Week 8 - A Saturday dialogue.

Week 8 brings me to start by quoting a passage some of the guys in our church dialogued about on Saturday morning:

Christian faith is about Christ, not about experiencing Christ. There's a difference and it matters. We put our faith in a person, not an experience........
We do experience Christ in our faith and that's a very good thing, but it's not the really important thing in Christian faith or even in Christian experience. The person in whom we have faith is the really important thing in Christian experience.

Its a great quote. Its a thinking quote.

I grew up in a tradition that seemed to worship doctrine over Jesus.
You could be a hard, difficult, angry man .... but if you were solid in your doctrine everything was good! I came across many men like that. Full of truth, but no grace.
Doctrine was everything.

For years I've been puzzled by this reality.
It's like churches called "Bible Church" or "Baptist Church"!!
Why are they not called "Jesus Church"?
Do we worship the Bible, or worship a sacrament? No. We worship Jesus Christ.

But recently I've been rethinking my attitude towards the elevation of doctrine.

Listen again to our Saturday book:

More than any other religion Christianity makes a big deal of doctrine.
Most religions are fundamentally a way of life, but Christianity is fundamentally a faith, because it's centered not on how we live but on what we believe about how Christ lives (and died, and rose again).

So today at church a girl walks up to me and thanks me for the past 2 years. She has been a part of our church while attending a nearby two year YWAM mission project. Specifically she wanted to thank me for every week teaching from the Scriptures and not trying to just be topical or relevant.

Interesting that it came a day after discussing this topic.
Interesting that most of our critics see us as anything but doctrinal!

Here's the kind of church we have worked hard at being for the past 7 years - a church that elevates orthodox doctrine heard in fresh and creative ways, leading people to Christ, and from that knowledge of Christ come to a vibrant, life changing experience with Christ .... from the outside in.

Maybe our presentation of doctrine has not been wrapped in the same wineskins as a previous generation or other churches, but we are a solid doctrine teaching church.

Final quote from our book [Good News For Anxious Christians @ Phillip Cary]:

The work of the church is accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit, which forms hearts by the word of God, so that Christ may dwell there and make a lasting change in people's lives. This has been the work of the church from the beginning, since our Lord poured out his Spirit upon his Body at Pentecost. We need not worry that the Holy Spirit will cease to accomplish the work for which he has been sent, no matter how many falsehoods and failures we see in the life of the church.

I got robbed in Nairobi!

Week 6 and I've just returned from a quick trip to Nairobi, Kenya.
Again I return because too easily I forget how the majority of our world brothers and sisters live.

Seems rather ironic that we have to spend nearly $2K on trip costs to remember that over 70% of the world live on less than $2 a day.
Ask the four young guys who lead the Furaha Community Foundation that we partner with in the Huruma slum or any of their 23 employees and they will tell you that for "mzungus" (white people) to care enough about them to visit them ...... is better than sending more money to them. In a culture where relationships are more precious than money somethings truly are priceless.

As I return from another trip it is too easy for me to ignore how far away we were.
Eerily we flew over Cairo, Egypt as the country below us was sitting on the edge of a revolution. Just hours earlier we had flown at 36,000ft over Darfur seeing its sprawling sand hills - unable to see the pain on a people who had and are experiencing modern day genocide ..... sadly the world flies over it too with politicians ignoring the reality. We watched as Vienna lit up in the early evening and its huge cartwheel shaped road pattern distinguished it from the other European cities we passed. With nightfall on us we landed in the cosmopolitan capital of the world - London with its 9 million people representing over 270 nationalities.

The sad thing is I'd seen it all before and the awe of how far we were from home and what we were seeing no longer gave me chills.

Some say familiarity breeds contempt. For me, it just breeds ordinariness.
Maybe that's sadder.
When the sense of wonder, awe and excitement get diluted, life shrinks down to your size.
When life becomes your size - ordinary is too grand a word to describe the pettiness of your existence.

Of course, where ordinariness is the norm, faith is extinct.
Faith only exists in the world of extraordinary. Ordinary has no need of faith - it is content to remain where it is.

That is always the challenge of Kenya.
How do you prevent the regularity of visiting robbing you of the faith needed to visit?

Same is true in your life, in your context.

The challenge is to prevent the theft.
The need is to be wise to the thief.
The technique is to protect your soul.