Sojourn

Contrasting Church Experiences

I was particularly aware of a stark contrast this past weekend.  Sunday morning my wife and I drove to the building where our church gathers.  We walked in and waded through the two-way crowd of people, one lane rushing out from the 9:00 service and one lane rushing in to the 11:00 service.  We took our seats, smiled at a few people, and the service began.  The music was good.  The sermon was good.  And then it was over.  We waded through the crowd of people and, without any real conversation with anyone, ended up in the car driving back home where we later spent the rest of the day watching television, surfing the internet, and playing a computer game.

One day earlier, on Saturday, I received a complimentary copy of the new book, Reimagining Church, by Frank Viola.  While Lynn was in Target I read the introduction, specifically, this letter written to Frank by an international marketing and business consultant.

I was raised in a Christian home and attended church every time the doors were open.  I knew how to live and behave like a Christian should.  You might say I was the poster child.

Late in high school and early college, I met some Christians who sparked a passion in me that I never knew was possible.  I saw their passion to know Christ in deep ways, and more than that, they actually seemed to know Christ much more deeply than I.  In meeting them, I discovered that my own faith and knowledge of Christ was very shallow.  You see, I realized that although I enjoyed going to church to be with my family and friends, I really viewed church as an obligation to endure in order to "hang out" with them before and after Sunday school, services, or youth group meetings.

I quietly sat through sermon after sermon hoping it would hurry up so we could go to the restaurant afterwards.  Minutes after the sermons I couldn't actually remember what was said.  I already heard that I needed to go to church more, I needed to tithe more, I needed to read my Bible more, and I needed to witness more.  It wasn't until I met these other Christians that I realized that all of the previous churches that I was a member of didn't fulfill my thirst for Jesus.  They gave me rules and regulations instead of something that gave life.  Instead of growing in Christ, I was "dying on the vine," filled with fear, shame, and inadequacy.  I didn't actually enjoy talking about the Lord.  Nor was I near as bold to share Jesus with nonbelievers.

I would ask myself, "If I was such a good Christian like I thought I was, why do I feel so far behind the curve?"  The more I was with these believers, the more I wanted to know Christ like they did.  I was drawn to Christ like a moth to a streetlight.  I gradually began to spend more time with them and started going to their meetings.  Their meetings were free and open.  There was no liturgy.  There were no clergy.  They didn't actually need them.  There were plenty of believers who had encountered the Lord and had encouraging things to share with the others.

They didn't need someone to give them permission to speak.  They didn't need someone to buy them in rules and lifeless duties.  They wrote many of their own songs.  They prayed together, taking turns talking to Jesus unrehearsed from the heart.  They met together as if Jesus was actually in the room.  They treated each other like a family that loved each other.

After just a short wile, I realized that this organic experience of Chrst was exactly what was missing from my own experience.  I began to crave gathering with these believers.  I would go to their meetings and see a much bigger Lord than just someone who died for my sins.  I would see Him in much deeper ways.

I was no longer satisfied with watching a performance.  In this organic meeting, I began to want to share with my brothers and sisters what I had seen of the Lord.  Instead of being passive, I now thought it was easy to function and contribute.  Every one of our meetings was free to be different.  Sometimes we sang for hours.  Sometimes the believers were bursting at the seams to share what Jesus had done in their lives that week.  Sometimes we revered the Lord's awesomeness in silence.  No one had to tell us to do these things.  The Spirit was moving in these ways and they just spontaneously happened.  We often ate together as one family.  Sometimes we shared scriptures with each other.  Other times we enacted scenes and stories from the Bible that shed light on Christ.

We met all throughout the week.  In the mornings, the brothers would find another brother or two, and the sisters would get together with sisters.  And we would pursue the Lord in prayer and contemplate Scripture together.  We would start our day with Christ.  In the evenings, wome of the members would open up their homes and share Christ over dinner.  We had brothers and sisters meetings where we could collectively decide on matters relating to the church.  and we would share responsibilities for caring for one another.

If there were no pressing needs, we would just sing to the Lord and pursue His presence together.  If there was a member in need, we would think of ways to help them.  Sometimes we would just plan ways to bless each other for the fun of it.  Sometimes the single people would babysit for the parents and give them a night out on the town.  Sometimes when one of the brothers or sisters went away on a long trip, the whole church would show up at the airport to greet them upon their return.  And we would have a church meeting right in the airport.

There was always something happening where you could share Christ and love the Lord together.  We would also have spontaneous times of outreach to the lost.  Everything we did, the Spirit was free to move and change the direction of the event.  When we did get together, I saw a Christ glorified and magnified.  We were constantly making new discoveries in Him.  Every time I saw Him in a new way, I wanted to see more.  The feeling of guilt, shame, and unworthiness was gone.  I had a passion to know Christ in deeper ways.

I am through with dying on the vine.  I have now seen the freedom that Christians can really have in meeting together organically, just like the early church did.

Watch Me Daddy!

I spent most of my years growing up in a little town in Illinois named after some guy with the last name of Willis who had started a coal mine. The town grew up around the coal mine and flourished to a population of a couple thousand. But by the time I arrived, the mine had closed, businesses had left, and a remnant of 600 or so people were living simple lives surrounded by alternating patches of corn fields and jagged landscapes that bore the scars of being violently raped by thoughtless strip-mining machinery.

We lived in a double-wide on a couple acres of land just south of town in a little neighborhood called Dolly Hill (I assume someone named Dolly used to live there at some point). There were four of us; mom, dad, my younger sister, and me. When you walked into the front door of our home you were walking straight into the kitchen. Take a few steps and look to the right and you would have seen the sliding glass door that led into a large backyard. Look to the left, and you would be about to enter the family room; fully equipped with a color console television, an Atari 2600 system, a C.B. radio in the corner shadowed with bulletin boards on the walls holding postcards from people in far away places whose voices had at some point crackled through the radio speakers clearly enough to be able to share mailing addresses, and a big cabinet housing a AM/FM radio, turntable, 8-track cassette deck and an assortment of 8-track tapes by Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Billy "Crash" Craddock, and several others whose music still makes my skin crawl.

Standing in the kitchen with the living room to the left and the sliding glass door to the right, you would then look straight ahead and behold the architecture common to all double-wide homes of that day; the long narrow hallway leading to the bedrooms. This was the place - the hallowed ground of athletic achievement - where I would demonstrate to my parents, my grandparents, and anyone else who cared to humor me, just how fast I could run. I think I even had people clock me with a stopwatch as I would run as fast as I could 30 feet down the hall and 30 feet back . I remember one particular time I had just gotten a new pair of tennis shoes and was sure that these shoes alone would knock about 2.7 seconds off the time it took me to run the orange shag-carpeted track. I remember many times taking position at the end of the hallway and saying, "Watch me daddy," before launching like the six-million dollar man down the narrow corridor.

As kids, we want our parents to watch us perform; but only when we know we are going to perform well. Hearing the loving affirmation of a proud parent is to the soul what oxygen is to the body. I remember a lot of those times when I knew I was doing something well and loved to hear the praise of my parents. But I remember other times when I was ashamed and embarrassed for my parents to be watching. Little League baseball is a good example. I played one season and during that whole season I only got one hit; and that one wasn't quite what the coach wanted. I hit a fastball with my left eye socket. As if my baseball career wasn't embarrassing enough already, I was forced to wear this stupid looking protective helmet for the rest of the season because the doctor said my eye would explode if that happened again...or something like that.

Not only was I embarrassed for myself, but I remember being embarrassed for my parents. I could almost feel what they had to have been feeling knowing that they were surrounded by other parents in the stands who were biting their tongues to keep from saying something like, "Man, your kid really sucks."

I'm 40 years old and I still think about these things. I still enjoying hearing my parents say, "Good job!" or "We're proud of you!" But my thoughts these days tend to go more in the direction of wondering what God thinks of me. There are times when I'm happy to know that God is watching me. I pray, "Watch me Daddy!" when I'm making a strong effort to be more sensitive toward my wife. "Watch me Daddy!" is easy for me to say when I'm standing in church singing a song or when we're going to a particular passage of scripture and I'm the first one in the row to get there. When I received my ordination as an elder in the Free Methodist Church I thought, "Watch me daddy!"

But then there are other times when He is watching, but I wish he wasn't. Like the time (okay...timeS) when everything in me wanted to flip off the guy who was driving like an idiot in front of me. I would prefer He not be watching as my fuse grows shorter and shorter with "Wanda The Wonder Slug" who is taking a half hour to check out the two people in front of me at Wal-Mart. See...I just did it again. I called that cashier a name. Hopefully He won't read this blog.

What does God think of me? I mean really...what does He really, really think and feel when He observes my life, my heart, my mind. I know all of the theologically correct things to think and say. "There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven" (okay, that one's from a bumper sticker). But I gotta tell you, there are a lot of times that I find myself wishing that I could just meet God at Starbucks some morning and spend a couple of hours just laying it all out on the table. Surely there have got to be times when He is just flat out pissed off at me...right? That may have been a bit irreverant. See how adept I am at this?

Mike Bickle asks some of the same questions in his book After God's Own Heart. In chapter four he invites us to ponder:

"How does God feel most of the time? Is He bored? Worried? Blase? Happy? Concerned? Detached? Engaged? Mad, glad, or sad? It sounds lighthearted, but it's one of the most important questions of our entire spiritual journey. How does God feel when He looks at you? What wells up in His heart when His eyes turn upon your life? I have asked many people this quesion over the years, and they usually respond in one of two ways:

God is mostly mad.
God is mostly sad.

And in both cases, they think it's their fault. Many Christians believe very strongly that God is angry and grieved with each of us.

Mike goes on to illuminate passages of scripture that lead us to the understanding that God is not mostly mad with us nor is he mostly sad with us. He is mostly glad! Deuteronomy 30:9 says, "The Lord your God will make you abound in all the work of your hand...For the Lord will again rejoice over you for good as He rejoiced over your fathers." Zephaniah 3:17 is another that he points to, which says, "He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing."

These are good. But there's another scripture that pretty much settles the issue for me. It reveals to me the incredibly understanding nature of God. It helps me to understand that there is nothing about me, my character, my weaknesses, my future sins that can surprise God. There will never be a moment when God will say something like, "Well, if I had known you were going to mess up like THAT I would never have wasted my time with you." There is nothing in my past that He hasn't seen. There is nothing in my future that He doesn't already know about. And because of that, I can rest in the reality that the same love and affirmation and acceptance I feel when singing a song in church will be unshaken in my worst, darkest moments of human frailty.

Praise the Lord, I tell myself; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, I tell myself, and never forget the good things he does for me. He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases. He ransoms me from death and surrounds me with love and tender mercies.
He fills my life with good things. My youth is renewed like the eagle's! The Lord gives righteousness and justice to all who are treated unfairly.

He revealed his character to Moses and his deeds to the people of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious; he is slow to get angry and full of unfailing love. He will not constantly accuse us, nor remain angry forever. He has not punished us for all our sins, nor does he deal with us as we deserve. For his unfailing love toward those who fear him is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth.

He has removed our rebellious acts as far away from us as the east is from the west. The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him. For he understands how weak we are; he knows we are only dust.

Our days on earth are like grass; like wildflowers, we bloom and die. The wind blows and we are gone - as though we had never been here. but the love of the Lord remains forever with those who fear him. His salvation extends to the children's children of those who are faithful to his covenant, of those who obey his commandments!

Living the Questions

"Living the questions runs counter to the mainstream of Christian ministry that wants to impart knowledge to understand, skills to control, and power to conquer.  In spiritual listening, we encounter a God who cannot be fully understood, we discover realities that cannot be controlled, and we realize that our hope is hidden not in the possession of power but in the confession of weakness."

~Henri Nouwen; Spiritual Direction

Where Has The Wonder Gone?

It's was 8:15 on Sunday morning.  I was finishing a glass of orange juice and bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats while watching the televised service from a church here in Columbus, GA.  The pastor was preaching a message about prayer.  Every few minutes the camera would pan in such a way as to show the faces of band members and choir members behind him.  Occasionally they showed a shot of the people in the congregation.  Here's the dichotomy that struck me. The preacher is talking about the most amazing, powerful, transcendent conversation that can happen in all of the cosmos.  Yet the faces of the people around him are blank and bored, betraying that the minds behind the faces are occupied with a hundred other things of life.  I can somewhat understand the faces as I listen to the sermon of droll jokes and worn-out cliches. But beyond that, they are the faces of men and women who have lost the wonder of a conversation with God.

I can relate.

Several days ago I wrote a post called, Tolerance, Taste, and Spirituality in which I express some of the same feelings of boredom which really are the result of a loss of wonder.  It's easy to lose that wonder when we reduce our relationship with God down to church attendance, ten or twelve "worship" songs, a purely intellectual pursuit of the Divine, and a political agenda every four years.

"All philosophy begins with wonder."  ~ Plato
"Wonder dies with knowledge."  ~Francis Bacon
"Explanation is the termination point of mystery, analysis the death knell of curiosity."  ~ Ravi Zacharias

A while back Lynn picked up a book from the Library written by Ravi Zacharias called "Recapture the Wonder." I finally picked it up one night, read the introduction, and ended up taking it to bed with me where I found it difficult to put down.  In the first chapter he talks about the transition from childhood to adulthood and how much of the enchantment of our childhood vanishes with age.  The difficulties of life strip us of any hope in there being anything beautiful, mystical, and transcendent in our existence. Knowledge tends to leave us convinced that most of what we found fabulously mystical as children is, in fact, logically explainable.

"Deep within every human heart throbs the undying hope that somebody or something will bring a way to retain the wonder."  ~ Ravi Zacharias

Of all places and all peoples on earth where there should be a very real, on-going, experience of that which is mystical and transcendent, should it not be among the people who have been raised to new life by the one who was raised from the dead and sits at the right hand of God in Heaven?"  Shouldn't our times together, as those people, be times in which the drab and painful here-and-now is mysteriously swallowed up in the unexplainable, illogical, yet more-than-real life of a Kingdom not of this world?

How do we recapture this wonder, this reality that life as we know it is a mere echo of that which is real life?  How do we embrace this life, yet see past the foggy mist of our perceived reality to anchor ourselves in that which is truly real?

Sin Boldly

I just happened across a blog called, "Today at the Mission."  In one post the author gives a brief reflection on a book entitled Sin Boldly - A Field Guide for Grace.  It sounds like an engaging book.  Hop on over to the blog and see what the author has to say.  Here's an excerpt:

"After a moment's focus I was able to tell where the melody was coming from and looked up to see a House Sparrow perched on a narrow ledge high above the street, warbling with all the joy her tiny heart could ever know, warbling with all the joy in the universe. Grace is often like that - an unexpected moment of joy and wonder amidst the bellow and strain of life. Just when I needed it most, 'Sin Boldly' reminded me that God still sings in the hearts of sparrows, that his grace is still in the world."

Tolerance, Taste, and Spirituality

I love food too much.  But it wasn't always this way.  Growing up as a kid I was a very picky eater.  There are many, many foods today that I love but thought were gross growing up.  I learned once that the reason your tastes change over the years is because of a change in your taste buds.  When you are young, your taste buds are more sensitive, therefore foods with a more powerful flavor can be overwhelming.  But with age, your taste buds loose their sensitivity and those foods become more enjoyable.

I remember walking through the Publix grocery store a couple of weeks ago and picking up a sample of lemon-encrusted tilapia on linquini noodles cooked in wine.  I wanted to pull a coupe on the sample stand and take it over for myself.  It was amazing.  Lynn also makes a fabulous lemon-pepper tilapia which we enjoyed last night.  I'm finding that the more flavorful a food is, the more I am enjoying it while I am becoming more and more bored with foods I used to enjoy.

This thought kind of reminds me of something we were taught in health class in high school when the lessons were about the dangers of drugs.  We were taught that over time, the body builds up a tolerance to certain drugs, so stronger and stronger ones must be sought out for the same high.  On the positive side, the body builds up a tolerance to beneficial drugs over time and we must use stronger and stronger ones to fight illness.

Where am I going with this?

A similar thing has been occurring with me on a spiritual level. When I first became a follower of Christ, my life exploded with new spiritual flavors, tastes, and sensations.  The first few years were amazing.  Nearly every time I went to church I could sense the presence of God all around me and could easily be brought into an intense time of worship.  Listening to sermons or worship songs in my truck or in my home or...anywhere...would often impact me in powerful ways.

I think my spiritual taste buds are losing sensitivity.  I think my heart and mind have built up a tolerance.  Because those same things now leave me feeling empty, tired, and bored.  It's not because I'm losing my faith.  My desire for a holy invasion and occupation of my life is stronger now than ever.    Yet in the context of a typical church service, I am often unmoved, unstirred, and starving for...something.  I don't even listen to Christian music outside of church anymore because it all seems so...cliche.

This is the reason that I'm finding such an attraction to other streams of Christianity, like Celtic Christianity, that lead us into knowing how to experience and live in the presence of God in all of life, not just the ecclesiastical setting.  I've always sensed the presence of God in more powerful ways in nature than in a sanctuary. My most spiritually powerful experiences of community have been in informal gatherings of brothers and sisters around meals and unscripted time together rather than programmed, time-restricted, scheduled small groups.

I would fit very well in a Celtic Christian setting.  Unfortunately, Lynn and I would have to move to Ireland to find it.  The practices and community ethos in Celtic Christian spirituality that have always resonated so deeply with me are not to be found in American church systems and structures.

Let me be clear, that what I am talking about is not about emotionalism.  I really am not interested in the manufactured, anemic emotionalism offered by and practiced in many religious settings.  I'm interested in something much more deep, holy, mind-renewing, and heart-transforming than mere emotionalism.

I know that many, many people are profoundly moved into meaningful relationship with God and others through their church services and programming.  I was once one of them.  So I believe this is more an issue of what God is doing...or is trying to do...to bring me into...something.  Perhaps others have experienced in their walk with Christ what I am experiencing now as I approach 40 years of age in the Bible Belt of America.  If so, I'd love to hear from you.