Shavuot and Acts 2

I accidentally prepared for the wrong reading when working on the last video for the New Testament Experience. I figured I'd do a brain dump here and share the wealth.

Pentecost (literally the fiftieth day) is the beginning of the Jewish festival of Shavuot. This is the religious festival that was all about celebrating God giving the law (torah) to the people of Israel (which coincidentally happened fifty days after the Exodus).

If you remember your flannelgraph correctly, you may remember seeing a fire at the top of the mountain. This passage (along with Ezekiel 1-2) is one of the theophanies (visible manifestation of God) that the Jewish people read during the feast of Shavuot. The other main reading for this Festival comes from the book of Ruth. That is interesting because the book of Ruth foreshadows the incorporation of the Gentiles into the people of God as she is not a Jew but a Moabite (who are forbidden in Deuteronomy 23:3 to be part of the Jewish people... they are to be totally separate).

What a beautiful setting for the giving of the Holy Spirit! The festival celebrates the moment when all the people saw a fire on top of the mountain and received the Law that was to help them cover their sin and live in right relation to God once again. Now, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the fire is no longer on the mountain, but separates and rests on them individually. It fills them and they cannot help but cry out! The law that is being celebrated in Shavuot is being fulfilled before their very eyes.

Binding, Losing, and the Presence of Jesus

Did you realize that "wherever two or three are gathered" is talking about far more than what happens in prayer?

The Baptism of Jesus (Jewish/Cultural Background)

This is the first of several videos that will explore background information related to the readings for the New Testament Experience series that the Newsong service at my church is doing.  This is about Jesus Baptism found in Matthew 3.  So much information it was hard to decide!  Please email me questions: cumcyouthpastor@gmail.com and subscribe to email updates at the right side!

A New Face for an Old Blog

I have been blogging on some version of unpretending for several years.  As my horizons have expanded, I have begun to contribute in many places.  I have decided to move JeremyWords.com to be a blog that contains most of all the content I create.  Unpretending (currently unpretending.blogspot.com  soon to have a proper url) is going to have a very specific focus.

Over the last couple of months I have had several conversations with people (especially college students) who want some sort of place to receive deep conversation and teaching about scripture and the Christian faith.  Since we do not do a whole lot at our church for college ministry, I am hoping that this can be a place for our college students as well as other interested students and adults can recieve that sort of information on a semi-regular basis.  My commitment for this blog from hence forth will be to the following:

1. Honest, academic information - Meaning you will not find a lot about the latest Christian inspirational book.  I will do the research required to provide depth rather than re-re-digested content.
2. Short - I will not write dissertations here.  I am going to get to the point and leave out as much as possible so that it is easily digestable... think two-three double spaced pages.
3. Questions - I am not here to provide answers.  I am much more interested in questions and difficult ideas that make us wrestle with God.
4. Little Application - I will have some sort of bringing it back into the real world time, but will focus most of my energy on the content itself.

We start with background information for a study our church is doing where people are trying to read through the Bible in 9 weeks.  

Art and the Wailing Wall

The last several months have been great in our youth ministry. We have seen several new ministries started by our teens, and some great creative offerings. Becca has been similarly moved and expressed her thoughts far more eloquently than I on her blog; however, as I was walking through our youth facility today, I swelled with pride for the ministry that they are doing. Below are several pictures that alternate between honest cries to God and artistic expressions by our Photography team that delve into being filled up and poured out.

The wailing wall is something that was suggested in The Kingdom Experiment. We are using this amazing small group resource for some of our life groups, and mine decided to do this community option suggested in it. All we did was tape the words wailing wall to an existing wall along with a cup to hold pens and some post-its. We each posted a prayer request to the wall and allowed God to do the rest. The result is a place where students are crying out like the Israelites in the desert. My heart is broken every time I read the new notes, and I am forced to my knees by the weight of their concerns. I guess my prayer now is, "God hear the cries of your people." Stop by sometime and join your prayers with ours.

Amen.

A New Entry to Faith

I have been in many conversations with people about this idea, and this post is a sort of working out of those conversations in my ow mind. Credit for a lot of this stuff goes to my conversation cohorts: Nick Melton, Jim Kinder, Brad Boland, Jeff Spiler Amanda McNeal, Tobi McMillan, Jon Spallino, Becca Griffin, Bill McLarty, and Chris Folmsbee.

Here is the idea I grew up with regarding how someone comes to faith. We all start from a place of utter lostness to the Gospel. Then, through our life we are exposed to the concepts of God. We consider them, and eventually come to a place where we can sign on to being a Christian. In other words, we come to a place where we can believe the claims about faith made by the Christian organization we are involved with. Once we get there, we begin to grow in the faith learning more and more. We hope that as we grow in faith, our actions begin to change and look more and more like the actions of Jesus.

This conception of salvation and faith asserts that God woos through and to the teachings about Him. This system would say that these teachings are the best way to understand who God is, and when delivered through the community of faith lead the masses into the heart of God. After accepting by faith these concepts, the life of faith is about working those teachings out in our life.

I believe that this is changing. I believe that a time is coming, and may already be here, where the most powerful entry point into the life of faith in Jesus is not through doctrine, teachings, or even a powerful evangelist. I believe that the power of words in bringing people to place were they are able to give their lives to Jesus is waning. I would suggest that the process is turning on its head.

Here's the change: instead of faith leading to action, it is action leading to faith. People begin living out the teachings and life of Jesus (whether they would characterize it as this or not). Through their actions, they begin to be wooed by God through their experience. Then at some point, they discover that what they now believe as a result of their actions matches up with the person and teachings of Jesus and make the conscious decision to identify themselves with that faith. At that point, the cognitive side begins and is discerned and interpreted through the lens of their experience rather than the other way around.

Just as everything else, there is truly "no new thing under the sun." This has been happening, but has not been seen as the primary method. I believe that this needs to be the case soon, but not to the exclusion of the earlier pattern.

This changes how the church approaches ministry and evangelism. The primary "invite your friends" events are no longer hang-out or worship but mission. Instead of having bunches of small groups who are primarily focused on study with a once a month mission project, we have small groups of people ministering in the community each week who have a once a month study project. This is only adapting the old model. I'm sure that this has new innovations ready to be born as it is granted validity as a path to faith.

Just as interesting as this change in ministry are the implications that flow from this mindset. To a person who experiences faith in this way, anyone who does not actively live their faith ideals is seen as someone who has not met the most basic, entry into faith. To a person who experiences faith in this way, success is not judged on worship attendance but on active ministry. In a sense, one could imagine a church who resources this type of model with an actual priority on the serving piece having more people involved in service than in a worship service.

Do we need to jump ship and start a new church? Not yet, and maybe never. Do we need to convince our existing people that this is the correct method? Not really, it is growing on its own. Neither is better, they just have different emphases. We need to recognize this transition, and be aware of our bias towards the current model and try to experiment with what ministry through this emerging model looks like.

The Way Ahead (for the Church)

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about what the way ahead is going to look like for the Church. You may ask... why me? Well, my only answer for that is that anyone to whom that question occurs should think about it. If that person is in a leadership position in a church, they should think even harder. If that person feels called by God to bring renewal to that same Church, they should not stop thinking about it. I am all three. I think about this a lot.

I think best when I break things down into smaller observations (like thin slicing). After thinking them through, I can usually draw out some salient connections. That is what is going to happen here. Well, that AND this is all about what we SHOULD be doing and where we SHOULD be heading. If you want a list of things we need to stop, that post was just recently written so that this one was cleanly positive.

A practical, active faith

For too long, faith for most people has been about sitting and listening. For too long, we have received and received and received until it has begun to feel totally normal to be spiritually self-centered. I believe that when Jesus said "thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven" he was announcing a core tenant of our faith. He was talking about an outwardly-focused group of God-Lovers who were actively trying to make earth a little bit more like heaven and a little less like the messed up place they used to live. Paul said, let me show you my faith by what I do. AMEN!

We need to DO something. There are hurting, hungry, naked, cold, and ignorant people in a world where there is more than enough food, fabric and books for those not to be problems! I'm not talking about launching multi-national non-profit corporations. I am talking about you and I taking some sandwiches to hungry people downtown, or sending vitamins to an orphanage in Africa.

Small, Organic Community

I think that the way ahead includes a renewed focus on the small. By that I do not mean arbitrarily throwing complete strangers into a small group where they watch some rich pastor on a screen. I mean friends going to get coffee and talking about the Bible. I mean a couple of families finding ways to pray for their neighbors. I mean those groups coming together to worship and break bread together. There's an interesting thing called the Rule of 150 or Dunbar's number. The Rule of 150 basically says that because of several factors (some of which are biological) the largest effective community size is 150. Once it grows larger, people feel anonymous and disconnected. I believe that churches should find ways to respect this rule, and try not to have community gatherings (like weekly worship services) exceed 150. This is not to say that churches cannot be larger than 150, but that larger churches should have as their goal to be gatherings of many 150 groups.

Why? Because when you are in a smaller gathering, you feel like you are part of what is happening. You feel like your presence is missed. You feel like you are NEEDED. That encourages members who are not passive card-punchers but actively-involved shareholders. This is a section that will deserve its own post soon, but I will stop here for now.

A Return to Mysticism.

We believe that, though we are mortals, we can reach out and commune with the creator of the universe. That is a mystical belief. Don't get me wrong, I love science, but our faith exists in the realm of the mystic. For too long we have ignored communing with the Almighty through the ancient practices of Christian mystics and have lost the insight and wonder those practices afford. It is time to recover our mystical roots. It is time to spend an hour in silent meditation on the scriptures. It is time to learn how to truly listen to the voice of God. It is time to follow as the Almighty leads us into places of divine union.

A Primitive Faith

Throughout the centuries there have been movements (Wesley's methodist groups being one of those) that have reinterpreted the message of Christ to a new culture. One of the things I have noticed in my study is that many, if not all, share this idea of a return to what they call the "primitive" faith. By primitive the reformers and theologians have not meant backwards, uneducated, or any other negative connotation we have; rather, they have been calling for a return to Christianity in its original form. This is the same call that was heralded by Hybels, Warren, and others as an "Acts 2" faith. The goal is to recover something that was lost along the path that our religion has taken from Jerusalem to the Internet.

What has been lost? I see a couple right now, though I am sure there are many others. They are the concluding two sections.

Faith Rooted in Heritage and History

This is not just our heritage from the Gospels on, but our roots with Abraham Isaac and Jacob. There was a clear connection, and struggle at times, with the Jewish faith. In fact many of our rituals/sacraments were originally being performed by Jesus and His disciples in a Jewish setting. The baptism was a mikveh. The communion was a passover meal. And on and on.

This is one reason why so many people latch on to Rob Bell's rabbinical teachings. We are hungering for a faith that is rooted in something more than audience analysis and market research. We want to experience the Rock of Ages and see our part in His epic saga. Our teaching and discussion needs to engage with our full, ancient history as much as possible in the most interesting ways. I say everyone should decide on their favorite Rob Bell-type history-rich teacher/preacher and get that teacher's recommended reading list. And read it of course.

A United Body of Christ

There is nothing more odd to me than the sometimes hair-splitting, sometimes joking and sometimes venomous separations that exist within the Body of Christ. When I read the writings of the early church fathers, I see a constant conviction to ONE church. The people closest in time to Jesus' incarnation saw this as something worth fighting and sacrificing for. Huge compromises and incredibly long discussions centered around preventing any sort of significant split or schism.

Sometimes it seems like we couldn't be further from that commitment. What does that breed? The competition that I address in the post "10 Things Churches Need to Stop." I believe we need to rekindle the passion to break down the walls that separate Protestants and Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from Messianic Jews and come together as the Body of Christ. I think this diverse palette of expressions all supporting each other and coming together to make positive changes in our world will be more of a witness to the power of God than almost anything we can do.

Is this naive? Probably. Is this overly optimistic? Definitely. But this is the way it needs to be! Those who feel this way need to start acting together. We need to start collaborating. By our actions of unity we will expose the foolishness of separation and live into what I think was a clear passion of Jesus, the disciples, the apostles and the early Church Fathers (Jn 17:21, 1 Cor 1:10, etc). Will we ever again live in a world where there is a single church with a single man at its helm? Probably not, but we can connect these severed limbs and become a viable organism again. It will be hard; it will take a lot of work; it will make everyone involved repeatedly furious. But, it is necessary if we are to be the Church God desires.

The Way Ahead

Here's what I am proposing. Since it is clear to almost every person considering the issue that we are either in the middle of or coming to the end of a huge cultural shift from the modern age to the postmodern one, we need to change now. I believe we need to start acting so that we can make some mistakes and find the right path as soon as possible that leads to a clear expression of Christianity in a postmodern era. Do we abandon all that has worked in the past? Absolutely Not! Much of that is needed to help us make the transitions, and I believe a good bit will need only minor tweaks.

We cannot afford to allow our faith to become irrelevant and die because we were afraid to try new things. There is no excuse for our fear of the unknown to stop us from reaching a world full of people who need Jesus but have no interest in the current expression of Christianity. I don't know about you, but I refuse to watch the only viable hope for mankind suffocate because we are afraid some people might join a different church. Nor will I allow this transition to be as horribly wounding as the Great Schism or the Reformation. This must be a healing. It must be a rejoining.

I guess what I'm saying is: not on my watch!

10 Things Churches Need to Stop

Before I start, I must be clear about where I am coming from. I have two things from which to draw... a good bit of experience (12 or 13 years) as a professional minister and I am part of the next generation of leaders whose mindset will have to see the way forward. Nothing more, nothing less. This post is not about my current church. It is about all churches. It is about my heart for renewal in my denomination. It is about trying to be part of the solution. Although the church I am serving is doing quite well, I see churches failing all around me and am concerned for the longevity of Christianity as we know it if churches do not change. My whole goal is to find the larger things that are hindering us from remaining in the center of the movement of God in the World. My next post will be more about that.

10 Things Churches Need to Stop

1. Tracking Spiritual Growth - Spiritual growth could possibly be the most individually unique thing there is. When have you ever met someone who responded to the question, "How did you grow closer to God?" with something like, "I was muddling through, until I met my church's Goal of [insert arbitrary measure of spiritual growth here] and began to grow closer to God?"

The truth is: God is pursuing us! He takes what we offer and builds on it. I believe that we experience God the way he made us to experience Him. Some people have a super-consistent personality and some people have a much more scattered personality. Therefore, some people will get up at the same time every day, do the same spiritual practice, and grow step by step. Others will do something in the morning, then something the next day in the evening, and then nothing. The next day, they will do two hours of intense something. Who's to say which is better? Not Me! We need to stop trying to quantify spiritual growth so that we can measure our church's effectiveness. We know the things that connect people to God... those haven't changed in thousands of years! Why not just try getting people to grow rather than getting them to conform to some arbitrary, rigid structure we have created?

2. Being Church-Program Pitch Men - I recently noticed a colleague in ministry's Facebook stream... every post was some variation on: "I am so [insert annoying superlative/adjective combo] about [insert name of church program] because of [insert reason or mysterious saying that you would have to come to find out] see you there at [insert time of program]." It made me acutely aware of how much of my passion and energy was spent promoting our programs instead of really displaying the amazingness of who God is. I felt guilty.

This is mostly directed at professional ministers. If the only reason people are coming is because they received three phone calls, four passionate pleas from the pulpit, three letters, two reminder cards, and one door hanger, the program isn't meeting a need! Why not take all that energy and proclaim the brilliance of our creator?

3. Labeling - Look, the only people who know what "missional" or "attractional" or "ecclesial" mean are uber-church-geeks. These terms are as useless as they are meaningless. Our world is in a state of change (see here and here) we do not have a solution, or know exactly how we will need to do ministry in the future to minister in that world. Attaching to one of these ideas as if it is the fulfillment of something is just short of crazy, and broadcasting that to the world is even less rational.

As an aside... we need to start using words for our programs that mean the same thing to non-Christians as they do to Christians. For example, only Christians know that "contemporary" refers to using screens and songs written or revised after 1985 rather than something/someone not being dead.

4. Showing one generation the door - We need the wisdom of the older generations, the stability of the middle generations and the vision of the younger ones to be the Body of Christ. What would happen if we stopped defending the sub-interests of one group or another and sought ways to sacrifice our preferences for the health and unity of the church?

5. Segregation/separation - Really? There's less than 5% of your church that are of a different race than you? There are no poor/middle class/rich people in your church? Why have we become so centered on our niche that we cannot worship in gatherings that come anywhere close to resembling the body of Christ? I have no idea how to fix this, but we look like hypocrites when we say that these things do not change a person's standing before God, but worship in homogenous groups. I am definitely part of the problem. I am praying and thinking about this. I would love to hear your solutions.

6. Wasting Resources - The world is hungry; most of the chocolate in the checkout line was harvested in part by slave labor; the fourth leading cause of death in the third world can be solved with sixteen bricks and a bit of mortar; there are 2 million children in the commercial sex trade; even though the earth produces enough food for everyone to eat well, a child dies every five seconds from hunger. If this is the case, why is there a church with a custom-made sony screen that splits in two on a track to then become two screens on the side instead of the middle? Why do we spend so much time on petty problems like the color of the flowers outside the church? Why are we not sending a bottle of over the counter medicine per family per month to people who need it?

7. Building - Let's face it, with very few exceptions, we are not building works of art that proclaim God's glory. We are building glorified Wal-Marts or office buildings. If Churches need to expand, there are plenty of those buildings that are sitting empty and need to be used. What's better, if things go south, a church is never in the place of having to keep on going because they are obligated to pay a mortgage! That may sound extreme to some, but when we lived in California, I knew of MANY churches, with 10-20 members, that were renting rooms to whoever was willing so that they could pay the mortgage.

8. Making and Publicizing 5-year plans - Things are simply changing to quickly to be able to see that far into the future. We need to not commit to long range plans. I believe that we need to become agile and focus on the more immediate 12-24 months so that we can respond to this tumultuous time. That is not to say that we become directionless or stop thinking ahead. Instead, I suggest that we keep our longer-range plans close to the vest so that they can be tweaked or scrapped without everyone feeling like an earthquake just happened.

9. Mislabeling fun, Christian-attracting events as "outreach events" - We need to be reaching out to a hurting world, but an Easter pageant or Christian concert just doesn't do that. That reaches Christians. While it is important to have times where we have fun and enjoy the creativity of the body of Christ, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that these fulfill our call to the non-christian world. In short, we need to find ways to introduce a hurting world to the Almighty Healer.

We need to be about identifying needs and then using our resources to meet those needs. Over the last month, I have watched as students in our youth group have started everything from prayer groups at their schools to collecting unused food at the end of the day at their schools to give to the hungry. It takes very little effort to find a need and meet it, but it does take effort. It takes a transformation in our mind from faith being about me receiving to faith being about me giving.

10 Being Competitive - I recently observed a couple of ministers intentionally targeting committed believers (at several other churches) who were plugged in and passionate about their faith community. There is not other way to say it except that this is absolutely wrong! The field is so vast, the lost are so many that it is wrong at the least and sinful at the most to intentionally compete with other churches for the found. If churches are doing this, they must stop, and turn their eyes from the barns to the fields! Everyone has people who move from one place to another, but when enticing those believers is your growth strategy... it has to stop.

I am looking forward to a post I am working on called "The Way Ahead" in which I look back on all that God has done in our Engage in the Movement campaign (not capital). In a way this is the mirror image of that post.

A Shift in Authority

I have mentioned in another post about the periodic cultural shifts that have occurred in the Church throughout history. It seems that about every 500 years or so, we have to refigure who we are and how we understand our faith because of fundamental cultural shifts that are happening. I was pondering this as I was rereading (listening is more accurate) the book Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren. His goal in the book is to find a way that we can allow the multiplicity of doctrines to not divide us, but unite us.

That being said, he was pointing out that in the medieval church authority resided in the church. If someone asked why you believed something, you said that you believed it because the church or priest told you. He went on to describe how in the modern time, the authority shifted to the Bible. However, we are now entering time when the focus of the authority for belief will shift again, and I believe I can see a bit of the direction it is taking.

I believe that the focus will shift towards the community of believers. In other words, when someone asks why you believe something, you will not say because the church says so, or even because the Bible says so, but because the community (body of Christ) has consensus. This feeling comes from several places.

One of the more recent developments in church History is the movements called the "waves of the Holy Spirit" From these moments several thriving denominations (though they may not want that label applied to them) have arisen. One of the key differences between these movements and current mainline denominations is their comfort with the revelation of the Spirit over and above (though generally not in contradiction to) the Scriptures. In addition to this is a growing cultural trust in the "Wisdom of the crowd" (think Wikipedia and Digg) which basically says that if enough people agree on something, it is probably right. Combining these in the realm of faith, you get a system of authority that is based on a melding of divine revelation and wisdom of the crowd.

I am not saying that I agree with this idea or even that I believe it is inevitable, but is feels generally correct in where it points. Like it or not, there will be a shift in the basis of authority within Christianity over the next fifty years or so. It would behoove all Christians to pay attention and help guide this to a place that is healthy, sustainable, and relatively orthodox. If not, no complaining when it doesn't go the way you want it to later!

Mary, the Garden, and a New Eden-View

I am preaching (or preached depending on when you read this) this Easter Sunday (7am!) on John 20. One thing that I did not (or will not) have enough time to talk about is this interesting bit of the story.

First things first, John is not a haphazard author. He is very intentional about how and where he uses words and details. That being said, there are two interesting qualities about the resurrection narrative that we will miss if we aren’t careful. When talking about the tomb where Jesus is buried John says, “At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid.” (John 19:41) When Mary is in the tomb chatting it up with the angels, she turns and “thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’" (John 20:15b).

What is the obscure detail we hear? Garden, garden, gardener. John is trying to point toward something. He is trying to paint the resurrection as something far beyond that moment. He is painting it as the birthing of something sown at the very beginning of The Story. It appears that he is announcing a return of the gardener… a return to (of) the garden.

How can that be? Wasn’t the Garden of Eden perfect? If it was, and this is about returning to the garden, then something messed up because we all know that our world is far from perfect. I think there are two possible solutions (both of which could be simultaneously true).

First is the way many would instinctively deal with this. We would say that John was talking about the fixing or returning to a spiritual state that had been broken since the fall of man and can now be mended through Jesus. In other words, Jesus’ death and resurrection allows us to have true forgiveness and a relationship with God the Father.

Another way to understand it has its roots in the Hebrew language. Our understanding of the garden flows from a Greek dualistic view of the world (light and dark, good and evil, perfect and imperfect, etc.). This was not the way the Jewish people viewed the world. Without chasing that rabbit trail, we can recognize that they have a fundamentally different view of some things than we do. Perfection is one of them.

The Hebrew language does not have a word for “perfect.” In fact, the word we generally translate as perfect (tam/tamam) means complete/whole, and is relational meaning suitable/mature. In other words, it is not a static state.

In the Greek understanding the Garden of Eden must exist in a relatively static state of perfection because any change would mean one of the two states was not perfect. However, if we look at it through Hebrew eyes, we see that the Garden was suitable, mature. It was complete in the sense that someone who has completed puberty is a finished with their physical maturing and ready (physically) to create offspring or in the sense that the turkey has completed cooking because the little plastic thingy popped out. The Garden in this understanding is no longer perfect in the Greek way of thinking, but good. (I think it uses that term somewhere in the story)

That changes things. When Jesus rises from the dead, it doesn’t instantly bring guilt and condemnation in a new level because now we can be perfect (again?). Rather, it brings hope that we do not have to continue in a downward spiral. We do not have to fade into the darkness as the stone rolls over the cave. No! We can break out into glorious light as Jesus brings us once again to a place where we can mature spiritually. Where we are no longer stuck in some infinite spiritual adolescence (yikes!), but can get past the voice changes and tripping and get to the real life of being a follower of God the Father.

Like I said, two options. Both can be true. Or either. You must listen to Him, and I trust that the Holy Spirit is powerful enough to reveal the truth to your soul. As for me, I’m always discovering His truth and my own error.