My home state of Kentucky is ranked next to last among the states in “well-being,” according to a recent Gallup poll.  Based on responses to questions on work environment, emotional health, physical health, basic access, healthy behavior, and life-evaluation, Kentucky scored a “D minus,” 62.3%.  The Well-Being Index is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 100 would represent ideal well-being.

It’s the work of sociologists and economists to ask the “why” and the “how” questions about such data.  I want to ask, what is the impact on mission?  If God’s mission in Kentucky is to bring the kingdom here, just as it is in heaven, then what are his people to do?  If the realities of God’s reign, which include no more tears or pain (Revelation 21:4), is to become a reality in our state, what is the task of the church?

The church is to be an agent of “shalom” – a rich, multi-faceted, biblical concept of God’s best, wholeness, and wellness.  The message of Jesus we live out is not about minimal entrance requirements for heaven when we’re gone.  It is about “good news” now.  Shalom now.  Holistic well-being now.  Our whole selves – spiritual, physical, emotional – are to be affected by the gospel.

And that means the church in Kentucky has some work to do.

We must make a shift from a gospel limited to, “if you died tonight …” and encompass a more holistic, “if you live tomorrow” approach to faith.  The well-being of those in contact with a missional Jesus-community ought to be higher than a “D minus.”

So, what would it mean for the Jesus-message to take hold in the work-place?  What would it take for it to impact emotional health?  Physical health?  Basic access to necessities like clean water, medicine, food, shelter, and affordable fruits and vegetables?  How does the gospel affect healthy behavior choices?  And how might a follower of Jesus respond to a question of life-evaluation?

Whether you’re a Kentuckian or not, I’m interested to hear your response in thinking about “well-being” where you are.

Related posts:

1. Lesslie Newbigin: Power of a Believing Community
2. The “Jealousy” of God
3. The Lesson of Show & Tell

As a pastor, I try to be authentic and transparent to people in our community.  I’m generally fine with admitting mistakes, confessing sin, and telling people I’m still a work in progress.  But, what if I don’t want to be completely transparent?  What if I’m going through a rough season (or even a rough morning)?  Is it hypocritical to keep this hidden?

Here’s an example …

Yesterday was the third Sunday in Advent and I’ve been preaching about the “rhythm” of this time of year and how it can be an invitation for us to slow down and reject the hectic and harried pace of our culture’s “holiday season.”  The problem is my own family’s life has never seemed more rushed.  I’m in anything but a peace-ful, Advent state of mind.

I felt strongly that I should continue to present to the community the Advent challenge of preparing our hearts for the coming of Jesus. And that’s what I did … and I feel like such a hypocrite.  Instead of just admitting that I’ve stunk it up as a husband and father and been guilty of the very thing I’ve been warning the church about, I put on a mask and performed.  Ugh …

I’ve blown it in the way I’ve been swept up into the life-draining pace of this season.  I just didn’t feel like going into it yesterday with the church.  I just didn’t want to be transparent.  If I’d opened up, I’m afraid it wouldn’t have stopped with a mere confession of a hurried soul; I think I would have broken down and gone into more stuff that has me depressed and frustrated these days.  And then I think, “is that helpful, hopeful, or edifying for the church?”

If I have anything like a “core value,” it’s authenticity, and I just squashed that yesterday.  I felt like hiding behind a mask and I’m justifying it in my mind by saying it was “better for the church” as a whole, it “protected me,” and who wants a blubbering preacher interrupting their Sunday morning, anyway?

Clay pot, indeed …

Related posts:

1. Authenticity: Are You “Feelin’ It”?
2. Tears in Worship
3. Sunday School

Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes about the church:

‘The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.  As a fresh start she should give away all her endowments to the poor and needy.  The clergy should live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling.  She must take part in the social life of the world, not lording it over men, but helping and serving them.  She must tell men, whatever their calling, what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others.”

What do you think about this statement on the identity and calling of the church?

–

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison

Related posts:

1. Evangelism & Social Activism: On Eliminating the ‘&’
2. Tithing and the New Testament Church
3. Swiping the Offering at Church

Some provocative words from Michael Spencer (aka, ‘Internet Monk’) at his blog this week:

Tithing to a local church … is a practice that I can’t see being scripturally required in any new covenant sense. I was taught my entire life that God commanded me to tithe to my local church. Awareness of the larger needs of the Kingdom, of other ministries, of individuals and even of other causes supported by my church was always laundered through the “tithe to the local church” first rhetoric.

Shocker: I don’t trust many local churches to spend that much money in a kingdom-savvy way. Insurance. Utilities. Salaries. Facilities. With a percentage to “missions.” I can no longer believe that is how I, as a Christian, am to be a steward of my financial resources. My church should help me manage and spend that money by showing me many different ways I can make it count for the Kingdom and teaching me to be a Kingdom investor in all of life. They should teach me to see the world with Kingdom eyes and my resources through the priorities of Jesus, which include the local church but certainly isn’t restricted to it.

A couple of questions that I’d like to discuss:  how do you understand ‘tithing’? Is it a command for the Jesus-community or do you agree with Spencer, that it is thoroughly non-scriptural?  And, perhaps a larger question: what is the relationship between the local church and the ‘kingdom of God’?  How does participation in a local church (whether through financial gifts, serving, passion, sacrifice, etc.) influence or shed light on your participation in the kingdom?

Would love to read your thoughts and interact with you in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Swiping the Offering at Church
2. [Blank] Church
3. Consumerism and the Church

There once was a woman named Ruth, and she was a Moabite.  That is, she was from a mountainous strip of land in Jordan, then called “Moab.”  She can teach us a great deal about real, muscular commitment to relationships.

The Ruth of the Hebrew Scriptures made a commitment to Naomi, her mother-in-law, when her mother-in-law returned home to Bethlehem and Ruth committed to go with her.  You might actually know some of her words.  You hear them often romanticized at weddings.  Here is Ruth, a young, newly widowed girl, and she says this:

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.

These words have been so sentimentalized in weddings that we can hardly understand the heart of what they’re saying.  Ruth is not speaking to some handsome man at the head of an aisle. It’s not some bright June afternoon in a little white church in the middle of a field of wild flowers, her smiling up at him in his crisp tuxedo, with the smell of cologne filling the space between them. There’s no aisle carpeted with roses.  There are no candles here.

Ruth is speaking to her mother in law!  Naomi is this old, wrinkled, wizened-up lady and Ruth is standing on a dusty road at the beginning of a long journey of more dusty roads. She’s got everything she owns stuffed in two plastic bags from Kroger.  She’s at the start of a bleak and unpromising walk into a future that’s full of uncertainty, heading to a place where she will be ridiculed and marginalized and rejected and gossiped about because of her culture (the Jews hated the Moabites).  My former pastor, Steve Elliott sums up Ruth’s words of commitment like this:

• I will go with you to a land where I will be despised for who I am.
• I will forsake all of my upbringing and all the values associated with my culture and I will embrace yours even though I know it will cost me more than I recognize.
• I will embrace a people and a language and a culture that may never embrace me.
• I will live as a widow forever and I will die in a land that will never honor my life and I’ll be buried there as an alien.
• And I will walk into tomorrow with both eyes open, knowing that a relational famine of untold proportions waits for me there.
• And when the well is dry and the crops are not good, when Bethlehem – the city of bread – becomes the city of hungering and waiting on God. When I look across my pillow at only another empty pillow, when my contentment has fled, when my joy has vanished, I will never forsake you.

This kind of commitment to relationships is missing in our present day culture.  Despite the words may use, we tend to commit so much less of ourselves to our relationships, and we tend to give up on them much sooner.  The demise of authentic community is a predictable outcome.  As a pastor and a follower of Jesus, I lament the surface-level commitment we give today to lasting community.  We pay lip-service to a lasting obligation to others, but when squeezed by life’s pressures, we “take our ball and go home.”

The lesson of Ruth is that relationships (friendships, marriages, churches, teams) require a big decision – a “line in the sand” moment that sets the course for the future.  Of course, there will need to be many little decisions along the way that support the big decision; but it must start there.

Here’s to big decisions and muscular commitment and relational health!

I know of other churches that do this, but Tim Stevens blogged about the decision his church made to put “giving kiosks” in their church building.  I will say that my reaction to these “money machines” in a church building has always negative, bordering on disdainful.

What do you think?

Take a minute and read what Tim says about the reasons their church did this.  He points out the low percentage of people under age 40 that carry cash.  If they desire to participate in worship through giving, is the “giving kiosk” simply a natural, culturally-responsive solution?  Does this kind of giving present any problems that you see?

Bottom-line question I’m wrestling with:  does it promote a giving response (and a spirit of giving) consistent with what we see in the New Testament church?

Related posts:

1. [Blank] Church
2. Prayer for Holy Rebels … [Do I Really Want to Do This?]
3. Tithing and the New Testament Church

Lesslie Newbigin explains how the Jesus-message can make sense and have impact on our culture:

How can this strange story of God made flesh, of a crucified Savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world which can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: a congregation which believes it.

For too long, evangelism and social activism have been separated. Followers of Jesus are given the false impression they must choose to be involved with one or the other at a time.

Jesus came with saving love for the whole world. He indwells the church, empowering us to be on mission with him, redeeming the world. He invites us to be a part of his missional community in order to experience his saving love and participate in it.

If that was our view of the larger process called “salvation,” then distinctions like “evangelism” and “social action” would fall away.  Both are integrated in our experience of God’s saving love for the world.  Those who want to know Jesus, whether through our proclamation or through our demonstration, we invite into community.  Those who don’t, we serve in love, fostering peace, joining God in seeking their wholeness.

Related posts:

1. Bonhoeffer on Church, Endowments, Clergy, and Social Life
2. The Saving Life of Christ
3. Prayer for Holy Rebels … [Do I Really Want to Do This?]

I’m beginning to pray for something that just might be filed under the category, “be careful what you ask for!”

As you know, if you’ve been following my blog, the church where I serve as pastor is entering into a major transition.  We’re taking the step of purchasing a building.  And while it is our deep desire to prevent facilities from becoming the focus, I’m cognizant of the danger that we could become “just like every other church;” that is to say, losing what makes us unique, inattentive to our great (co)mission, and spiritually myopic.

C.S. Lewis wrote, “there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence.  So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God, to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.”

This leads me to think we are going to need a few “holy rebels!”  We may come to a point where it is essential to receive loving critique in the tradition of the ancient Hebrew prophets and the first century apostles.  This would be firmly within the biblical tradition of what is sometimes called, critique-from-within.  It’s what Alan Hirsch calls, “holy rebellion.”

Of course, I hope we never need it; but if we do, it will most likely come from someone outside the leadership team.  My sense is that if we lose our way, even slightly, God may need to raise up others in the community with a spirit-led prophetic voice.  So, I’m asking God to always keep us attentive to the Spirit’s guidance, even if it comes in the form of critique!

Here’s my prayer:

Kind Father, if, in the life of this church, we create or allow structures, systems, unwritten “rules,” or anything that hinders your kingdom purposes, please bless us with holy rebels, empowered by your Spirit, to challenge the status quo and lead us to an even greater experience of life in your Son, Jesus.  Amen.

Related posts:

1. Meditative Prayer

Ben Myers has posted an interesting report on his visit to a mega-church in Sydney, Australia (Hillsong).  It got me thinking about the use of “the screen” in Christian worship gatherings.  Here is a re-post of the part of his blog that’s gotten to me:

… for me, the most interesting aspect of the service was the dominance of the screen. Every moment of the service, from start to finish, was broadcast on to huge screens around the auditorium. When the pastor spoke, he would address one of the many cameras. When the worship-leader spoke to the congregation, he would speak into the camera. Even the heartfelt altar call at the end of the service was addressed to the camera. During the worship songs, the screens would be filled with the faces of those gorgeously happy singers and musicians; then a camera would pan across the crowd of raised hands before cutting back to a shot of the worship-leader’s face, full of adoration and passionate sincerity.

What made this so interesting was that the songs’ lyrics were also superimposed over these images; so if you wanted to join in singing, you had no choice but to turn your face away from the altar (if there had been an altar), away from the congregation, even away from the flesh-and-blood performers on stage. In short, participation in worship was possible only through the mediation of the screen. The entire worship service was orchestrated primarily as an event of the screen, so that one could take part only by turning towards the screen and participating in its projected images of worship.

The Protestant reformers used to complain that the Roman Catholic priest was “doing worship” for the whole congregation, standing in their place and performing everything on their behalf – and a similar complaint is often made about today’s Pentecostal megachurches. But I think the function of the screen raises a much more interesting problem: not merely that the congregation is worshipping vicariously through the onstage performers, but that the entire worship event is actually taking place onscreen.

At this morning’s service, even the worship leader himself was not a direct participant in the worship event – the real worshipping subject was his onscreen image. The flesh-and-blood performer participates in this worship only indirectly, through a vicarious participation in his own projected image – a larger-than-life image which becomes the bearer of transcendence. Similarly, the congregation is involved in worship only vicariously, through the mediation of the screen. This is an instance in which the screen comes to possess more ontological depth than the flesh-and-blood world itself; the projected image becomes “more real” than reality.

What do you think?  Is he being hyper-critical?  Couldn’t we make an argument that use of “the screen” in worship is simply our modern day version of using the printing press in order to facilitate worship and participation?  Does “the screen” de-personalize worship?  Look forward to your thoughts …

Related posts:

1. Lesslie Newbigin: Power of a Believing Community
2. Tears in Worship