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Two Flawed Prophets

25 Monday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, revolutionconference

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The Bible is full of material which challenges simplistic interpretations and this is one of them. It is a tale of two prophets: “the prophet from Judah” delivers a true prophecy that was fulfilled with accuracy more than three centuries later. The “old prophet from Bethel” transmits a lie that trips up the prophet of Judah, and then delivers a judgment message from God himself because of the younger prophet’s disobedience. It is a most unsettling story — almost reading like a divine sting operation in which the Almighty seeks to trick a faithful man, and then gives him a harsher penalty than the evil king he was sent to correct. (see 1 Kings 13)

I’ve been thinking about this one a long time, and as I was preparing some remarks about “listening to God” it finally dawned on me that this story is like a theatrical piece or screenplay illustrating the fact that all of God’s spokesmen are flawed characters. Except for Jesus, everyone who has ever spoken for God has had deep, fatal flaws that deserve God’s judgment, and no pronouncement or claim from anyone who teaches the Word can be relied upon withhout careful checking. No wonder James warns that teachers will have a severer judgment.

The prophet of Judah was brave and true, confronting king Jeroboam, who had introduced idolatry to the 10-tribe kingdom of Israel. When God gave him the message he was to present to Jeroboam, He also instructed the prophet of Judah (I’ll call him PJ) to go home a different direction, and not to eat food or water before he got home. PJ passed the first test when Jeroboam asked him to stay and dine. He also demonstrated one of the hallmarks of a true man of God, in that moments after he condemned Jeroboam for the most serious types of sins, and the wicked king had actually commanded his soldiers to seize the prophet for punishment, PJ became an intercessor on Jeoboam’s behalf, praying to God to release Jeroboam’s withered hand after God had frozen it in position. What a merciful man he was… instead of laughing at the King’s predicament and walking away from his misfortune, he used his close relationship with God to gain a reprieve for Jeroboam as soon as the king showed the slightest hint of repentance.

The old prophet — I’ll call him OP, heard of these remarkable acts of virtue and followed PJ until he overtook him as he rested in the shade of a mighty oak. No doubt PJ was famished — that’s a long journey to take without food and water — and the old man extended kindness to PJ, offering him some refreshment and a place to rest. At first PJ remained loyal to the instructions God had given him, but then, when OP told him he was a prophet too, and that an angel of the Lord had told him that he should indeed come home for a meal with him, PJ succumbed to the temptation and went home with OP. While they dined, the word of the Lord came to the Old Prophet, that PJ would die away from his father’s house, and be unburied. Sure enough, a lion came and killed him on the way home. OP heard of it and made the journey to the site, becoming a witness to a bizarre scene in which the lion stood there by the corpse, not eating the man or his donkey. In sorrow OP took PJ’s corpse to Bethel, and put him in his own grave, where not many years later he joined him in death. Their bones were mingled in death, according to the account.

Most of the commentaries I have read on this strange tale draw from it the idea that God is extremely intolerant of even the slightest deviation from His word … that if we are unfaithful in the least little detail, God will judge us harshly.

Here’s my take. Every spokesman for God is flawed. God knows this. So God has arranged that while we live, we must be each accountable to Him for what we see and know. If we see and know something to be true, a word from God, we are accountable to Him and no one else for our faithfulness to that revealed principle. On the other hand, we will constantly coexist with other brothers and sisters who are also prophets of God. They will have things they see and know that call attention to other truths, other dimensions of God’s plans and dealings that we are unaware of. We need to test what they say against the word of God.

I can hear one school of thought right now, saying “The point is, we dare not depart from the truths we have learned — we must be faithful to God!” From this perspective, the post=protestant initiative is like the lie of the Old Prophet, theatening to lead the “orthodox” into judgment. But that’s not what I see going on here. As I see it, the real problem in the church today is not that the emergent church is questioning and contradicting the word of God (although that does occur in places) but that what has been accepted as the word of God — the systematic theology of orthodox Christianity — has within it elements that never were part of the word of God and have always needed to be reexamined. Looking back at history, there have always been dissenting voices, challenging this or that orthodox position. And since the 4th century, the way those voices has been dealt with has been both ecclesiastical and political violence. Today the monopoly of orthodoxy is being undone by the shear volume of dissent and the ease with which dissenters can now communicate.

By flipping the script, as Brian put it at the Revolution conference, we can start to get a more complex, but more productive view of this process. God is speaking through multiple voices, each of which are flawed and as Pope put it, partial evils that make up together a universal good.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:

How will we find out what is true, whether it be in eschatology or in our current practice? By remaining kind and diligent in pursuing dialog, study, testing, and conversation. By avoiding what Pope called “pride, reasoning pride”, — by listening to each other and rigorously retesting what we thought the Bible said, we can do better than merely tolerating paradox — we can arrive at broader, more kind and inclusive truths.

The old prophet was used by God to expose the weakness in the prophet of Judah. That’s the hard pill to swallow. Both were faithful men, though both had flaws. OP could have been talked to by a lying angel, the way we are warned that Satan will speak to all God’s people — as an Angel of Light. So whether what he said was a malicious lie, a “white lie” or fib to get him to be sensible and eat some food, or a case of unfortunate gullibility by the Old Prophet (believing a lying angel), his words became the occasion of stumbling which exposed the weakness of the prophet from Judah. One man’s flaw exposed another man’s flaw — just as iron sharpens iron. And OP loved PJ — he was saddened to have to be the agency which taught him a very hard lesson.

OP was a stone of stumbling to PJ. And by turns each of us in a Christian community is a stone of stumbling to the others. The bitter fact of our life in Christ, even with our closest friends and co-workers, is that we trip each other up. We have flawed friends whose flaws bring out our weaknesses, and yet which reveal to us either by precept or example, our own areas of sin.

Viewed in that way, I think the story of the two flawed prophets is a beautiful and realistic story — in the best Hollywood traditions of complicated characters whose interplay creates drama, struggle, and eventual resolution. What is the resolution here? Not some sort of frightful judgment of an angry and legalistic God, but a warm and loving picture of two men who struggled to accomplish God’s word in their lives, were partially successful and partially failures, but whose bones ended up together in death, awaiting a resurrection together by the kind Judge of all.

The principle of kindness over judgment is what all of us must use to get our eschatalogy into line with God’s love and fairness. To me, that’s the main goal of the emergent conversation, and I appreciate the efforts of Brian McLaren, Jim Henderson, Donald Miller, Geeorge Barna, and others who are contributing to this dialog today.

The Murky Marriage of Love and Truth

23 Saturday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, Generous Orthodoxy

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In an interview by Next Wave, Brian McLaren defines the purpose of his book, A Generous Orthodoxy (which I am enjoying and have been responding to over the last few days):

In a sentence, A Generous Orthodoxy is an attempt to remarry two things that never should have been divorced — truth and love….

This reminds me of an old “Father Knows Best” episode in which the teenage daughter is trying to change her boyfriend’s character, and Robert Young says,”why don’t you try something easy, like moving the Rocky Mountains.”

Truth and beauty, even, would be a lot easier, as they do not require us to bend our minds to embrace what repulses us.

For all my adult life I have pursued Truth with a capital T. Sometime in my late 20s I started adding Love to that quest. This dual pursuit became for me the impossible dream, because Truth took me beyond the boundaries of my Christian upbringing, and began to make my concept of Love grow broader than was normal in my denomination. Truth and Love were at war, and the more I was able to reconcile them in my own mind and philosophy of Christian fellowship, the less my longtime brothers and sisters could handle it.

Initially, love seems to take the lead, arguing in defense of those who seem nice but don’t fit our “truth” definitions. For example, as a young man I learned this Joaquin Miller verse and kept it with me as a tolerance builder:

“In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still.
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot.
I do not dare to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.”

It has only been in recent years that I have begun to discover how the Bible resolves its own seeming flip-flops in preference between Truth and Love..

It is indeed a murky area, where the ability to embrace paradoxes and to have a healthy degree of self-doubt seem to be pre-requisites for making progress.

Tomorrow I will explore the story of the Prophet from Judah who was killed by a lion for not obeying every detail of God’s word to him. Within that story, I believe, are some important clues as to why love and truth must learn to coexist within the emergent, unfinished, presently-divided Christian community.

My McLaren Colloquy: 3. New fields of opportunity

21 Thursday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, orthodoxy

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On page 140 of A Generous Orthodoxy Brian McLaren writes:

When I imagine what a generous orthodoxy can become, I realize I must seek to honor both conservative and liberal heroism. And when I do, I want to consider myself both liberal and conservative. I must learn from their mistakes, and when I do, I don’t want to be boxed in either category. Instead they can look up for a higher way and look ahead to the new fields of opportunity and challenge that stretch from here to the horizon….

In my own journey I was once characterized as a liberal, and my response was that I am only liberal if one takes a rather narrow slice of conservatism.
That is the trouble with labels — they are snapshots taken by someone else, usually with a macro lens and with a specific point of view. And yet labels are the stuff that Protestantism consists of.

So I greatly appreciate, and strive to copy in my own ministry, the inclusive, kind, non-polemical, post-protestant spirit I observe in Brian, in Jim Henderson, and in other “Revolutionaries” I am meeting.

Where are these attitudes taking us? As Brian put it, into new fields of opportunity. New fields that were anticipated, as usual, by the Master himself.

Matthew records a most amazing promise, a signed blank check that empowers all followers of Jesus, whatever label they answer to:

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old

To me this means that any scribe or writer/teacher of the Word — (greek, grammateus) — is like a steward who is empowered to bring from the storehouse both old things and new. The old things, it seems to me, are what the Bible says directly, what we learn from the text itself … things that all disciples of Christ have seen more or less clearly. The new things, to my way of thinking, could be realizations about spiritual truths, about the fulfillment of prophecy in our own time, and insights into the character of God that come from our personal walk — meditations, interactions with others, etc. There is room here for the rational as well as the mystical/poetical insights that Brian writes about in the next chapter of AGO.

Knowing God is the very fountain and purpose of eternal life, and all who have experience with God, as students of his word, are enriched and empowered to record meaningful insights along their way. These are the sources of one type of the heroisms, plural, that Brian refers to (it seems to me), coming from both sides of the spiritual aisle.
Think of all the scribes, past and present, who have recorded their insights and yet whose works are lost to us because they were not part of our particular ism.

It is for this reason that I feel called to disregard sectarian fences and to pray to God for the strength to make the assembly and compilation and comparison of all these different heroic threads — writings from every Christian stream of thought — for the edification of the present and future generations of disciples. That is what my dream of the Grammateus Institute is all about.

For me, this is one of the great, new, fields of opportunity created by the convergence of Web 2.0 technology and an Emergent, Revolutionary ethos among Christian brothers and sisters.

My McLaren Colloquy: 2. Restorationism

20 Wednesday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Generous Orthodoxy, restorationism

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One of the most fascinating and vigorous sectors of protesting Protestanism has been “restorationism” — a belief held by a succession of groups through church history that, by finally getting the last or lost detail right, they now represent a full-fledged restoration of “New Testament Christianity.” – A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 128

Like Brian, I was raised with such an ethos. And my experience jives with his: “if you are part of a restorationist group, the group dynamics of your group will be nearly identical to those of every other restorationist group.” And while I no longer identify with the “group dynamics” of my spiritual heritage, I appreciate and share the kind sentiments with which McLaren describes the individual Christians within it:

Fortunately, beneath these squabbles over distinctives, one nearly always finds an idealism among restorationists, a belief that Christianity should be and can be better than its common manifestations. This is a good thing, and needed….One often finds a beautiful, sincere, childlike desire to follow Jesus whatever the cost and however lonely the road.

I am not sure where Brian is headed with his search, now that he appreciates the strengths and weaknesses of many different spiritual streams. At times he seems to envision a sort of ecumenical fusion — gaining a kind of institutional strength from many people who, it would seem, would have to miraculously lay down their points of difference and grow silent on the areas that up till now have been their sources of identity.

For myself, I think the model will be more like WIKI — devoid of institutional frameworks and fully free to embrace individual distinctions of thought and action.

I agree with McLaren, though, that the revolution must embody kindness, not as a surface gloss but as a defining, foundational principle. And in so doing it will radically depart from constant “protest”-isms.

Thus I expect that the Lord’s people who Barna says are now leaving the institutional church in droves will gather around Jesus, will sense the spirit of Christ in each other, and will be driven by humility rather than sectarian pride toward common understandings of the kindness of God and his happy plans for the human race.

It seems to me that the processes which will serve this gathering will incorporate both the rational, evidential tradition of Protestantism and the poetic, visionary disposition that is emerging through post-modern influences. Both isms are dangerous and extreme. But we do not need to choose either extreme, or lukewarmness either. We can, in Brian’s gracious words, find a balance that through generosity and humility walks that edgy middle road of Christlikeness — and honors what has been good in both the orthodox and heterodox thinking of preceding generations.

The only restorationist movement that will ever work is the inclusive, broadminded, and kindly one that God fuses together from every corner of His world.

McLaren/MacArthur colloquy: 1. Honoring evangelicals

20 Wednesday Dec 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, evangelicalism, Generous Orthodoxy, John MacArthur

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I appreciate the honorable treatment Brian McLaren gives to evangelicals when he writes: (A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 119)

“evangelicals have a passion that drives them into action: their emotion puts them in motion. And this emotion goes right to the heart of what it means to follow Jesus: loving God and loving others…. That’s why you’ll find evangelicals passionately at work around the world — including every dangerous and difficult place they can get themselves into. They have a mandate from Jesus to get out and make a difference. They love Jesus and they’re not going to let anything stop them. I love that.” He goes on to say, “evangelical passion for spiritual experience, for spiritual understanding, for mission is precious. If it could be bottled, one quart of it would be worth five libraries full of religious books (including mine) …. Even though it can’t be bottled, it cann be acquired, because, ultimately, “it” is the Spirit of Jesus, and Jesus gives himself freely to all who ask.”

I, too, have observed this evangelical zeal and I love it. The evangelicals who are attacking McLaren for what they perceive as dangerous perspectives in “Generous Orthodoxy” would do well to copy his kindness. I think that this missional spirit, this zeal to learn truth and stand for what is right and obey God’s commands and reach out to bring a message of salvation to the unsaved world are all noble impulses — as McLaren said, “the spirit of Jesus”.

I think Jesus was referring to this wholesome part of evangelical traditions when he praises the Philadelphia church — the only one of the churches he did not rebuke — in Rev. 3:7-13.

Unfortunately, the current church is not Philadelphia, which I believe was the 19th century church. Today we’re in Laodicea. We’ve moved beyond the missions of Dwight Moody and Hudson Taylor into the “hour of tempptation” realm of the 20th and 21st centuries. The historic period of “justice for the people” (literal translation of Laodicea).

John MacArthur’s contribution to this colloquy:

He agrees with me that the Philadelphia church is a “true, faithful church”. And he agrees with me that the Laodicea church is “a graphic picture of the church in the Tribulation.” Well, actually, Revelation doesn’t say “Tribulation,” it says “hour of temptation”. Which I think is now. And I do not share MacArthur’s black and white view of reality, that there are “no true believers, only false” in Laodicea; any more than I think there were only true and faithful believers in Philadelphia, a century or more ago. Why then, does Jesus say to them (us) “as many as I love I rebuke and chasten; be zealous, therefore, and repent.”? And why does he counsel the lukewarm believers of Laodicea to obtain from him gold, and fine linen and eyesalve, so that they can see their nakedness etc. and be healed of it? So I agree with McLaren’s perspective, that we need to keep “flipping the script” as he put it in the Revolution conference — keep recognizing that by fits we each are what we despise.

Laodicea feels to me like Evangelicalism

Brian McLaren points out that where he got off the Evangelical (capital E) train was when he began to notice finger-pointing, strife, and debate more than bringing the poor to their house (to put it in Isaiah’s words). In Brians’s words, they seem to have “started identifying judgmentalism and anger as fruits of the Spirit.” (p. 117)

So I join McLaren in honoring what is good about evangelicalism, the focus on a good message with passion and creativity — and call to them to open their ears to the words of Jesus in Revelation 3:14-22…. something that clearly they are hearing, hence the many different strains of “revolution”.

It is the Emergent movement that is finally trying to prick the conscience of the church with this century-old social theme of Justice for the People. [that God is not on the side of the powerful but the powerless]. So I share McLaren’s observation that evangelicals need to balance their passion for getting the details right with an appropriate emphasis on the mercies of God. It is indeed above all else a Revolution of Kindness. Tomorrow I’ll give a brief reaction to his thoughts on page 125ff about Protestantism.

Brian McLaren – Final talk on Saturday: "A Revolution in Kindness"

11 Saturday Nov 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, off-the-map, revolutionconference

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Brian McLaren’s final speech was simply outstanding — here are my notes, expanded by my recollections a bit….

Brian: I believe the deepest question facing all Christians — the nagging question, is “is God really kind?”

The Bible helps us and also makes this more difficult for us to answer.
For example, Romans one tells us that God shows wrath toward sin. But in Romans 2 it opens with “THEREFORE you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. … But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same {yourself,} that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?”

We show contempt for the riches we have been given when we condemn others.
God’s kindness is intended to lead to us to repentance.

We see another example of this — the kindness of God — in Mark 2.
In Mark’s version of the story, we read how Jesus reacted to the hard-heartedness of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus was, as we described at the beginning of the conference, “flipping the script”. They were worried about observing the sabbath — but as the four men held up the paralytic man, with his shriveled arm above their heads, he asked them, “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’; or to say, ‘Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk’??
“But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”–He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home.'” Mark notices that Jesus looked around at them in anger, and saw the hardness of their hearts. We’re told that from that moment the Pharisees and the Herodians went out and made a pact to kill Jesus. Now, these were sworn enemies — and yet they were so deeply opposed to Jesus that these enemies became united in violence and hatred toward Jesus.

Now, if we believe that Jesus is the exact representation of the Father — that in him dwells the image of the invisible God, that if we have seen Jesus we have seen the Father; if we believe as I do, that in him dwells the fulness of deity, then we should carefully look at what made Jesus angry, because that will show us what makes the Father angry.

What makes Jesus angry — is a lack of kindness..

[Here was a paralytic, weak and deformed since birth, and these religious people didn’t care about that– they were not kind. — They were focused on their doctrine of what can be done on the sabbath.]

Kindness is a friendly, generous, warm-hearted concern for others. And the etymology is that it comes from the way we relate to those who are most like us.
God is kind to people who are different, and so the challenge of the Christian church has always been to learn to break down walls and treat as kindred, or with kindness, those who are different from us.

God is kind.

God is light.
And in God there is no darkness at all .
God doesn’t have a dark side.
I have to believe that God isn’t faking us out in Jesus — only to come back and hammer us later on.

Now, I’ve written a lot of books that are controversial, but the one book that I was sure would not be controversial at all has been the most controversial one yet: “A Generous Orthodoxy” (laughter) — Now, in there I wrote that some people’s religious tradition breeds out a sense of humor.

So I believe we need to reintegrate the idea of God’s kindness, and our own need to express and experience kindness — into our views of doctrine. We use the term orthodoxy — it means correct opinion.. It’s a good concept — having the correct idea.

We also focus on orthoproxy — having the correct practice. This is good, too.

But when we go back to the original Christian creed it was very simple — that Jesus is Lord. He is our Supreme authority — when you have a question you go to Jesus first and foremost.

I believe we need an unwillingness to separate how we think and how we act — othodoxy and orthopraxy — from our feelings — how we belong to God .

This year in my travels I visited a seminary that was started by a man who later
ran off with another woman. I met his wife — and what do you suppose she felt God wanted her to do? She had decided to pick up where her husband had left off, and she was running the seminary.

She told me about orthopathy — having the right feelings.
She focused on joy, peace, compassion. That is what God enabled her to do. what God wanted her to do.

If there is a religion well positioned for growth in the world, it is Buddhism.

Buddhism focuses on orthopathy — an internal attitude of peace and compassion toward others.
Jesus practiced orthopathy. He saw the crowd and felt compassion toward them.
He brought kindness – a revolution of kindness — and this is the Revolution I felt it in these days. —

I saw it in Sunil’s story, of how social systems that teach us we are all different, teach us not to have compassion — kindness. [Sunil had said there is no word for “kindness” in the Indian language — because the caste system teaches that all are different — and that even in the lowest caste, the Untouchables, there are 68,000 levels so that no one can have commonality with anyone else.]

Yet Sunil believes the impossible can happen, and he’s making a difference through teaching people about kindness.

We learned about domestic violence — the corruption of the best things in all of us — and learned about challenging it through the simultaneous expression of compassion and anger —

My hope is that we will go from here with a revolution that Jesus started — not merely speaking for God — but living a revolution of kindness — like Jesus, who was so sure he was really reflecting the character and image of God that he was willing to die.

I’d like to close with a new song I have writeen, based on the poem by Teresa of Avila which says that Christ has no body on earth but ours no hands and feet on earth but ours; — no way to do things on earth but through us. [We then sang this new song– it was outstanding.]

Barna Saturday: Why I joined the Revolution

11 Saturday Nov 2006

Posted by in George Barna, revolutionconference

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Barna Saturday: Why I Joined the Revolution

For most of my life I was on a very different path — I spent twenty-plus years to try to help churches — chronicling the accelerating changes that have now become a revolution.
I used the old style or classic quantitative methods — research — who, came, how many did this or that, etc.

About a year and a half ago I reached a point in my life where I decided not just to describe the Revolution, but to join it.
Why?

Each of us has several roles he plays in his life
What are my roles?
1. First and most important, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ
2. My second role is to be a good father and husband
3. My third role is to be an effective church leader with integrity — teaching, writing, and leading

Mark 12:30 defines it clearly — that our chief purpose in life is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

In my work, there are 4 components: Research – gathering good information
Teaching – presenting information, but also interpreting it for the audience
Writing, too, is an activity that requires the gathering of facts, as well as expressing them to an audience
Coaching & Consulting involves personal interactions

There is a reliance on leaders in the existing local church
The assumption is that people in positions of leadership are actually leaders…!
We compiled a great deal of information about who these people are….
What we found is that 4 of 5 of senior pastors are not leaders — they are not called, gifted, or prepared to lead!
Most called to teaching, and many of them are good at that.
But leadership requires a very different mind, heart, and skill set.
The prevalent institutional model forces you to be both at once.

I actually tried pastoring a church, and I don’t want to pastor a church.

So why did I leave the conventional church for a house church?
There are 9 reasons — yes, I quantify everything!

1. I have come to believe that in God’s vision for my life God has called me to be a catalyst of a moral and spiritual revolution. For 20 years I assumed this would be through the institutional church. I do not think so now..

The institutional church model is something we made up — it does not exist in scripture.
How do I facilitate that revolution? by helping people experience transformation outside of these institutional boundaries which I have found to be unauthorized in scripture.

2. I joined the revolution because of professional frustration – I found from the testimony of the people we interviewed that essentially no transformation is happening through the local church.
I came home from a 9 month road trip, going with my family from church to church, and I simply collapsed. — I told God, “If you want somebody to change the church, it’ll have to be somebody else.” After I got over my tantrum with God, I asked, “is anybody’s life actually being transformed?” — I did a new study — and my research made it clear that twenty million people are being transformed. God has twenty million people in the United States who are active and alive and growing in Him — but my research told me that almost none of it has anything to do with the conventional church, but is happening in other communities of faith — other types of relationships.

3. My third reason for joining the Revolution was personal desperation. — Spiritually, I was drying up. — The institutional model, the constant experience of showing up, singing, participating in an event … had nothing to do with connecting with the living God. We found in our surveys that 80% in any given week say they sit through worship and do not feel they have connected with God — over 50% say that in the entire past year of going to church, they did not connect with God even once.

In that environment, participating in church, knowing there was a problem but supporting the institutional model, I felt like a fraud.

4. I had a personal spiritual experience — a taste of real intimacy with God — and I knew I would have to be accountable to God from then on.

5. I had experienced a practical frustration within churches. When you are a genuine leader you are not allowed to lead.

6. I became a major proponent of 1 Chron 12:32 — Men of Isachaar – men who understood times. They understood that we need different forms, models, and insights.

7. Scriptural revelation – God gives us incredible freedom in how we connect with him

“Community of faith — yes; institution, NO….
God calls us, not to be faithful members, but to be practitioners of Christian faith who have been personally transformed — bearing witness of Christ to our families, the church, and the world.
We need to therefore make a distinction between church and Church.
Little c church is the local assembly. All institutional churches are little c churches — attempts at following Christ.
Big C Church is all of us — the entire body of Christ.

Another thing that this scriptural revelation taught me is that we must reject the teaching that church (little c — the institutional manifestation of Jesus’ followers) is the hope of the world.
That is simply not true — Jesus Christ is the hope of the world.

8. Another reason I joined the revelation is the recognition of how God made me. I’ve taken all the tests – Meyers-Briggs etc. — and they tend to show that I was bult to influence people.
When I coupled that insight with another piece of research — my discovery of what IS having an influence on Christians, I had to make a change.

What is influencing Christians? My research shows that 70% of the impact on all people’s decisions comes from 7 different sources: movies, TV, music, family, public policy, books, and the Internet.

Schools, peers, and radio make up a big part of the 2nd tier of influence, producing 20% of the influence on decisions, values, and actions.

Church is one part of the third tier, the least influential things in people’s lives. In fact, conventional church has about one-half of 1 percent of influence on people, compared to all the other things that shape their values, choices, and actions.

What does this tell me? I have spent the last 20 years of my life trying to reform the institution which only exerts half a percent of the influence in people’s lives.

This led me to make a professional decision to focus my energy on media — spiritainment. Movies and videos and music.

9. Finally, I awoke to my family responsibility. I realized that I could no longer bring my girls to a place where they are learning nothing about Jesus.

I suppose this reveals my conservative roots, but I am still persuaded from Scripture that it’s a war — we are, or ought to be, engaged in a battle between good and evil. I could no longer send my kids to a place where they were not being equipped for this battle.

Summary

I have left the institutional church and joined the Revolution. Why does this matter to me? It is all about restoring my intimacy with God, and my hope in Christ.
Joining the Revolution is not becoming a rebel, but reestablishing my priorities, redefining Christian community. For me it has meant getting involved in a house church experience, and reaffirming that God doesn’t need large armies in the Battle — He uses a remnant of sold-out people —
God uses a little band of wackos to change the world.

Remember — Love is not a feeling it is a commitment — so the question that I ask myself and you is: what is the nature of YOUR commitment?

Questions after Brian McLaren’s Saturday speech

05 Sunday Nov 2006

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Q How do you deal with power without appealing to power??
A The Cross is symbol of Roman domnination — and Jesus transformed it
The Symbol of Cross means peace thru suffering, not through torture and dominationn

Elaboration: Jesus was crucified by the Romans which symbolized their power to torture and dominate anyone who opposed their authority.

300 years later, when the Romans claimed to embrace cross, it’s not clear who really won — the powers of righteousness or evil. Because when the Romans embraced the cross they continuted in the same way, to use it as an instrument of torture and domination. They painted crosses on their shields and swords.

There are two kinds of evil: not just people abusing power — but also systemic evil.

If Jesus heals blindness, paralysis, deafness — it is a victory for the individual he heals. But it is also a victory over the condition of blindness or deafness.— a systemic evil.

When Jesus casts the demons into pigs, what was their name? — Legion — Is there a hint of something else there, something beyond pigs? What was the name of the Roman armies? – Legion.

Did the Romans belong in Palestine? Did the pigs belong in Palestine? When Jesus sent the pigs over the cliff, was he sending a signal about another unllawful eflock that did not belong in Israel?

Consider the systemic evil of racism.

Martin Luther King opposed it with a spiritual movement — not using what Paul called “carnal weapons” —

Jesus showed us two ways to confront power:
1. Tell the truth — confront power by telling the truth
2. Suffering — we will know we are on the side of Jesus by instead of making other suffer, we suffer
what does it lok like in our day to day lives
Instead of having the pleasure of setting them right, we forgive and don’t respond
accept you’re not wanted — leave and move on.

Q. Would telling the truth mean telling the truth about ourselves?? (laughter)
A. No. (laughter)

Yes, we need to be transparent, and deal with the anger and ressentment we feel as victims of power.

Next Brian recounted the story of a Serbian bishop who was betrayed by his fellow priests to the Nazis — and sent to Dachau. There, he found himself feeling very angry and betrayed by one or more of his supposed friends. So he worked on his own attitude and it resulted in this prayer:

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them. Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth; enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world.

Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having ensconced myself beneath Your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless and do not curse them.

They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world. They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself. They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments. They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself. They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish. Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a [fly].

Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.

Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand.

Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep.

Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.

Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of your garment.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me:

So that my fleeing will have no return; So that all my hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs; So that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul; So that my heart may become the grave of my two evil twins: arrogance and anger;

So that I might amass all my treasure in heaven; Ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception, which has entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life.

Enemies have taught me to know what hardly anyone knows, that a person has no enemies in the world except himself. One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.

It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies. Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and my enemies. A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand. But a son blesses them, for he understands.

For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life. Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Barna first Q&A

05 Sunday Nov 2006

Posted by in barna, George Barna, off-the-map, revolutionconference

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Q from former youth pastor — What about the scriptures that say that the body has pastors, elders, leaders, etc. How do we reconcile those with the Revolution which seems to be abandoing those kinds of forms?

[Kindig: my notes are sketchy here someone, either George or the questioner, talks about how a Wolfgang Simpson book, Houses that changed the world, changed his life. I think it was George who said this, and mentioned the 15 theses of the book, which you can read here:

Barna’s A: Submitting to elders — God has called people to play different roles — even in small relational groups, some emerge as leaders — it’s normative in small groups to have an individiual who leads.
This does not need to be heavy handed — but there is a gift of leadership — and the group must learn to recognize that.

Q — How do you find these people? How do you do your research?
Barna’s A: We get random samples — used to be, we worked in and got some of our samples in churches. Now, not much work in churches. Mostly we look at the culture at large — ask batteries of questions not just straight up questions about what they claim to believe and do, but look at all their beliefs and lifestyle decisions, and from their statements of belief sort by whether they are nominals , atheists, other faith groups, evangelicals, etc.
Typical samples are considered large in this kind of work — at least 1000 from acrosss the country. We have done special samplings of groups as large as 22,000.

Recently we’ve done a lot of research on what other forms of church have emerged — house, marketplace, ministries, cyberchurches, intentional — we’ve found them to be organic, growing slowly and spreading.

Q — What do you do if you’re a pastor but you feel like a revolutionary?

Barna’s A: The starting point is understanding what it is we’re trying to facilitate — look at issue of ongoing transformations — becoming more Christlike. This has nothing to do with activities,
more to do with relationships, personal passion, growth.

The pastor must think outside the “box” — the church building — and look at what takes place outside of the institutional church — the relational communities — and ask, “How can I facilitate these communities?”

[It’s very hard to break out of the standard ] “set in cement” ideas: show up, put money in plate, hire staff, be more efficient, create new programs, etc. — none of which Jesus died on the cross for.

Paradoxically, one of the elements that facilitates the Revolution…. is inefficiency!

Being out of control helps somehow to create opportunities for transformation to take place.

Brian McLaren – Domesticated the true revolutionary power of Christ

04 Saturday Nov 2006

Posted by in Brian McLaren, Emergent Conversation, eschatology, revolutionconference

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Brian McLaren spoke after lunch today….
My unedited notes:

Throughout human history , the paradigm has been: people without power are hurt by people with power. So they use the selfish assumptions and violent methods of the powerful to claw themselves into power… so that by the time they have arrived, they themselves are just as violent and oppressive as the ones they have replaced.

It would be easy for this revolution to be the same — for it to be another outbreak of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless — but ultimately if it still uses violent methods it will fail.

Mark 1: The good news of kingdom — has come near — repent and hear good newss.
John Baptist came and began to immerse…

Brian asks (ironically) Why is there so much filler — why is John the Baptist relevant?…
Then again, maybe it’s not filler after all.

On a plane recently, Brian sat next to a guy — asked him what he did, he said, “I’m one of the top 3 experts on the genetics of the fruit fly in the world.” 🙂

So Brian asked him to talk about his field and he was delighted to tell him what about it that was exciting.

Among other things he said: “they say there’s junk DNA — but that’s wrong. There IS no junk DNA. First, there is a lot of DNA that we simply don’t know what it does.
Then, there are parts that seem to fill an important role in the timing and alignment of strands. They peel and break and when you analyze it, you find that the DNA needs these strands to unpeel and connect. Their function is to help the DNA strand stay together and keep in time.

The details that seem like filler are like that. For example: — John the baptistt.
John didn’t invent baptism — it was common to Israel — ritual washing.
If your child came to you with a cut and you got blood on your skin — you were unclean. If you were a woman and had your monthly cycle; if you encountered a dead body — you were in need of ritual purification.
Who did this? the Priests. Where? at the temple
What was unusual about John the Baptist was not that he did immersing, but where — not in temple precincts but in Jordan river..
He was saying, this brown water is pure compared to the religious establishment — I look like a wierdo — it’s the priests who are the ones who are defective.
And then Jesus came and was baptized by John. He was validating John, and more than that, he was adding that John, who had condemned Herod for his immorality, was right in his condemnation of not only the religious establishment but thee civil as well.

When Jesus was baptized at Jordan is was thus an affirmation of the Kingdom of God — both a political and religious establishment…. not a new religion but a new kingdom.

Jesus was establishing an entirely new way of life — something radical. We’ve domesticated it but it’s truly a revolutionary message.

Luke 1:46-53 — the words of Mary. Mary praises God for being “mindful of the humble state of his serveant…his mercy shas
he has scattered those who are proud …
he has brought down rulers from their thrones
buth he has lifted up the humble”
but has sent the rich away empty”

What is Mary saying?

That the economic system is turned upside down by God.
and that He has toppled the rulers from their seats, while exalting the poor..

Luke chapter 4 – Jesus reads in the temple:
“spirit of Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor; freedom from prison, recovery of sight to the blind”

Jesus warms the hearts of his Jewish audience at first by – proclaiming favor to the poor… the Jews could identify with that since the Romans were oppressing them.

But then, Jesus made his public relations team shake their head because he offended his audience with his next statement: Elijah and Elisha didn’t do their miracles for their Jewish citizens but for two Gentiles in their midst . At this they were ready to stone Jesus.

It was revolution Jesus was talking about.

We domesticate the revolution and turn it into something tame and harmless to the status quo.

We should not gather in little rooms to do things harmless to the world;
our real ongoing work is to proclaim liberty to the captives, good news to the poor

Yes, it is a message both to the powrful & powerless– each enslaved to their ownwn selves. But through most of our history, the Christian church has been the religion of the powerful.

Jesus doesn’t proclaim a revolution in the political sense.,
His is a revolution in the type of revolution we join.
A change, not through domination of others, but through personal transformation, outflowing into social transformation.

Lies are always told by religious, social, and economic leaders — Jesus’ truth shows all those things to be a lie..

Luke 18:18-23 — Think about the subtext. How could someone become a ruler – by collaboration with the Romans.
So this rich young ruler asks Jesus, “Good teacher — what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus replies by asking if he knows the commands. He replies that he keeps the commands. So Jesus says, you still lack something — sell what you have and give to the poor. –

To this ruler, in that historic context, Jesus is saying: “You’re working for the powerful people. Stop working for the powerful and join me in my mission to the poor — in other words, “switch sides.”

The Kingdom of God message is for both the powerful and the powerless. Don’t follow in the paths of the world system, where the goal is power. In this model, powerless people claw their way to the top with the goal of benefiting the powerless — but in the process of seeking power, they become like the powerful. So that by the time you arrive in a position of power, you are just like the person you displaced.

Jesus proclaimed the message of a different kind of Kingdom — in which a small band believes and follows the example of the King. [KINDIG note: I think the gist of his idea was that “The transformation happens inside us. It is not a transformation we accomplish toward others, but that God accomplishes in us.”

If we don’t get the message of the revolution as Jesus taught us, we are exchanging old wineskins for new wineskins while we keep and cherish old wine. — [KINDIG: Here is my recollection and rewording of what Brian was saying: in other words, the old wine is the failed paradigm of trying to change other people through organizations we establish — trying to gain power “for the accomplishing of good”. Adopting a new structure for doing that will not help us. We need to abandon that paradigm, that old wine, and allow God to change not only the wineskin, the structure of our community, but also the wine, the goal and method of our transformation — from using power to change others to allowing God’s power to change us while we accept the other brothers and sisters in our community.]