My Best Ten Reads of 2009.

So here’s my best ten reads of 2009.

The Sacredness of Questioning Everything @ David Dark
When Eugene Peterson endorsed this book by saying “David Dark is my favorite critic of the people’s culture of America and the Christian faith”, I knew I’d like this book.
Read it on a flight to Miami and had fun talking about it with the couple sitting next to me. Multiple pages turned down by me that will require a second read to engage with further. Brought depth to my thinking that can sometimes due to everyday living can become too surface.

Three Cups of Tea @ Greg Mortenson
This crept up nearer the top of my list than I imagined. Struggled with first 50 pages – but then it gripped me. Perhaps it was where I was at and what I was thinking, but this book inspired me to believe that any ordinary guy in any ordinary church could do something global that was extraordinary.

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism @ Timothy Keller
If you have gone through 2009 without some Timothy Keller wisdom spoken into your life – duh!!! The new John Stott of the next generation. Wisdom, insight, solidly biblical and orthodox. A reformed teacher, mentor and preacher and listening to him will only strengthen your faith, keep you well established and yet live in the real world of building the church and extending the Kingdom of God.

ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church @ Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch
This is either my number 1 or my number 2. Came at the right time with enough substance to draw me in. Will become a staff read for our team in 2010 as we make sure the church remains true to its Bride and Head. Often a good book whimpers to a close – the last two chapters helped me as much as the good stuff in the opening chapters.

How (Not) To Speak of God @ Peter RollinsThe purest form of postmodern theology I’ve read since Reforming the Doctrines of God @ Shults. Only this time, unlike Shults, you could make sense of it and it wasn’t 400 pages. This one makes your head spin ….but you know why it’s spinning. While many people have differing views on Peter Rollins and what he’s doing with the Ikon Community in Northern Ireland, his blend of philosophy and theology helps you see the new face of an emerging theology.
His book The Orthodox Heretic is perhaps better ….but you need to start here to appreciate it.
I like a thinker. May not stand with him always, but I like a thinker.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible @ A J Jacobs
How a secular New York Jew made me laugh a lot. This was a good book. You often wondered what part of the Bible is he's going to try and take literally today …like the stoning of an adulterer in Central Park. Funny ….but it makes a point.

The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture @ Shane Hipps
This one came to me from our Media Arts Director who takes ‘the sacredness of questioning everything’ literally!! Our staff team read it and talked it through (nearly).
An important read. A necessary read. A challenging read.

Killing Cockroaches @ Tony Morgan
A collection of Tony’s blog articles and hence each chapter goes somewhere else and is a circular more than linear book. Appeals to me. Very practical. Neither profound nor theological but a little punchy number on many topics of church leadership. Helps keep focus and diligence in the practical of leadership.

Contrarians Guide to Knowing God: Spirituality for the Rest of Us @ Larry Osborne
It felt a little like this was a retake of Messy Spirituality by the ‘well done good and faithful servant’ Mike Yaconelli. And it is but like Mike’s book it is helpful. It helps us be honest …despite being a pastor and teacher ….praying is hard, and I so often miss what God is saying!! A great book ….average writing, but good material.

The Hole in our Gospel @ Richard Stearns
A great read. The story of Richard Stearns’ journey to becoming the President of World Vision. This was the book that Bill Hybels gave to all his church last year.
My leadership small group went through this book together. Some lines stab you and you know its God behind the stabbing. It didn’t have the feel of a book that laid out the huge problem of world poverty and then made you feel guilty about not doing enough, it more inspired us to make sure our church kept poverty at the front of the line and not pushed further down.

I'm starting a petition for classic rock to be compulsory at Subway!

So I’m sitting in my usual Subway having my usual sub and reading my usual journal. I’m served by my usual friend who works in there and it’s around the usual time.
I like it this way.
There’s even my own sandwich now …others have been known to order the ‘Gilbert Special’.....roast beef on wheat, cheese, spinach, bell peppers, tomatoes and honey mustard sauce!

It’s what I like. ..
A little oasis in the middle of the day.
But ….not this day.
Something disturbed me.
The sandwich was the same; the magazine I was reading was the same; the usual guys served me and the usual customers were eating quietly ...but I noticed the music was different.
You know that background music to bring atmosphere and deaden the noise of multiple conversations …but today something is different - the music is Christian Radio!

One of the guys who work in Subway has become a kean Christian ….and so now he plays Christian radio in Subway.

But this is what disturbed me.
It used to be we got good old classic rock. But my friend had become a Christ follower ….and I get no more classic rock to listen to - instead it’s synthetic Christian pop!

It’s like changing from their excellent roast beef sandwich to their veggie sandwich – its pretend healthy!

I know the problems with rock music – I watched Pirate Radio …yikes!
Rock comes with other stuff, bad stuff. But popular Christian music (especially the stuff played on our local Christian radio station) can appear to be healthy but actually is bad for your health.

At least with Rock you know the bad stuff.
With Christian music many people are unaware of the bad stuff lurking, and unlike the extra bag of chips I too often reach for that hurts my cholesterol, this bad stuff hurts your soul!

Apart from the often boring musicality of Christian radio - it’s the words and sentiments of the lyrics that are the unhealthiest.
God is seldom, if ever, the object or the subject of the worship.
Most of the songs are the singer telling us what he/she is feeling about God. By the end of the song we know a lot about the singer and very little about God!
The most common pronoun is ‘me’. The biggest sentiment is lyrics about what God means to me!
They are nice songs, not bad songs. But there’s a difference between nice songs and worship songs.

In the history of the church the church sang its doctrine. Great themes of God were declared in its worship. Grand truths were sung.
Popular Christian music today misses that entirely. Sadly it more sings the doctrine of our society – ‘me’ living in a ‘me’ centered world.

Into my try-to-be-healthy lunch break sneaks selfish and egocentric worship music – worse than if I’d taken the meatball sandwich or someone has laced my Diet Coke with Doctor Pepper!!!!

Maybe Subway is not such a healthy choice after all …and it has nothing to do with their delicious sandwiches!

Too Trivial To Be Truth!

The writings of Dallas Willard are poignant if not pointed. Sharp words, kindly written, that cause even the most mature Christ follower to re-examine their discipleship. His most piercing words, at least for me, were not written but heard in an interview he gave. His quiet voice clandestinely hit me hard and remains the most haunting leadership words I have heard in 2009. Here’s the comment he softly spoke: “Maybe people are not coming to your church because they see it as too trivial to be truth.”

Too trivial to be truth.

Of course there is no church out there that thinks it’s not about the truth.
From the staunch bastions of Conservatism to the dogged Liberal landmark congregations; from the swaying Charismatics to the most staid Dispensationalists; from the solidly Reformed to the fluid Emergents – there’s no congregation and no pastor who does no think that what they are about, what they stand for and the shape of what they hold isn’t about the truth.

But the comment hit on perception by others of us trivializing the truth.

Do we trivialize the truth when we wrap it in three points each beginning with the letter “P”?
Do we trivialize the truth when we bumper sticker our theology?
Do we trivialize the truth when we Daily Bread our Scripture reading?
Do we trivialize the truth when we give 7 steps to a healthy family sermons?
Do we trivialize the truth when we tell God how great he makes us feel in our worship songs?
Do we trivialize the truth when our worship songs talk about me instead of Him?
Do we trivialize the truth when we stick it into a formula – say this and you’re saved?

Too trivial to be truth.

Do we trivialize the truth when we suggest that we have the truth all worked out??
Do we trivialize the truth when we keep the truth irrelevant to how we live and nothing in our lives has been changed for the past 10 years!

Too trivial to be truth.

It pushes you into the deeper questions of substance, authenticity, realness, mystery and depth.

It’s not about whether you use modern songs or classic hymns; media and drama or choir and liturgy.
It’s about something that is greater, deeper, ‘more than us’, being packaged traditionally, modernly, or even postmodernly, in a box that is too human, too formulaic, too all worked out, too one dimensional, maybe two dimensional.

Searchers of faith, seekers – know that the God shaped void in their souls need to be filled with God not our ideas about God or our explanations of God.

Maybe Willard’s comments help us understand why Americans by the millions have walked away from the church – we sit at 12.7% US church attendance on a Sunday morning – a drop of millions in a 25 year period!

If Willard’s words have hit me hard, they’ve caused me to ask new questions.
Not surface questions.
Not easy questions.
How do we clearly present the Gospel yet honor its depth and profundity?
How does a preacher bring help but not appear to have all the answers – which we haven’t got but sometimes have suggested otherwise?
How do we teach our doctrines but leave room for mystery and the unknown?
How do we honor the Word and the Spirit?
How do we explain faith when its sometimes unexplainable?

I guess as the church moved West – it moved towards answers, solutions and systems.
Willard’s comments continue the push back East – to where tension is willingly held; where mystery remains; and where the journey is as important as the destination.

Too trivial to be truth – maybe wiser words than even Willard knows.

A Cool Church Name

So I tweeted today that my latest read has surprised me. I seem to be something I formerly was happy to say I wasn’t.
Ever thought you were definitely not something and it turns out you may actually be it!
This is often how we operate. Its not that we claim to be something, we more often or not claim not to be something.
We so often define ourselves by what we aren’t.

So, we’ve changed the name of our church. No longer First Baptist Church of Reedley we are now Redeemer’s Church and everyone is loving the change.
The new name is so powerful.
Yes its classic and not hip.
Yes its got a religious smell to it more than a cool smell to it.
But it is a loaded, powerful name that is absolutely spot on.

So come back to our habits of defining ourselves by what we aren’t, what we stand against, what we don’t do, rather than who we are, what we do and what we stand for.

Enter the Redeemer.

Its Exodus 6, early on in the story of God. God appears to Moses and he gives Himself a new name …and the moment that new name is given God, Jehovah, The Lord (or as its best interpreted The Eternal One) talks about redeeming. It’s a bigger word than ‘rescue’ and a bigger word than ‘save’ – the bigness of the word is in the wholeness and fullness of what redemption does.

Redemption is a rich word.
It’s a Bible word that Christians need to speak and talk about.
Redemption is a salvation word.
But this word doesn’t present salvation as ‘get me out of here God’ or the other classic Christian mistakes such as ‘it gets me saved so I can get to heaven’. Redemption is a word that we must preach because it tells us how brilliant God’s salvation is – its not only future in heaven when we die it is slap bang in the here and now and very much about who you are and what you do. It involves your essential being here and now and on into eternity.

Redemption says – I no longer need to define myself by the negatives I do not do, believe or stand for, I can define myself by what I fully have been made by God's redeeming power. Negative (I am a wretch) has been replaced with positive (I am a redeemed child of God). Its not what I don’t do its what I do – and that doing is me, fully me doing it because of the power of a redeeming God.

It challenges teaching that majors on how wretched we are and how that won’t be fixed until we get to heaven. It rather says …..there is a you that is created in the image of God with all God’s beauty, and God has come down now in Christ and is redeeming you to that original design beauty outworking now Christ’s redemptive death and resurrection.

So come back to my surprise today as I read a book and discovered I may be something I thought I wasn’t – this is sin. And its sin every time I define myself by what I am not or what I do not; when I define myself as a redeemed follower of Christ in the negatives. Sin is when we remain in the broken, wretched state of defining our being not by the redeeming work of God in Christ, but by the state of sinful, broken humankind.

Imagine how different you would be and everyone you engage with or even set eyes on could be if we spoke the language of the redeemed because we live the life of the redeemed and we tell everyone we meet about the Redeemer.

It really is a cool name for a church!!

Is Twitter destroying us?

It’s been too long since I last visited this blog. But, I’ve started to tweet!
The explosion of Twitter and the multiple other social networking forums has caught my imagination and the imagination of the thousands who sign up daily for either Facebook or Twitter. It’s the web 2.0 surge - the web now doing what its original designer hoped it would do.
But I guess as I join in – Twitter name GilbertFoster – it’s got me asking some questions of civilization especially western civilization.
In my life time we’ve gone from face to face communication to letter writing, to conversations via telephone, to emails, to then texting to now Twitter – 140 characters (not letters). The whole thing needs to be in the space of 140 characters.

It’s a neat exercise to succinctly put down comments in 140 characters.
I’m a bottom line kind of guy – give me the short version – and even I struggle to get it to 140. It becomes a new way of thinking and communicating.

We live in a society that is so cluttered. Every day hundreds of adverts hit your eyes; every day hundreds of messages cross your mind.
Maybe something as short, brief and summarized as 140 characters will be noticed; will help de-clutter us.

But if Web 2.0 and social networks are to develop new 21st century forms of community – can we really know someone in 140 characters?
Is it really social networking or is that just a myth, a dream …even worse – is it a destruction of civilization.

Think about relationships. Think about what it would look like if we all spoke in 140 characters. In some friendships this might be helpful but in most it would be unhelpful.

Would we ever get to the real person? Would we ever reach the real stuff to talk about?
Just as you get past the usual pleasantries – boom …out of characters.
Maybe you think we’d avoid the pleasantries and just get to the real stuff …but you and I know that doesn’t work in sex, its unlikely going to work in building genuine loving relationships!!

140 character social networking.
Is the issue the limiting number of characters, or is the issue the limiting amount of time?
Are we becoming a nation of fewer words, or is Twitter successful because we are a nation of fewer minutes.

I guess Twitter would never work in Africa.
But maybe Africa’s healthier than America – because of it.

And then what about the Gospel.
Yep – for too long people have shrunk the Gospel down to too few characters. The four spiritual laws; the sinner’s prayer; recite this prayer and you’re in.
Our reduction of the Gospel has damaged the Gospel and distorted God.
Both God and the Gospel are a lot more than 140 characters.
Both God and the Gospel need time, development, following.

A 140 character relationship - will only get you a 140 character worth of God, hope and faith.

So ……is it quit the tweeting and return to the blogging?
Or is it let tweeting do what tweeting can do – and make sure we don’t make it do what it never can do.

What causes us to post anonymously?

So there are a couple of phrases we’ve got on our church staff that are really helpful.
The first one goes something like this “help me understand”.
Ever had that awkward moment when someone does something not very good or rather weird strange and you need to talk to them about it – the above phrase is excellent in confronting without confrontation. It’s a modern take on Jesus’ compulsion to speak the truth in love.
The second phrase we have around our staff is the Bill Hybel’s classic “always say the last 10%”.
Ever been in a situation where you are talking to someone – but you hold back from saying everything that needs to be said. You might have said 90% of what needs to be said – but that last 10% is so crucial. It’s also the most difficult to say – in the right way for the right reasons.

So why am I telling you this?
What’s this blog about??

If you’ve been reading my two blogs you’d see a confession by one blogger about blogging anonymously. So here’s a Scottish pastor’s musings – giving the last 10% and hopefully helping you understand.

Confession is leaving the church and the Christian’s vocabulary.
This is bad.
Interesting BBC article today on confession. The article is entitled “Two sexes ‘sin in different ways’”. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7897034.stm?lss
The report came amid Vatican concerns about the declining rate of confessions. A recent survey of Catholics found nearly a third no longer considered confession necessary, while one in 10 considered the process an obstacle to their dialogue with God.

It’s the classic outworking of Christian individualism and I’ll-make-my-remarks- anonymously-because-I-do-not-live-to-or-for-anyone-else.
Harsh but true words; the last 10% kind of words.

Protestantism has never embraced confession – sad when the Apostle’s all did.
Catholicism embraced it but then used it to allow a few take individualism to a dictatorial level.
But it needs to return for the church to be saved.

If we confessed out sins would we need to act anonymously ever??
If we confessed our sins would we need anyone to tell us the last 10%?
If we confessed our sins would we need anyone to ask us ‘help me understand?’

With confession comes humility.
With confession comes transparency.
With confession comes grace.
With confession comes hope.
With confession comes salvation.

Just some musings …..but musings I began to practice many years ago and since then I've never needed to be anonymous.
Live in the light.

Why we deserve to lose Prop 8.

So it’s January 1, 2009.
What a last few weeks we had in 2008.
It began with inviting a comedian to take our entire Sunday service to kick off Christmas – even my open minded, golf playing, now also pheasant and Bambi hunting wannabee yuppie younger brother who loves the music of Queen and has over 5000 songs on his iPod sync’d to his big Merc thinks that was pretty risky!
Then it was running a church service with two adults suspended on a plank of wood at what seemed like 30 feet high (it was more like 4 feet) all to illustrate Joseph going out on a limb for God. It felt like 30 feet high because inadvertently one of the people I spontaneously chose to help me suffers from acrophobia. And then another couple I chose might be more than a couple …maybe there were three people out on the plank. Of course we’d calculated the weight to anchor measurements – hopefully we had it right…..as we heard the plank make a breaking sound!!!
Sunday service planning and execution is no easy business.
But then came the request to host a funeral service in our worship center – for the local Buddhist congregation – incense, Buddhist altar and all.
The last month of the year was a risky month.

But is love not always risky.
We went ahead with the Buddhist ceremony in our facility because Jesus told us very clearly to ‘love our neighbors.’
Never easy to love.
Risky to love.
Hard sometimes to love.
But is that not the core of our faith.
Love.
Love moved God.
Love moved Jesus.
Love called us.

So we sit at the start of 2009.
I know this year will have its share of risky decisions. Not because our church staff is sitting around dreaming of what next whacky thing to pull off just to be controversial - although sometimes we get up to that also (how else do pastors have fun) - but because we are committed to following the way of Jesus which is a way of love.
Love can’t not be risky.

What is so sad, and so urgently in need of fixing, is that this risky form of love is the very opposite to how people perceive Christians.
Let’s take the Prop 8 battle of November.
Whether right or wrong (check out my blog of June 11, 08 “Are you martyring or being a martyr.”) Christians cannot enter into this debate without being viewed as bigots with hate and homophobia because for way too long Christians have failed to show any love - even a crumb of love towards those who do not share their views.
That historic failure leaves Christians with no right now to speak.

There is a warning Christians in America need to heed from what happened in the UK in the late 1980’s. Christian hate and bigotry left them powerless to speak with any impact and subsequently Christianity slid from a place of influence to a silent, mocked voice. The results - Evangelicals dropped from 25% of the population down to a mere 7% and are still slipping.

May 2009 be a year we put the brakes on our arrogant assumption that because we’re right we should be listened to, and may it be a year that we hit the throttle of demonstrating risky love.