Archive of "The Church" Category
Don't tell Hauerwas, but I preached a Father's Day Sermon
So yesterday was my first Father’s Day. It felt great though I am still trying to wrap my head around it. Truth be told, I’ve been so happy and blessed every since we got Nathan that Father’s Day was great and all, but today feels just as good as Saturday did.
I did get to preach yesterday too and that felt good. Not good in the performing sense but good in the I feel like the Lord is using me to some extent sense. Also the congregation seems to have really warmed up to me this past year and I feel that there’s a better connection.
My friend, Evan, reminded of Stanley Hauweras’ shock value line of American flags, mother’s day sermons, and whatever else as being non-Christian things and not being acceptable in churches. If you don’t know Hauerwas, he’s the intelligent man’s version of Tony Campolo, only less spiritual (yes, I’m kidding. I don’t know even know what ‘being spiritual’ means).
So I gave a Father’s Day sermon that I said was directed to everyone but to the men first. I remember hearing that these types of sermons leave some feeling isolated but I think that’s kinda short-sighted. If we come to worship and not just to hear a sermon as being the focal point, then I think the sermon can be topical and specific from time to time because whoever enters the sanctuary should have the intent of worshipping God first, and having Him “speak to you” as secondary.
I think of all the times I heard sermons and illustrations relating to marriage before I was married as a good thing. I like hearing about the Proverbs 31 woman (from time to time) because I think she’s great. Though I don’t plan on dying of old age soon, some of the messages that are geared towards older people are sometimes memorable to me because chances are if I live long enough, I’ll get old too. (yes, I am aware of what I just wrote, but I am trying to be funny. I’ll try harder). I personally think that you can be blessed from pretty much almost any sermon, even if the guy sucks at his delivery. If he (or even she!) is being faithful to their calling, then I must be faithful not only as a listener, but as a worshipper.
Reflecting on Q Conference – Session 2 – Post 3
Environmentalist, Bill McKibben – “More vs. Better”
He wrote the book The End of Nature which is considered an important contribution in this discussion and now considered ahead of its time. He has a new book Deep Economy is out now – took time and lived off the fruit of local farm.
His first argument was from science:
- “How can we have grown large enough as a species to affect the planet?”
- “Science went to work on that issue.”
- We dramatically underestimated the pace of our growth
- The earth is more finely balanced then we thought …
- There were 275 parts/million of CO2 in atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution.
- We now have 385 parts/million of CO2 in atmosphere after the IR. And we need to get it down to 350 parts/million of CO2 immediately. He said James Hansen, “greatest climatologist in the world”, endorsed this.
In his second point entitled, “Argument from Hebrew Bible”, he said:
- “4% of world population (us) produces 25% of CO2 …
- “We are not the good samaritan, we’re not even the levite. We’re the suv driver that backs up to run over the pediastrian.”
- “We are not loving our neighbors, we are drowning our neighbors” - (what a line).
He endorsed the Evangelical Climate Document and urged everyone to check out www.350.org which is an effort to build first global grassroots, open sourced plan to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s a great site, they talk about the Q Conference and there’s a ton of stats and other necessary info. Also, 350 calls for a rise of artists, all types of speakers, and peaceful protests.
When I say he “pleaded”, I don’t want to make him out to sound whiney. He wasn’t at all. I would tell you he was more angry. I was happy to see Q have him.
This is something I need to work on. I have been and have been making some progress but I survey my lifestyle and am convicted. I’ll probably blog more about this later but I wanted to post something today and wanted to get these names and sites out.
Elderly lady risks being ex-communicated for not tithing.
Well, this church is not messing around. I am not a violent person but if this pastor sent me this letter to me and my church, he’d end up beaten up behind the pulpit by the offering plates themselves (we got the nice brass ones too, they would do some damage).
Found this on the relevant magazine site and thought this was funny … and sad … but pretty funny in the “this is why some churches and pastors are dumb” sense. I hope this church gets a new pastor and a better leadership but until then, may God give her grace and may the news of this bring conviction to those who need it.
“A church member of Victory Time Full Gospel Church on Anniston Drive, received a letter from her pastor stating she would lose her church membership if she did not pay her tithes within the next thirty days … more”.
It’s a short article but the comments are pretty long. Couldn’t read all of them but this was a welcomed diversion from all my church history reading. But on a side note, it was interesting to observe all the people who wanted to set everybody straight, gets pretty intense (but we’ve seen much worse). My take is that even this is part of the church.
Q Conference Post 2 – Jon Tyson session
The first speaker of the Q Conference was church planter, Jon Tyson. Born and raised in Australia, he was the young adult pastor in a mega-church in Orlando and a couple of years ago started Origins Church in Manhattan.
I’ve met Jon a couple of times (even brought my youth group to see him, and yeah, I know, our kids are so lucky, I mean blessed, to have a guy like me taking them to a guy like Jon.) and really appreciate his humility. He speaks with a lot of wisdom and brings great ideas and insights to his audience whether it be on Sunday mornings or to a group of fellow leaders at a gathering like this.
Here are a couple things he said that got me thinking:
“We have incredible fruit in our churches on an individual level but there is little cultural fruit”
- So true. The success of our churches have been on that individual level. We all know people who have radically changed their lives through the power of the Gospel and through the discipleship and encouragement of their local church. What we haven’t heard nearly as much are the stories of churches that have had similar impacts on their communities.
- Thus the long-term causality has been the minimal effect the church has had on the culture. We’ve retreated from it, been told it was evil or worldly. For a long time, the church was only a refuge and not an agent of transformation and now many of them are becoming monuments.
“There needs to be a return of the city
Return where cultures are created.
We have a mandate – we’ve been commissioned … (gospel)
Accept our responsibility – Christ did this like spiritual acupuncture, he took those moments and points …
Engage the world …“
- Jon and later fellow NYC pastor Tim Keller, called for a return to the “city”. This was more then an anti-suburban cheer but was more of a vision-casting of the hope and need of a city. I’ve always loved many parts the city, (and I enjoy certain parts of the burbs too. Who knows what is in store for us? But back to Tyson and Keller.) but the idea was to be a part of the city. To see it for it’s potential, to see it’s not only worth saving, but worth loving. They didn’t say this, but all the emphasis that we put on the burbs, maybe we can be as faithful in the city (or attempt to be).
- We read things like this and we react because the cities do not have the best public schools, have more crime, polluted, crowded and expensive. But we all know that at the end of the day, generally speaking, we live where we want to live. We don’t want to live in the city. I found myself convicted on this yet again.
- Cultures are created in the city. That line alone is a lot to think about.
He called for the need to create “a holistic theology relevant to our time”.
- Not sure I can put these thoughts into words yet. I find myself nodding ‘amen’ but that’s all I got so far. Yes, things need to change.
Reflecting on the Q Conference
I was fortunate enough to attend the Q Conference in NYC put on by Gabe Lyons’ (co-author of UnChristian) Ferni Project. Truth be told, I was really impressed. The theme was Culture.Future.Church.Gospel.
Seemed very balanced to me. Chuck Colson and Jim Wallis were both speakers, need I say more? Some of the speakers were Tim Keller, Andy Crouch (who was friggin awesome), Os Guiness, Shane Hipps (the second coolest guy named Shane) and a bunch of others.
Sitting in round tables in Gotham Hall in Herald Square (in between Time Square and Madison Square Garden), they put a lot of thought into this. For instance, each speaker was only given 18 minutes to give one big point. There was a countdown clock left of the speaker. No joke. It helped keep everyone’s attention.
There were “3 Minute” missional shorts to create awareness of projects, films, and causes. There were talk-backs with the speakers, an AIDS Care assembly kit (where you actually pack the kit with supplies) and some music like The Fray who played some old and new tunes.
Gabe Lyons is my latest hero. (Yeah, he’s a fellow Liberty grad. We’re not all lame you know). I hope to highlight some of the speakers’ points as I bring a blog post once each month. So, yeah, maybe you should just register for next year. It will be in Austin next year April 27-29. Here is the link.
reflecting on a Multi-Faceted Gospel
One book I thought I would have read by now is Scot McKnight’s A Community Called Atonement and this CT article entitled, “A Multi-Faceted Gospel” reminded me that I need to read it soon.
Here are some exerts:
“…Plurality does not equal pluralism. The ancient creeds, echoing 1 Corinthians 15, say that for our sake Jesus was crucified, buried, and on the third day rose again. God’s people have been reflecting on these declarations ever since. We will never exhaust their implications, whether expressed as “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” or “I once was lost, but now am found.”
(this one is my favorite) - ”Evangelicals needn’t be afraid of new approaches to the gospel—the church has been coming up with them for centuries. We managed to get through 1,900 years of Christian history without the Four Spiritual Laws and the bridge diagram. The formula of “accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” is also fairly recent. And what worked in the post–World War II context might not be appropriate in the early 21st century. Many people today have different questions, assumptions, and concerns.”
“Hence, we need variety and creativity in our gospel witness. A chorus of voices from N. T. Wright and Dallas Willard to Allen Wakabayashi and Brian McLaren calls us to rediscover the kingdom of God. Scot McKnight tells a story about the restoration of cracked eikons (image-bearers). ”
For full article, click here
'We Just Weren't Sure How To Deal With It'
* Innitially when I had heard about the Ted Haggard scandal, I dismissed it because I think we need to be careful how we treat our fallen (Haggard, Gibson, etc)
I am not really sure why I am blogging about the Haggard situation other then I want to partcipate in the conversation with other bloggers I respect.
I find myself agreeing a lot with Todd and I had seen this headline on a different site and had the same reaction. Now, I am not excusing Haggard in any way, nor am I really that emabarrassed by this scandal (our focus is on Christ, not on feeble men. Thus such situations are inevitable), but I am a little surprised by his “friends”. How do you not try to intervene? Not to avoid scandal but to serve and help your brother. Some of the comments on the link are pretty intereseting too.
From Todd Rhoades Monday Morning Insight
“I’ve tried to give a real balanced approach to the Ted Haggard situation; calling people to not to speculate (particularly about Ted’s wife) during this situation. But this caught me a little off-guard; and I’ve seen no one else (other than a Time Magazine blogger) even notice this comment. Over the weekend, the head of the Traditional Values Coalition, Rev. Louis Sheldon, said that “a lot” of people knew about Haggard’s homosexuality “for a while” but just “weren’t sure just how to deal with it”…
I’m not trying to speculate; but I don’t want to ignore Sheldon’s comments either. You see, if “a lot of people” knew about this and did nothing; and have a much deeper situation on our hands.
In his comments to the newspaper, “The Jewish Week”, Sheldon casually mentions the Haggard ordeal amid a bunch of other questions on the election, morals, etc. According to the paper:
Months before a male prostitute publicly revealed Haggard’s secret relationship with him, and the reverend’s drug use as well, “Ted and I had a discussion,” explained Sheldon, who said Haggard gave him a telltale signal then: “He said homosexuality is genetic. I said, no it isn’t. But I just knew he was covering up. They need to say that.”
Sheldon’s words sound vague to me. Haggard gave him a ‘telltale’ sign and knew he was covering up. That sounds to me a little different than Ted admitting he is gay (which he still hasn’t admitted). And who are the “a lot” who Sheldon says knew about Haggard’s homosexuality? And why openly admit that, ‘yeah, I knew about it’ but didn’t do anything about it… especially when you’re the head of a ‘traditional values’ coalition? It makes no sense.
When will we stop shooting ourselves in the foot?
An Interview with Erwin McManus
found on the Monday Morning Insight blog.
An Interview with Erwin McManus
What does it mean to be a spiritual leader in the world of Hollywood? Erwin McManus declares Los Angeles as the capital of the future. As the leader behind Mosaic, he has a lot of profound thoughts about the role of the church, creativity, and risk-taking for the Christian in today’s culture. In this insightful interview with Infuze Magazine, McManus shares more about the role of creativity, why the church lacks innovators, and gives us the details of his upcoming book..
Matt: You’re in arguably the creative center of the world. What is it like to be a pastor there?
Erwin: Wow. It is a different world. I guess I don’t think of myself as a pastor in this setting. I think being a human who lives a life that others might be interested in and attracted to and having a journey that others feel is authentic and really connects to God. That’s really why I’m here. I’m trying to live out the life that Jesus talks about, hopefully in a context where people will go, “Maybe this is real.”
Okay, I agree with you. But obviously your expression of that looks different in Los Angeles than it does in other places like the east coast…
Oh yes. Dramatically. One of the differences, obviously, on the east coast is you’re still dealing with a very European or Western paradigm for people who don’t believe. On the west coast, we have 80 plus nationalities at Mosaic and most of those are under 28 years old. So, it’s a whole different kind of postmodernism.
So when I hear a lot of even the Emergent conversation about postmodernism, it’s not at all what we’re dealing with. We’re not dealing with people who are angry with Christianity because they’ve never been exposed to it. We’re not dealing with people who are trying to look back. A lot of midwestern or east coast postmodernism is trying to look back to an Eastern Orthodox or Catholicism and we have people who come out of Buddhism, Hinduism and Roman Catholicism. So a highly ritualistic approach to religion left them empty.
So it’s an entirely different conversation. They’ve given up on organized religion. For them, a lot of the classicly postmodern things would be still very organized religion. I think it’s organized religion for Christians figuring out how to create community for themselves.
So I realized several years ago when I was in conversations about what it means to be post-modern, what it means to be non-modern, it’s an entirely different world. I’m dealing with people who are actually very spiritual. They’re deeply spiritual. I think L.A. is a very mystical city. Creativity moves you toward mysticism.
How do you tap into that?
One of the great challenges is that people don’t really care what I know or believe or have been trained to teach. It’s very intuitive. They decide whether you’ve actually met God, even when they don’t believe. They are people who end up going, “I think this person is in an experience living in a dimension that I’m interested in. I’m unsure if it exists but I’m willing to stay long enough to find out.”
Which is such a dramatic shift from the rest of the nation…
Oh, yeah! That’s why I feel like sometimes I’m in a different country. I don’t feel like I’m in the United States anymore. And I think that’s why, honestly, people get nervous about Mosaic and about me because we’re so mystical. We’re not trying to figure out what is a cool, cultural American way of getting people to act Christianly. We’re basically saying that the invisible is reality. At your core, you are spirit and everything is understood out of this context.
If you go to our podcast, I don’t know if you know that we have a podcast, my last three talks have been on suffering, Hell, and sexual orientation. We actually deal with pretty intense subjects. This is not a place where we avoid things.
Do you feel like people think that about Mosaic?
No, I think that most traditional churches avoid the important issues. They act like they deal with the important issues, but they’re answering questions that noone is asking. They say things in such definitive ways where we all go, “Yes, that’s right.”
I think one of the differences is that Christian churches focus on what the Bible says. That’s all they have to do. It doesn’t matter if they’re reformed, emergent or whatever it is, they focus on what it says. We focus on why. We say, “If this is really God speaking to us, then it has to make sense. It has to give us a holistic view of the universe. It has to have an integrated relational core where everything begins to come together.”
So there’s a sense where we focus on not being simplistic, but being simple. We look for the elegance in truth. Because I’m dominantly dealing with people who do not see the Bible as their authority. So if I get up there and say, “Well, the Bible says this,” I’m sunk instantly.
The Walmart Factor for Churches
I like this guy. He consistently faciliates good disucussions. Read on if you are interested in church growth.
By Todd Hertz
Here’s one that will get you thinking. I live in the midwest. Typical small town. I remember years back when Walmart came to town. It’s a battle that has taken place in communities all over the country. Small local merchants tremble. How will we be able to compete? I’ve recently watched with interest in my small town when the new, improved SUPERWalmart opened (they tore the old one down). Now, in our town, we can purchase FOOD at our Walmart as well. This made the local grocery store chain across the street change the way they do business. They remodeled their store. The spent a ton of money on advertising telling everyone in our town that they’ve lowered their prices on thousands of items. We want your business, they said. And it almost came across at times as begging… please don’t go there, please keep shopping here. The end result in our community is that we now have two stores, and lower grocery prices.
Well, yesterday I was reading over at Don Chapman’s Worship Ideas blog; and he asks what will happen if the Walmart Factor ever hits your small town. Of course, he’s talking about the multi-site movement that is finding more and more larger megachurches branching out and opening new locations all over the place. How will your church respond when and if it happens in your town? Don asks…
What will happen if [or when] Rick Warren [Todd’s insert… RW probably isn’t a good example for MMI readers! Let’s say Ed Young instead!] plants a church in your town? Suddenly, I’ll bet the battles over the color of your carpet, or whether you do enough hymns will matter that much in the face of fierce competition by a megachurch on the move.
Which church do you think your average visitor would rather go to: a church that allows off-pitch Aunt Sally to sing solos, or a mega church with standards? [By the way, you don’t have to be a megachurch to have standards.]
In other words, churches, get over your dumb, ingrown habits and start getting serious about your mission. Or you’re going to go out of business.
I think Don has a point… the status quo for churches in your community may be changing. I know that Don’s remarks will probably spark alot of controversy… but before you start tapping on your comment keys, consider what he’s saying. He’s saying (not to put words in his mouth) that competition may be coming to your area. My thought is… is that such a bad thing? If more people are coming to Christ in your community, is that a bad thing? If another church moves in across town and causes your church (and others) to make changes so that your communities’churches are more effective; aren’t there really two (or more) more effective churches in your community rather than one that isn’t effective?
Isn’t that ultimately great for the Kingdom?
What are your thoughts…?
Todd
In Praise of this Mega Church
Awesome! I am not against the mega-church model though I have my criticisms and concerns (as I do of every model and style of church including ours).
This church sent out letters explaining the purpose of the local body of believers assembled in what we call “church”. Be a part of it or find some place else to “worship” (or in this case, “sit”). Contrary to popular opinion, “church” is not entertainment for the religious.
But this is great. This is Biblical. This is a church that understands its calling and removing all that is detracting from its purpose. Can’t say enough.
