Day 177 - summer reading

Day 177 and I'm selecting my reading for the next couple of weeks.
Take a look at my choices:

1. Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race & Class Divisions in a Consumer Church @ Paul Louis Metzger.
2. Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate @ Matthew Soerens and Jenny Hwang.
3. Leading Outside the Lines @ Jon Katzenbach & Zia Khan.
4. America's Prophet: Moses and the American Story @Bruce Feiler.
5. What the Dog Saw @ Malcolm Gladwell.
6. The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World @ Alan Roxburgh.

Eclectic and yet all speaking into my search for some new answers.

Truth be told I've been asking new questions these days. Questions I've never asked before.
Questions that other 'growth pastors' don't tend to ask.
Questions that point to new answers that both excite and freak me out.

My July reading is part of my hunt to hear God speak into these new questions and point me towards answers.

I think following Jesus very much involves being a learner. The model of rabbi and student doesn't pass when you reach 40 or 50 or 60. I want to remain a learner. But I want to remain a learner of new questions, not failing to grasp the answers to earlier, elementary, previous questions.

So this summer .... I'm learning.

Humbly.
Hungrily.
Intriguingly.
Broadly.
Curiously.

So ....I'm making sure that to me book list I add my The Book time.

Read of a church that recommends for all the 10/10 plan. Everyday everyone ensures they have 10 minutes in the Bible and 10 minutes in prayer.

Learning.
Following.
Being a student.

Some how I feel that this is going to be a good, exciting and defining summer.

Did you read my list of books ........see any common threads.

Watch out for some bold moves.

Hey ....my blog might not be too regular in the next few weeks ...busy reading, busy learning, busy gone!

Day 173 Humbly hold a humble Christ

Day 173
As I begin reading for the final preach on The Star, The Cross & The Crescent I want to handle the topic of how you hold Jesus as unique yet without the arrogance of truth.
Been reading Hunter's book "To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility Of Christianity In The Late Modern World" (referenced it on my leadership blog as the must read of the summer).

Hunter writes these words:

"The significance of every person before God irrespective of worldly stature or accomplishment and the care for the least are the ethical hallmarks of Christianity, for they mark every human being and every human life in the most practical ways with God's image and therefore worthy of respect and love. Without these, Christianity is a brutalizing ideology........So far as I can tell, elitism for believers is despicable and utterly anathema to the gospel they cherish."

WOW!

The disturbing profoundness and thorough practicalness of this statement stirs me, shakes me.

This series has only more reaffirmed my belief in the church being the hope of the world - but when it gets it wrong ....being the scourge of the world.

Our church staff have been reiterating among ourselves the core characteristic of humility.
If we can humbly hold a humble Christ -what possibilities.

Today's intentional follow .....humble surrender to anothers diagnosis.

Day 172 - rest.

Day 172
Rest.
I’m not talking about the long lie in or the lazy Sunday afternoon rest – do nothing, read the paper, enjoy the couch - I’m talking about something deeper.
Hebrews 4 talks about entering into God’s rest.
I’m needing/wanting to experience that afresh.
God’s rest is Christ.
To rest is to experience Christ.
It’s that kind of rest that my soul really needs.
It’s a rest that reminds you everything you are and have is sourced in Him.

Why we need rest is because we get too busy working. We would seldom if ever say it, but truth be told, we work as a means of our salvation.
It’s not that we aren’t trusting Jesus for our salvation …it’s just that we prefer to make sure of it ourselves.
Subtle.
Into the core of our being comes this need to work – and it robs us of the rest that is Christ. It robs us of what Christ’s salvation is.

Rest.

Yancey put it this way “there’s nothing you can do to make God love you more; there's nothing you can do to make God love you less.”

I cannot get my brain around that.

Maybe if I rest …then I’ll get it.
Maybe if I get it, I'll rest.

Day 170 - I missed blogging, but God didn't miss me!

Day 170 - and oops for missing last week.
Doesn't mean I wasn't intentionally following Jesus ....I just wasn't doing it as well as I should have been.

Busyness and its sister 'tiredness' can most times spur me on to better things and focused living - but occasionally it can really distract me.
Occasionally was last week.
Not my best week.
Thankfully I listened into a teach from my 'go to guy to get kicked in the butt spiritually every time', Bill Hybels.
Maybe its because we lived in Chicago and enjoyed our time at Willowcreek Community Church where Bill is the Senior Pastor.
Maybe its because in Cardiff, Wales many years ago God used Bill to ignite the passion I have for the local church being the hope of the world.
Maybe its because Bill's own vulnerability helped others, myself included, be honest about leadership and daily leading a local church.
Maybe its because his candid but dignified leading and teaching is something I seek to emulate.

Whatever the maybe ......on my way home from a road trip to Martinez,CA a CD of Bill just spoke powerfully to me on the topic of soul replenishment.
He hit the nail on the head.
Ouch.

Bill tied it in to the main thing a Senior Pastor is required to bring - deep spiritual connectivity to Christ.

Double ouch!

Every Senior Pastor knows this ...but sometimes the pile of leadership stuff on my desk takes priority over the main spiritual leadership stuff I'm charged to bring.

So .....while my last week wasn't my best week .....it was a week when God used a key leader to hit me over the head, stab me in the stomach and point me in the direction I need to go these summer months.

Soul replenishment.

I know this will be hard for me to do.
Leaders are so often task oriented and vision focused. When I have new vision to write, new budgets to write, new recruiting to do, new plans to set, new teams to form, new messages to write, new ideas to craft ......these things sit at the fore of my mind.
Replenishment means - these things have to sit beneath both Christ and my enjoyment just of Him.

I know I am going to have to force myself to stop planning, envisioning, strategizing - and listen, be still, - the three r's "rest, relax, rejoice" as someone called it today.

So .......this week is me figuring out how to do what isn't natural to me.

Ideas welcome.

Seems weird even suggesting my intentional follow is going to be resting, relaxing and rejoicing!

Could however, be fun.

Day 163 - Wash Over Me .....excuse the focus on me!

Day 163 and yesterday we saw 52 people baptized.
It was our first Wash Over Me Baptism Ceremony and a great Saturday afternoon.

There was one other baptism not in that 52, a 53rd - my own.

Strange.

When I was 13 years old I was baptized. With a mixture of 'the right thing to do', being obedient and wanting people to know that I was a Christian.
All good, all real to where I was and what I was feeling.

But over the past few years my views on baptism have begun to shift.
It's more centrally become sacramental.
But this year something bigger happened - its moved from being a fidecentric emblem to a Christocentric emblem.
This is for me a significant movement, and a movement that required me to do more than appropriate this into the baptism I had many years ago, to do the whole thing again.

Probably best that I speak into this odd site of the church's Senior Pastor being baptised by the church's staff.......

For years I've held to the idea that baptism is a result of my faith. I've come to believe in who Christ is; I've received by faith His salvation and I then take this further step in demonstrating my faith for others to see.
This is the classic believers' (converts) baptism.

Of course Christianity is divided between two types of baptism - believers' baptism or infant baptism. The more theological terms are credobaptism or paedobaptism.

I grew up credobaptist.

But in the past few years I've been restless with not so much with what is attached to credobaptism, more I've been restless with what's missing from credobaptism.
Initially I felt it minimized the Divine movement as a sacrament. Everything seemed to revolve around my movement. It was me who was moving to show my faith; it was me who was stepping in the waters and displaying my devotion; it was me identifying with Christ.
This seemed to wrestle baptism away from being sacramental. As a sacrament the movement is always from God. This is the case in every sacrament. God descends to meet us in the sacrament.

But in the past few months my restless has intensified.

Is it really all about my faith?
Is it not all about Christ?

And this began me re-reading the paedobaptist position.
[Thank you Sinclair Ferguson and your excellent defense/summary of infant baptism in Baptism: Three Views edited by David F. Wright.]

For me the issue I'm revising is not whether it is believers' or infants that get baptised - for me it is what movement is happening and where does it start.

Is it a "fidecentric" emblem or a "Christocentric" emblem?

Fidoecentric says it is my faith that is being outworked in baptism.
Christocentric does not minimize the role of faith but stressed that what is symbolized in baptism is not faith but the Christ in whom faith rests.

This is a defining difference.
This pushes it to being a sign and a seal rather than a symbol or testimony.
This pushes it away from faith towards grace......towards what God does, not what I'm doing.

This is a major part of the paedobaptist argument.
Maybe I'm exploring a third way, a way that takes the truth of believers' baptism but embraces some of the excellent theology behind the paedobaptist position.

Who says there's only two views.
Maybe its bigger than we've previously known.

Yesterday .....quietly at the end of the ceremony as people headed for food.... staff and one pastor decided to experiment with a third way.

Day 159 it wasn't a boring day.

Day 159 - great day.
Spent 3 hours with two guys from Kansas talking church transformation. Hopefully they learned some new stuff, I know I did.
Then ......spent nearly four hours with Jake from Guatemala. Neat.
We ate, we laughed, we nearly cried (hey we are men, we 'nearly' cried), we dreamed, we strategized and at the end we knew that God had showed up and something new, bigger is being birthed.

Life with the Holy Spirit is so unpredictable.
There are always the constants of everything pointing to Christ, God being glorified, the Kingdom of God being expanded. But within that there is the unpredictable.
Who would have thought I'd every be in Reedley. Who'd have thought I'd still be here!
Jake certainly never imagined he'd be in Guatemala with a wife and two kids!
But both of us, all of us, are trying to do life with God and for God.
That life is unpredictable.

Maybe this is why Scripture is always emphasising faith.
Unpredictability can only be lived in and through faith.
Maybe this is why Scripture says anything not of faith is sin!
Maybe living predictable lives is sinful.
It's certainly boring.

Today wasn't a boring day!

Day 158 - here's the truth.

Day 158 and its been hard to blog the last few days. Sorry folks.

Partly a lack of inspiration ...always happens in June as you begin to run out of steam.
Really looking forward to my summer reading and getting refreshed.

Partly, way to busy for June as well.
Been traveling with some staff to do training for a church in Tacoma, WA (one day was 68F and blue skies, next day was 54F and lashing rain!).
Today, I'm just back from Tujunga, CA and training with another church.

Both these churches are getting ready for their first Alpha launch after the summer ....and we are praying with them for many people to come to faith in Christ.

As I sit here blogging, I'm searching for some inspirational thought.
There's one line that today I shared with a Senior Pastor that just resonated with everyone around the table. It's Jack Welch's (former GE boss) leadership and management mantra: "Truth is the kindest form of management."

Why do we often think softening the truth is kinder?

There is something about the 'truth' that is greater than we imagine.
There is something about living in truth, operating in truth that does something more than we think.
This is not just at the leadership level, its also at our personal level.
Can you imagine if tomorrow you operated always from the truth position.
Truthful with others, truthful to others.

I spoke last week to a friend of mine Keith Getty (modern hymn writer and sad Liverpool fan). We spoke about Dr Tim Keller and his approach to ministry, especially worship in New York city. Surrounded by world class art and artists Keller knows that his worship team and his oration on Sunday mornings cannot compete with the class acts people have enjoyed on Saturday nights in New York ....so he doesn't try and compete with mediocre music or drama or speaking; rather, he gives them Jesus.

To the couple who's marriage is falling apart; to the guy racked with guilt; to the lonely women, the drained mother, the estranged father .....mediocre music in church does nothing for them. The one thing the church can give them is Jesus. Jesus is the answer to failing marriages, guilt, loneliness, weariness, pain, disappointment.
Jesus is the truth.

The truth is - the church should stop trying to compete with what the world does very well, and give the world what it hasn't got .....the truth....Jesus.

Day 152 - teaching our staff.

Day 152 and I spent the day educating our staff.
Being a global church is at the core of Redeemer's Church - but how can we be global if even our staff are ignorant to the biggest global event happening.
Three billion people will watch this global event.
It is not beyond exaggeration that the world will nearly stop for four weeks as this global event takes place .....except the US!

This global event, even global history is the FIFA World Cup being held in South Africa.

But our staff, most of our church, most of our country are absent (except Tom Cruise interestingly ....something to do with a friendship with David Beckham!).

So .....alongside blogging nearly every day about how I intentionally followed Jesus today, I will try to help those who read my blog become global people by updating you on what everyone else in the world has been a part of over the next four weeks.
here's the video of England team leaving London to fly to South Africa - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8717146.stm

My intentional follow of Jesus today was to help our staff be global.

It also involved praying for our friends Jake & Renee in Guatemala as they help people left homeless due to the recent volcano.
It also involved beginning to write the first preach in our new series The Star, The Cross and The Crescent. Trying to speak into the global conflict of our world ....a clash of three religions.
We need to learn what's happening on our globe - misunderstanding is causing more conflict.
We need to learn how to handle truth without falling into the arrogance of truth.
we need to be in relationship with our neighbors in a very small, village globe.

Following Christ is now, as it always was, a life that is to bless every nation.

Day 151, day 43 in the gulf.

Day 151 and its Day 43 of the Gulf Coast Oil Spill.

Its hard for us to comprehend how catastrophic this oil spill is.
Its hard to understand how the people in Louisiana are feeling about their state again being hit hard.
Its hard to understand how it will eventually get sealed off.
It's hard to comprehend the long term environmental impact of this disaster.

It's also difficult to think that we'll learn from this.
They drill because we are thirsty for oil.

We, me included, have lifestyles that depend on oil.

Someone today told me it takes somewhere between 20-50 years for a culture to change its transportation habits.

There is a direct correlation between our thirst for oil and what's happening in the Gulf.

This is a truth we don't like.
It's not a new truth.

The Jews didn't kill Jesus .....I did, you did, we did.
There's a direct correlation between me and what happened on the cross.

I'm amazed that in all the reports I've read, watched or listened to ....this is never mentioned.

My intentional follow of Jesus today was to confess my guilt in the oil disaster, and to confess my role in the death of Jesus.

Its strange how one thought leads to another!