You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2011.
I like cities. I grew up in a big city (Chicago), and even though I lived in Santa Fe for over a decade I tried to get to the city (Albuquerque) whenever I could. So I guess it’s only natural that I’m trying to plant a church in the city. Cities are important to God. Take a look at the Bible, what starts in a garden ends in a city. If people matter to God (they do), then we should take His message of salvation to them where they are (over 1/2 of the world’s population lives in cities).
Cities are upstream and the suburbs/rural areas are downstream; whatever happens in the city affects the suburbs/rural areas, but not vice versa. So if we want to be effective in impacting the world with the Gospel, it stands to reason that we’d be focusing on cities. God’s directive though Jeremiah was that Israelites take to the city and invest in it, knowing that their welfare was inevitably tied to the welfare of the city (Jeremiah 29:4-7).
This means that as we move forward to love people with God’s love, it will happen in the city. And that love may come in the form of food for the hungry, justice for the oppressed, or love for the rejected. This type of idea, that a church can be most effective by meeting the needs of citizens, was best exemplified by the words of a Jesuit priest who was serving Jesus in India, “I bring God to people in the form in which He is absent. Here, it is water.” What kinds of opportunities are we missing by ignoring the needs of the city?
God keeps waking me up early to pray; it’s quite annoying. I have a regular prayer time daily (that keeps getting longer and longer) and I enjoy that, it’s cool to talk to Him about stuff every day. So I figure that He should be pretty satisfied with that, but nope. Every morning, between 5:30 and 6:00, I get roused from sleep. This has been happening for a couple of months now. I used to try to go back to sleep, but I never could so I stopped and now I just get to praying right away. Anyway, the whole thing bugs because I’m getting up so early that I don’t get enough sleep and I’m usually kind of grumpy through the day. I suppose that I could start going to bed earlier, but then I’d miss out on some TV shows (I have to DVR everything because I have three small children that control the TV)…wait a minute, you mean this God trying to get me to give something up? Aaaarrgh!
Be so much easier if He’d just zap me and make me good instead of this whole “dying to self” thing.
Nancy and I were just talking, and we discovered something pretty interesting; we’re excited and hopeful about our lives. Nothing has changed in our lives; we have no more money, the church isn’t any larger, there’s not a single thing that we can point to and say, “That’s why we’re psyched about our lives now!” So I don’t know why, we just feel like God is about is change some things and bring some huge stuff into our lives. Actually, there is something I can point to. A few days ago Nancy and I were looking at Proverbs 23:7 and Romans 12:2, and we decided to allow Jesus to change our thoughts and attitudes. And it’s working! So, once again, God is allowing us to live the truth of His wisdom…it’s pretty awesome.
I had lunch with a dear brother today who I’m doing accountability with. He has grown and changed so much, and I’m really seeing God work powerfully in his life. The key to his transformation has been that he embraced a simple truth: life change begins with the renewing of your mind. He started thinking different thoughts and focusing on the Spirit leading him into the mind of Christ, and his life became very different. He’s hopeful, has more joy, and is excited about what God will do in his life in the days to come. I believe that’s the abundant life that Jesus was always talking about.
I got a new phone today, it’s a Droid. My Blackberry was a good phone, but as different things are changing in the life of SoulSearch, and as we’re getting clearer ideas of what God is calling us to be, the Blackberry was insufficient to meet the demands that were coming. I think it’s funny the way technology works, how something can be cutting edge one day and creeping up on obsolete the next. But as our needs change, our tools must evolve to meet that change.
I think that idea is applicable to ecclesiology (the way we think about church) as well. I believe the Church is one of the coolest blessings God has given us and we should submit to our elders and pastors as they strive to accomplish God’s vision for her. However, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t hold on to certain aspects of how we are the Church loosely and constantly be willing to review, and reflect on, not only our core beliefs about Church but also why they are our core beliefs.
This idea of reviewing and refining the way we seek to express the life of the Church is significant for a guy like me who’s laboring (with faithful friends) to reinvent what it means to be the Church. We are doing this not to destroy the Church, but in an attempt to reach the people that have rejected her (at least in her current incarnation). I don’t pretend to have it all figured out, but I’m grateful for the chance to try and be something a little different. Pray for us as we move forward; eternity is too important for us to mess up.
I got an amazing glimpse of a biblical truth firsthand today. You know the story of the widow giving her two copper coins in Mark 12? I was preaching today at Heartland Church in Blue Springs, and after one of the services I was talking with a lovely couple who handed me a check as a gift. They were well dressed and very pleasant, and the gift was awesome so I was grateful. I also spoke with another gentleman after one of the services; he was slightly disheveled with dingy clothes that didn’t fit him well. He told me how much he got out of the message, and he reached into his pockets and pulled out all of the money he had…$4. He handed it to me and asked me to please use it to help people that needed Jesus. I took the money, I could barely see through my tears, and promised that I would. I don’t know how $4 can be a greater blessing than a large check, but it was. Thank God, that I got to see and experience how the Kingdom works.
