices have guided me to spend  lot of time in what people call the Great Books. A careful reading and re-reading of the works of giant minds has been immensely satisfying and personally beneficial. I've treasured every hour spent in the company of big brains I found in old books and they've all etched a place in my spirit.  It's the library called the Bible that is the big Hebrew and Greek elephant in the room though, easily and happily commanding and deserving more of my sustained attention than all of them combined. This was so even before I became a Jesus follower. I've spent a lot of quality time with it and it informs my best thinking about everything. With lots of help, I'm learning how to read it - carefully.

There's a reason why I strongly disagree with California church leaders who, in defiance of public health directives, advocate a quick re-opening of churches. It's not because I have insights beyond anyone else. It's simpler than that.  A groundswell of California church leaders see immediate re-opening as the best way of navigating the shape shifting and unfamiliar world of global pandemic. They favor running past state, local and the governor's office guidelines that call for more gradual, incremental re-opening of churches. Some are friends, but I'm not traveling with them on this one because I've read the text of scripture - carefully. I think they are walking to the beat of the wrong drummer.

Have our First Amendment rights been infringed upon? Almost certainly. Are we and our houses of worship victims of government overreach? Sure. Overreaching is what powers and principalities do best, even ones with noble beginnings and exemplary founding principles. Is there an argument to be made that maintaining closure is an unfair singling out of churches? No doubt and it's probably a strong one.

If the text of scripture has any force in shaping our behavior, in charting how we lead the churches we serve, in framing our thoughts and attitudes, the only good answer to all those good questions is "So what?"

As Jesus followers, we cannot stray far from a Savior who willingly emptied Himself of every advantage granting privilege, who when publicly stripped of His rights and protections responded, according to hostile witnesses, with an inexplicably simple and simply maddening silence: " He opened not His mouth". Follow too far behind the Savior and you risk not following Him at all, inviting the unwelcome rebuke: "You are not setting your mind on God's interests but man's."

Demanding rights, equal protection and due consideration to the point of defiance seems oddly out of sync for those who follow a misunderstood, falsely accused, crucified God. Without question state leaders have treated churches and church leaders with contempt. In the prayers of confession we reflect on personal sin and often hold ourselves in contempt. That's common. What's uncommon is the Jesus follower who can let others hold them in contempt without reaction.  Remember we follow Christ/Messiah and no one ever expected to see a Messiah with spit on His face. "Being reviled, He reviled not."

He told us we could expect some of the mistreatment He got and now we're getting it. Which is easier to picture? Jesus hiring the Pacific Justice Institute or agonizing longer in Gethsemane? Paul played the citizenship card only to avoid severe torture or death - but not every time. Sometimes he took the beating, rejoiced and shook the world.

Back to my trying to be a careful reader: it's caused me to notice a recurring theme in scripture about how God involves Himself in human affairs. In the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament it's a consistent theme that God tabernacles in our weakness, not our strengths.

Marva Dawn, scholar, theologian and sometimes co-author with the late Eugene Peterson in her excellent but dense Powers, Weakness and the Tabernacling of God helps us see God's preference for human weakness.

• Imprisonment helps spread the message of good we call the gospel - Philippians 1:12-14
• The believing community is to imitate Christ's emptying - Philippians 2:1-10
• Declaring the mystery of Christ will lead you to prison - Colossians 4:3
• Timothy is encouraged not to be ashamed, but to join Paul in suffering for the gospel - 2 Timothy 1:8-10, 2:3
• Saints are reminded to be subject to the powers - Titus 3:1
• Saints should face trial with joy - James 1:2-4
• God's power is perfected in weakness, not strength - 2 Corinthians 12:9-11

Scriptural evidence is strong that human weakness is God's primary method. Demanding fair treatment,  using collective pressure tactics or threatening defiance even if it works don't seem to be methods God has historically favored. We have willingly become citizens in a backward kingdom and should expect Him to show up most vividly in our weaknesses, doing little of lasting value with any powers we may have, even if they are granted by the Constitution.

It may be that the shutdown of our normal routine is a dress rehearsal for the church. We must develop different ways of being the church. We may enter a more extended future when we will be unable to do what we've always done and now is the the time to innovate, to get back to Bible basics and most urgently, to model Christ and humility for our people while opposition threatens.

We all want the sanctuary full again, but opening incrementally and slowly may force us to seriously reconsider forgotten ways like house churches and small groups - the early church model that shook an empire and transformed a culture. We have time and the digital tools to remind our people how to stay in touch and show them how to encourage and pray and genuinely disciple one another. Making followers who make followers who make followers is Jesus' Great Commission hope that we've largely ignored. Maybe now is our chance. We can show our folks how they can begin adopting the forgotten scriptural practice of "speaking to yourselves in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs." All of our prayer lives can be deepened as we learn how to enter sustained prayer through the door of repentance. These may be the things that sustain the church in the future and may help us explore more sustainable models than the ones we've been using for a long time that seem to be offering diminishing returns.

Innovatively preparing for what is coming would make this time well spent. Insisting on a quick return to what never worked all that well would be a waste.  We've been handed a severe mercy in a difficult wrapping. American church leaders have been gifted a once in a lifetime opportunity to be true problem solvers, searching the scriptures for a way out that will advance the kingdom and deepen our people in Christ. We can do that or we can adopt the tactics of every other pressure group on the block.

Letting God tabernacle in our weakness can be exciting stuff if we let it be. That's the way I read it.

Essential or Non-Essential?

Are you essential or non-essential?

You can start a food fight with a question like that. Some businesses, charities, church, civic and commercial leaders have gotten unusually prickly with their answers. Being on the coveted list of essential goods and services connotes importance and worth. Fighting to stay on it does too. If you're not on the approved list then you and whatever you were busy doing two weeks ago aren't as important as what other people still get to do. By short extension that must mean you aren't as important either. Others may, you may not.

There's a lot about this virus nobody knows, but here's what's certain: we are dealing with something ugly enough to kill people. It's treacherous and cowardly and seems, predator-like to pick on the weakest and most vulnerable. If the softest of soft targets get caught by this viral jackal pack, say, your grandparents, the kindly older neighbors that wave as you're leaving for work, the co-worker who's been out on medical leave, the guy recovering from chemotherapy - they will die.

What's not well known is the transmission rate or where it's headed next. It might kill a lot of people you know who need to stay around a while longer. The best we can do for now is stay away from each other. That's it.

I'm noticing the businesses, non-profits, stores, drive-throughs, charities, churches, media outlets, government services and civic associations that are staying open when they don't really have to stay open. Switching to skeleton crews when dealing with a nasty, hyper-contagious virus is hardly a show of good faith either. Against good wisdom you're still mingling people who have been around different sets of people and will return to them - maybe with a very bad bug. Somebody in those unnecessarily interlocking chains might be sick.

I'm getting pretty good at quarantining and doing without lately and when this thing is over, I'm not going to have much to do with greedy outfits and tedious people who made a grab for the brass ring of importance by staying in business when they could have politely shuttered like we did and helped the rest of us out.

Jockeying for essential status is enough to make me sick.

First Words Mean Something

What if I told you that the first public word from the mouth of Jesus

• Is the first word from the mouth of John the Baptist
• Is the first word from the mouth of the 12 apostles
• Is the first word from the mouth of the 70 disciples
• Is the first word from the mouth of Simon Peter at Pentecost
• Is the same first word spoken publicly from the mouth of Paul?

What if?

You would likely say it is a very important word. Historian J. Edwin Orr noted that the first word of the gospel - the first word spoken by Jesus and the rest - is repent. In scripture as well as in  every human interaction with God, repenting has always been step one. It's how messed up humans initiate contact with a holy God.

It's weird that, in our day, repenting has almost vanished from the radar screen.

If we think of repenting at all, we imagine it as some kind of sorrow. Feeling very sorry for the bad things we've involved ourselves in: hurtful words, secret, disgusting thoughts and prejudices, selfish and destructive behaviors. Once we consider them, sorry tears can result. Repenting may bring joy as well as tears, but we associate it most often with feeling sorry about our sin and failure.

The history of repenting involves a Greek word - metanoia. From high school biology, we're familiar with another meta word, metamorphosis. Metamorphosis means to change form and nicely describes the familiar but startling transformation undergone by the wormy, earthbound caterpillar as it becomes the stunning, lighter than air butterfly. Our word metanoia involves dramatic change also: change of mind, change of heart and change of habits. It's a bigger deal even than butterflies.

"Your iniquities have put a barrier between you and your God, causing Him to turn His face away so that He does not hear you." 

This Isaiah 59 passage is pretty rough on believers. Did you notice "your God"? It's directed to insiders, not outsiders. It's a reminder that our self-absorption, greed, jealousies, lusting after people, things and experiences that don't belong to us along with bad words, perceptions and prejudices have walled us off from God. No matter how much you want it or claim it, a meaningful, satisfying relationship with God is impossible while a pile of sins sits in the road. Repenting removes it all.

Maybe you were never caught, but the secret sins especially can't be ignored, excused or explained away. They have to be acknowledged for the ugly things they are - in front of God who saw it all and is the most offended party. Was the harsh word spoken yesterday? Maybe the rage, lie  or other secret sin was 15 years ago. No matter when it happened, you have to come clean, face it and lay it out before God. Only with this level of cooperation can God do the work of changing your mind, heart and habits.

Because sin is our pattern, repenting has to be our pattern. A friend says it well, "I can stop repenting everyday when I stop sinning everyday."

Repenting is hard work. It's the last thing we want to do. We find it easier to work, serve, sing, give, worship or help the poor. It's even easier to feel sorry, filling a hundred sad hours with regret. But there's no substitute for getting gut-level honest with ourselves and God in genuine repenting.

Jeremiah was right in saying our hearts are deceitfully wicked and unknowable. We shield our inner self by "forgetting" sinful words, actions and thoughts. Accepting the challenge to pray the words of Psalm 139 will cause our inner phoniness and resistance to crumble:

"Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me"

It's a dangerously bold prayer. If you dare pray it God will definitely find the ugliness in you that needs to be exposed. Even if the ugly thing has lain untouched in some secret, inner chamber for a long time, the disinfecting light of Christ's presence will do its job if you let it. Once you see it and confess it, the blood of Christ does it's good work and the barrier is removed. The joy of salvation, knowing you are protected, will return with force and you will be drawn to a God who hears you loud and clear. His presence becomes a growing awareness.

You get dirty each day, so repent each day and real prayer becomes easier. Get over yourself and your heart will find it's true home.

Stop Poking My Chest Uncle Bud!

"He adopted us from slavery: it is a mercy to redeem a slave, but it is more to adopt him."
                                                                                     Thomas Watson - Body of Divinity

I find it very hard to argue with old Puritans like Watson. I don't care to debunk popular myths and "things everybody knows" about Puritans and this isn't an apologetic for their worldview - a view that is more broad minded than is commonly assumed. Plenty of able historians have shot fresh, disinfecting air through the predictable portrayals inflicted on us by deadly high school lit classes and over costumed, sepia toned witch trial movies.

Watson is always that welcome "one clear call for me".  As with most Puritans, the main thing stays the main thing and precision nearly always marks what he has to say. I like Samuel Johnson, Addison, Steele, Swift and even Hemingway for the same reason: they don't almost say what they mean to say, they routinely hit the point squarely, forcefully and usually memorably.

It's sad that the Puritans and their descendants are known to most of us only from cartoony textbook portrayals of Jonathan Edwards and his very angry God, both of whom get their jollies seeing human souls dangling and shriveling like spiders over the flame. Sad. And inaccurate. Sadder still to think of scads of theological schools that never introduce ministerial students to such clear thinkers, most of whom wrote beautifully, preached powerfully and prayed still more powerfully. I could be wrong, but a quick look-around tells me modern church leaders could use healthy doses of what the Puritans are serving.

Without diminishing the time stopping miracle of redemption - being bought twice by the real time/space invasion of a God-Man - Watson quickly leads us to a room with zero wiggle space by contrasting it with the much less talked about but infinitely more remarkable God act of adopting humans.

Against our wills we've been trapped at a family reunion we didn't want to attend in the first place. Know-it-all uncles have pushed us against the wall with finger pokes and questions that sound like conclusions. Holding a wilting paper plate of three bean salad and devilled eggs (we just came for the food) we are endlessly harangued with questions, machine gun follow-ups about who is saved, how saved and for how long. We sweat and mumble unoriginal non-committal grunts and look around nervously for rescue.

It's been a 1500 year discussion about salvation when we should have been talking about the more amazing reality of adoption.

Statements, counter-statements, synods, church fights, councils, doctrine wars and books without number all dumb down the biblical declaration of redemption by a God of mercy to a take-it-or leave it insistence that salvation is where it's at and there's only a couple of ways to talk about it.  Isn't it time to agree with Watson and end a 15 century exercise in missing the point?

Nobody but echo chamber trolls wants to hear another airtight exposition of salvation.

I'm begging you, no more arguments, please Uncle Bud! It's been hammered flat at this point and that's a real pity, because it was good a conversation at first, but that was a long time ago. It's time to pivot: there's a reality approaching fantastic that's light years beyond the salvation debates. Salvation is wonderful, but the real message of good has a quality beyond wonder and comprehension. The staggering, fairy tale truth for every human image bearer is that all of us have been included in the life of Father, Son and Spirit. Already! Our adoption is finished. It's the ultimate inclusion.

Here's the real kicker that can shut down all the tedious, time ragged arguments about who's saved, who isn't and who says so and at the same time splash the old world's sad face back to life with the bracing clarity of mountain fed living water: you're already included in the Relationship. They want you in the Dance! People everywhere are straining to hear the song of adoption by an ever inclusive Relationship of perfect harmony and love.

The adoption papers have been signed in the blood of Jesus. He really did pay it all! Now go tell somebody. Most importantly: go live it.

What Whittaker Chambers Taught Me (Originally posted on Friday, November 8, 2013)

One of the more engaging books I've read lately has been Whittaker Chamber's controversial autobiography Witness. The Foreword, written as a letter of explanation to his children for his life and failings, is a remarkable stand alone piece, being a surprisingly strong testimony to the power of historic, biblical Christianity. I didn't expect to find Jesus there.

The bulk of the book is the story of his initial infatuation with, immersion in and eventual messy extrication from mid-century American communism. Chambers went as deeply into the belly of the beast as any American could go and became intimate with the inner workings and many of the party's major players. Curiously, it was his almost complete absorption into the the party that caused him to leave it.

A local news anchor once told me, in lament form, that he had gotten into the news business because he enjoyed being informed of current happenings and world events. He very much liked being an informed news consumer. However, broadcasting demands and production of three daily news programs left him no time to be more than casually acquainted with the news he was reporting. The system required that in getting the story out, the object of his love had to be checked. His passion took a back seat to the program.

I may be off base and subject to good correction, but the same thing is happening with the gospel of Christ - the supreme message of good.  That stunning fairy tale like message that there is a perfect, eternal Relationship of love called Father, Son and Spirit who improves  love the only way it can be - by sharing it with us. In spite of all our brokenness we are invited into what God is. The beast dies, we are rescued and we really do live happily ever after.

It seems that for the serious lover of Christ, one of the easier places to lose sight of Him and this amazing invitation is within one of the multi-layered systems that has built up around the gospel. Lots of elaborate, encrusted, Byzantine structures - denominations and para-church - have been painstakingly developed by the well meaning to propagate the message of good. Agencies, associations, denominational offices, task forces, mega-churches, and campaigns of every description, all with Christian underpinnings are sustained with enormous outlays of emotional and creative energies and tons of cash. They move mountains for sure, but not nearly with the ease Jesus said we could.

Maybe the well logoed organizations and carefully crafted systems are missing the Presence. It could happen..

It's a happy fact that the local church is the only organization of believers mentioned in the New Testament. Maybe that's because it's the best and only essential one. It's in that messy place and not within the efficient, well lit offices of strategists, demographers, bishops, superintendents and sages that the Presence and power of the Triune God best displays what He's all about. It's in the sometimes comical, sometimes tragic foibles of the local church that the creator of the rivers of living water speaks His invitation to satisfaction the loudest. It's where the thirsty soul hears it most clearly. The strong but crazy notion that within the local church family, serious seekers and bruised saints alike have the best chance to respond to the still, small Voice has been around for a long time. For good reason.

Chambers left the party because the treasure it was designed to preserve and propagate was misspent and squandered. It can happen with any human structure I suppose, even very good ones that do Jesus stuff. Maybe the Pearl of Great Price is not to be found in Christian TV, the various Vaticans and pseudo-Vaticans, denominational offices or agencies. Oh, sure, they can talk about Him in those places and how much He's needed outside those gleaming but expendable think-tanks. Still, it seems to me the local church is where it's at.

Now, if I could only convince over half of Americans who claim to be Christian, all the local churches would be bursting this weekend and the smart girls and guys trying to save the world from their busy beehive of cubicles could go on vacation. Or go to church.

Least Favorite things (Originally posted on Saturday, October 26, 2013)

In a recent reply to a denominational leader asking for money, I signed off saying, "Great to hear from you, even if it was about my second least favorite topic." Since inquiring minds want to know, the follow-up question may never come: "What is the least favorite topic?"

For me, it's a tie between church growth and golf. I've played golf twice and though my golf christening was handled by nice friends who took pains to make it a good first experience, I found it stupefyingly boring. Boredom was relieved only by predictable tedium. Lovers of the game talk about the skill, reserve and control that make it the ultimate challenge. Green guilt is heaped on with the 'but at least you're in a beautiful setting' argument designed to keep people coming back to nature who don't really care for the activity. At the end of the day though, it's still golf. I don't care for it on any level.

The ecclesiastical-industrial complex that is church growth runs neck and neck with golf. In the world that is my mind and along the uneven, rock strewn Sylla and Charybdis archipelagos that are my own mental synapses, it appears to me that a lot of church growth experts are simply social engineers advocating their new and improved brand of social engineering. It looks to me like packaging and re-packaging predictable tips on moving groups of people around. The brick and mortar boys, program advocates, whiz kids and success story guys may tout different approaches and strategies, but they are a genetically distinctive and clever breed with a dominant characteristic. All of them are from-the-womb indenticals in their faint, passing or absent mention of Jesus' claim "I will build My church."

As with golf, I'll skip the tedium and predictability found in most church growth strategies. I think I'll let Jesus do His job. In spite of centuries long opposition from some truly despicable people, corrosive ideologies and albatrossing herself with the bad ideas and behaviors from some of her strange friends and fellow travellers, the church has defied all odds and survived. Genuine ekklesias - assemblies of the called out ones - can still be found behind, within, next to or at some distance from the big box worship centers and the airless and aging orthodox bastions of a by-gone era. 

The church will survive because Jesus does the building and He builds to last. Golf may be around awhile longer too, but I'll be doing something else.

Why Is Writing Good Therapy? (Originally posted on Wednesday, August 14, 2013)

It's happened again. That weird collision of unrelated events that leaves me emotionally spent and wishing my brain would shut down or go into energy saver mode for awhile. Lousy sleep, lousy appetite. Just getting through is the goal with little fun along the way.

It's not a guaranteed thing, but writing works sometimes and it worked wonderfully for me this morning. Not this writing. Lock box stuff where I just pull my thumb out of the dike, step back and try not to get my good shoes wet. It gushes for several unrestrained paragraphs and then, like a miracle drug kicking in, I'm all better. 

How's that work?

One reason may be that what needs to be said gets said. That's not the same thing as saying it to anybody in particular or being read by any eyes but mine. It just needed to get out of the narrow confines of my mind. Liking it to pent up autumn sap gushing from the bored hole in a tree trunk may be a descriptive and folksy analogy, but I don't see how it's helpful in this case.

Maybe writing is like a marker in time that says, "I passed this way once", adding some permanence. The permanence is followed by a sort of low level validity. Not real, tested validity. Not universal truth, just my truth and most of the time that's all that is needed. I suppose a lot of rubbish has been printed and passed on that was the kind of thing that is true within the very small arena of one mind and should have been kept there and at most, pulled out occasionally, hummed over and put back again.

Like the Trappists and other cloistered types, I think manual labor also helps the disordered mind. They say it clears the mind by diverting it. Like restocking the shelves when you aren't looking it's a kind of spiritual slight of hand. But it's hot out today, my yard looks just fine, the car is clean and, anyway, I'm feeling a lot better now.

Is That Your Own Idea? (Originally posted on Tuesday, March 19, 2013)

Is That Your Own Idea?

Standing in the courtroom of Imperial Rome, the battered and badly mauled rabbi from Nazareth couldn't resist answering a question with a question. Governor Pilate's original inquiry, "Are you the king of the Jews?" is risky talk in an empire that tolerates no rival to Caesar. It's a dangerous discussion and Jesus' answer is potentially explosive. Depending on how it's retold and by whom, it might all be interpreted as a serious indictment that the governor himself is whispering treason. Delicate stuff.

• "I don't believe in organized religion." 
• "I'm an agnostic." 
• "Christianity is outdated. 
• "I believe every word in the Bible is literally true." 
• "If you aren't attached to the right religion, you can't go to heaven." 
• "To be involved with Jesus, drastic religious adjustments must come first."

Oddly enough, polar opposite responses like those can have a single motivation. Many attempts at self definition are based on what we reject. We often glance around to make sure we are dismissing things whose rejection will gain approval or make us appear to be a certain type of person - open-minded, tolerant, holy, devout, serious, smart, humble, not "one of those people". The pattern holds when we affirm things as well. In either case though, if the lines drawn in defining ourselves are copied off someone else's paper, they are no good.

"Is that your own idea?"

Jesus is supremely interested in what you think. Thinking - your own thinking, not copy-cat thinking - is very important to Him. In fact He came precisely because our thinking on big issues is scrambled, tortured and twisted. Sin, failure a deadly consequential missing of the mark, damages our minds and leaves us blinded about our own nature and God's. Unable to know what we don't know, we act from our own darkness,  creating strange and almost mythological notions about God. It leaves us with the unpaid baggage of "I'm not good" and "God is angry." The first causes us to hide ourselves from significant people around us and the other causes us to hide from God, who is always closer than we imagine.

Your ideas are important. Do you know what they are?

When the Charges are Made in Your Church (Originally posted on Wednesday, February 4, 2013)

A friend working on his Marriage and Family Therapy program invited me to comment on what it's like to be in charge and have to walk through the investigation, prosecution and nightmare of child molestation charges in the church. I can only offer my impressions, having experienced it more than once. I know it has great, even devastating effect on the accusers and accused, but my knowledge of that comes by observation only and is second hand. It must certainly be awful, but I'm hardly qualified to speak to that with the authority of experience.

When it's on your watch and you report it and know all those involved - alleged victim and alleged perpetrator - it is one of the hardest and most solitary things to walk through. At least as hard as comforting a family shell shocked by suicide, as hard as speaking with the young couple who have lost a very young child. It's on level with the numbing difficulty of being the one spiritual guide in the room when they tell the already sick guy the cancer is fast, always nasty and terminal.

It's disorienting.

It's like being in a large, familiar room and every bit of light goes out. As you start fumbling around you realize somebody, somehow has quickly rearranged the furniture and nothing is where you remember it. They've added things too and the doors aren't where they're supposed to be.

The whole experience ages you and you realize again what nobody cares to hear: that ministry and leadership is not what people think it is. You don't know which end is up, but your prayer life does deepen because words spoken to other folks don't communicate like they used to, so you pray. It's only then that you start to realize that maybe the room is bigger than you thought and there is a way out and someday, once you get past the clutter, you might just find it.

Of course, the agonies endured by the others involved must be horrific. Guilty, not guilty, real, distorted or false accusations - it all has to be chaos and misery for everyone. I only know what I know and remain the world's foremost authority on my own experience and opinion.

If the whole point of this exercise - for me - is God's way of getting me to pray better or more, I would prefer to read a book by one of the Puritan divines or attend a seminar. Like W.C. Fields said, "all in all, I would rather be in Philadelphia".

Did You Hear the One About . . .? (Originally posted on Wednesday, February 4, 2013)

I guess a well known comic recently made comments meant to denigrate the Bible and anyone who reads it seriously. Maybe he meant no harm. Maybe he was just trying to be funny and George S. Kaufman missed the writer's session. 

I don't know anything about the comic, his show or what watching it says about his viewers, but since he wanted me to know what he thinks, I'd like him to know what I think. 

I'd like him to know that I've been reading the Bible seriously for awhile and though a natural born skeptic, I'm sometimes floored by the depth of expression, universality of message and the often satisfying way it speaks to a deep place in me. I'd like to tell him how I hear a ring of truth I can't explain and occasionally sense a naked awe that sometimes stops my breathing. I would mention being startled by a kindness so surprising, comforting and personal that sometimes brings tears. I don't understand all of it. I don't even like all of it. That too leaves an imprint on me.

I hope he experiences the Bible that way someday and genuinely hope it doesn't take him as long as it's taken me. I'm not mad at the guy, I just want him to know, that's all.

Another Silly Phrase Christians Use (Originally posted on Monday, January 28, 2013)

Funny how much can be missed in reading the Bible.

I bet when you know your numbered days have become numbered hours or minutes, you get very focused. If you keep your wits and don't go Butterfly McQueen panicky, you would probably do and say only the most important things. The night Jesus is betrayed, the Crucifixion clock starts ticking and He prays - significant right there - and His focus is not on Himself so much but on current friends and friends to come.

He prays that His friends will display a remarkable, almost otherworldly, degree of unity and closeness. Since He can't think of any relationship closer, His personal example takes us inside the mystery of His nature: "That they may be one Father, even as You and I are one." Unravelling the depths of that relationship could break your brain. Probably best to accept it as a, for now, unexplained mystery. They are very close.

Then He jabs hard, saying closeness like Theirs is essential between Christians if the world is ever to believe His words about Himself. "That the world may believe You have sent Me." Crazy, but He subordinates His success as a communicator to our treatment of one another. At present, it appears most of the world is pretty much unconvinced that Jesus is who He claimed to be and it further appears that the intransigence and pride of those who take the name of Christ are to blame. Maybe the petty prejudices Christians baptize as doctrinal and purity battles really aren't the most important things. Rough stuff.

Sandwiched between the peek into God's unity and love within Himself and the perennial failure of Christians to be Christlike, is a notion that should have been sandwiched between the previous two paragraphs: "That they may also be in Us." Jesus invites us into what someone has called the Grand Dance - a dazzling display of dexterity and adoration that exists only within the nature and life of God. We aren't in Kansas and we aren't talking religion anymore. We're invited into who God knows Himself to be. This is wild and unbelievable stuff.

It's not a trip to the altar, living a religious code, going to church, giving in the offering, finding a place of ministry or even pursuing spirituality in all it's varied forms. It's not about prayer, spiritual formation, reading Kierkegaard, Zen exercises or praying a sinner's prayer.

In fact, the cherished phrase that puts rugged American individualism proudly on display, "inviting Jesus into my heart", is shown by Jesus' wild ride invitation to be about as flawed and wrongheaded as anything can be. We don't invite Him, He invites us into the center of His life and nature. 

He's calling you into the Mystery and invited you to the Dance. RSVP'd yet?


 Note: If you care to read it for yourself, The Gospel According to John - chapter 17 is the place. Unless you're an Elizabethan scholar and are fine with being "hoisted on your own petard", find a modern translation. Don't take my word for anything. I could be all wet.