The Honduran Exodus

honduras-flag.gifThere is a migrant train of over 7000 people walking north towards the southern border of the US right now, Honduran refugees fleeing a context of poverty and violence.  It’s an exodus.

What’s walking towards America is more than that.  An awakening and an ethical decision is approaching. 

Americans have long thought of ourselves as the world’s good guys, using force to back up democracy and justice.  We are the ones who landed on the beach at Normandy.  Our first President couldn’t lie about chopping down a cherry tree.  We stand for Jesus and family.  Now that we’re the richest country in the world, it’s assumed that God has materially rewarded our spiritual and moral goodness like a parent reinforcing a well-behaved child with treats.

A 2007 report showed Honduras to be over 80% Christian.  They’re praying as they come.

American Christians have for a long time voted for candidates who claimed to be Christian, or, at least, promised to support Christian values.  Voters have rarely paused to consider the fact that that set of values has never been defined for them.  “Christian values,” in public discourse, seems to include freedom of religion (especially its expression in schools), a general opposition to abortion, and opposition to gay marriage.  They may include some nebulous affirmations like “Love thy neighbor,” but there is a sizable omission when it comes to Jesus’ very clear teachings about money and the poor.  In the American suburbs, these are generally add-ons for the specially motivated.

“Christian values” in America don’t especially exclude values which seem to be at odds with the teachings of Jesus and the early church, like xenophobia and nationalism.  Someone who is in an adulterous relationship would generally be seen as out of keeping in American churches, but someone who spends their money frivolously, doesn’t donate to charity, and doesn’t care what happens to the poor in other nations does not stand out.

What’s walking towards American Christians is a reality check.  Jesus isn’t as obsessed with sex as we are; he is far more obsessed with the poor and the outcast.  The package of values American Christians have accepted needs to be unpacked, separated, cleaned up and lightened up.  Some of it needs to be thrown away.  Self-identified evangelicals are overdue to face their baptized love of money and apathy for the oppressed. 

What’s going to be ironic about the American Christian response to the Honduran exodus is that we have an Exodus in our own Scripture, and consequently in the DNA of our faith.  God was on the side of the wanderers fleeing oppression for the sake of a land of freedom in that Exodus.  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex. 20:2). What do you think Honduran Christians hear when they read that?  Probably the same thing the first European immigrants to the US were hearing when they read the same scriptures – that is, the ancestors of a lot of Americans.

So, before the story takes over the headlines and the blogosphere, a word to Christian America: remember Jericho.

It’s Like This

 

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I’m pleased to announce the coming publication of my new book, “It’s Like This.”  It’s a passionate pursuit of the vision of the church, covering visions that churches love and visions that churches hate, visions that move churches forward into a vibrant future and visions that split churches in half.  Every effective church has a dynamic vision captured by a single, powerful image, and those who lead and love churches should invest in a vision that matters.  Dying churches often have a vision too, and I’ll show you what they look like.

This book will help your church:

  • Recognize who they are
  • Decide who they want to be
  • Manage the expectations they’ve inherited
  • Reject visions that have cost them their potential
  • Craft new expectations for life-change and world-change
  • Come alive again

Let me know if you’d like to be notified when becomes available (likely before Christmas):

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Eye-to-eye

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Jesus sat with a Samaritan woman (John 4) talking about life and eternity.  For all the interesting aspects of the conversation, my favorite detail is this one:

“Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, ‘What do you want?’ or ‘Why are you talking with her?’”

In a highly conservative culture, Jewish men would not be seen alone with a woman who was not their wife.  People would talk; assumptions would be made.

Jesus sat eye-to-eye with a woman, on a flat, 180˙ plane, which was not the normal angle.  Men looked 45˙ down to women.  This was the Creator of the universe parenting all the boys of the world.  If you want to be a good man, this is what it looks like.  Eye-to-eye.

I love not only that he did it, but that the disciples had already given up trying to change him.  They were surprised but surrendered.  He’s just going to do it this way.  We’ll probably just have to do it this way too.  Eventually maybe all men will sit eye-to-eye with women.

Maybe.

Nets and Lures

johannes-plenio-262531-unsplash.jpg“They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.  ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will send you out to fish for people.'” (Matthew 4:18-19)

Jesus called his followers to fish for people.  His followers now, across America, largely gather on Sundays to watch a show that might, on a good day, relate to fishing, but which never obligates any of them to head for the shore.  We are not the sailors you would expect to find gathered around the teachings of a fisherman.

Fishing for the American church is in a big shift right now.  It used to be that if you wanted to attract to people to your church, you would just lay out a big net, and eventually some amount of fish would swim into it, you would be hailed as an evangelist, and you could write a book on church growth.  That system is dependent on a culture where

  1. A good deal of the population feels obligated to go to church, and
  2. Church exists in a culture that is generally friendly to and supportive of it

That day is over.  The American church is poised to fall like a domino behind the European and Canadian churches.

There are some decent churches which are shuttering their windows and locking jakob-owens-208995-unsplash.jpgtheir doors for the last time, and the people are baffled as to why it’s happening.  They’re such a nice congregation after all.  They have a nice facility.  They have history.  Those are all a net thrown where there are no fish.

The American church is now going to have to switch from net fishing to line fishing.  We’re going to have to cast to reach the fish.  We’re going to have to walk to new spaces.  Throwing out a net and waiting is a fruitless activity, because the fish aren’t swimming to church.  The Fisherman is teaching us a new skill, and we either learn or we go home hungry.

Specifically, any follower of Jesus must see themselves on a daily mission to share the good news of Jesus with a lost world.  At work, at school, and in line at the grocery store, faithful Jesus-followers and fishermen in training must remember that they are called to a mission.  The mission is not to sit in a chair on Sunday.

#RLLA

 

Morality for Atheists

There is a longstanding debate about how atheists are moral.  It shouldn’t be an argument about whether or not atheists are moral, because of course, many atheists follow moral principles to which they are committed.  But there is a standing debate as to why.  As an atheist, you weren’t created for a purpose and you won’t be evaluated in the end.

12657829_963585900401513_4734572524383960592_oThis week, it was revealed that “celebrity atheist” Lawrence Krauss has been accused of sexual misconduct by students.  Krauss was a physics professor who has just resigned.  Of course we can point to any number of clergy and Christian leaders who have done the same if not that which is more shocking.

The issue though is not a matter of whether or not anyone can offend.  The question is whether or not anyone can offend consistently with their own worldview.  A Christian, by definition, is bound to the teachings of Christ, who condemns the exploitation of the vulnerable.  An atheist, conversely, commits herself to a worldview and ethic by choice rather than necessity.  The values to which she commits herself are self-selected and do not answer to an ultimate purpose or judgement.  So an atheist can consistently say that life has no value, whereas a Christian cannot.  An atheist can consistently say that one can establish relations of power with one’s peers in such a way that one’s peers are marginalized, whereas a Christian cannot.

Christians who violate the moral norms of Jesus’ teachings are failures.  The question is whether or not atheists who violate mainstream moral norms are actually failing at anything at all.

Melting Point

metal.gifMetals melt at different temperatures.  Gold, for instance, melts at a temperature of just under 2000˙.  If you wanted to reduce that gold cross around your neck to a liquid and recast it into a ring for your finger, you’d need an oven stronger than you have in your house. (Most people need to recast their wedding rings with the cross of Jesus, by the way.)

Human hearts are a lot like metals.  They come to church made of the right stuff but molded in the wrong shape. The purpose of preaching is to bring people to their melting point.  The gospel burns people down to their most basic parts – makes them focus on the purpose of life and consider shedding meaningless excesses.  Then, once we’re reduced to materials God can work with, he recasts us into the shape he means for us to be.

The purpose of preaching is to bring people to their melting point.

Worship, after the gospel, plays a cooling role.  We are reshaped by the gospel, and then we cool into our redefined shapes, a new and holy form that requires disciplined maintenance.  When we sing our response to God, it is an act into cooling into the form of a people of worship.  If you leave church a self-righteous, judgmental, gossip-filled religious person, you haven’t reached your melting point, and you’re definitely not cool(ed).  If you leave worship with a sense of humility, realizing you are only made right by the God who loves you, if you realize the only message you have for broken people is a message of love, you’ve been reshaped as you were meant to be.

See you on Sunday for worship.  God, melt us and mold us.

Letting Go to Lighten Up

Satan has scattered a few toys across the face of the earth, and people keep picking them up and playing with them.  Bitterness is one of Satan’s toys.  Revenge, pettiness, P.jpggossip, slander.  All the building blocks of revenge.  When life is over, Satan gets to come back and take all his toys home with them.  If you’re holding onto one of them, just realize you can get dragged down with it.  You don’t want to be holding onto the toys when the creepy clown comes looking for them.  So if you’re holding onto bitterness towards someone, you might want to drop it.  It’s not that fun to play with now, and in the end, it will take you places you don’t want to go.

Grace is not just a nice thing to do or a duty to obey.  It’s the lightening up of our souls by shedding the dead weight.

SA.gifI knew a family in South Africa who took in and raised as their son the boy who had murdered their daughter.  In the racially charged atmosphere after Apartheid, this destructive young man with evil in his heart tore apart this family.  It was grace that allowed them to steal that victory from the side of evil.  If that kind of grace can exist, can’t we practice its most simple forms?

Apple

Magritte.pngHere’s a painting that’s changed the world.

It’s by Belgian surrealist Renee Magritte of a man in a hat with a green apple where his face should be.  You can tell it was painted in the 1960s, because when you look at it, you wonder, “What was that guy on?”

Magritte said that the painting was intended to capture that feeling that we all have that there’s something more than what we can see, something behind the visible.  We feel it every time we try to communicate and feel that we’re not getting our message across.  Know what that feels like?  If not, date someone.  You’ll experience it.

I was content to give the painting a quick glance and then walk away, but I saw the title of the painting: The Son of Man.  That’s a title that is distinctively Judeo-Christian.  Daniel uses it in a prophecy about a coming savior, and Jesus takes up the term for himself to refer to his humanity, which often veiled his divinity.  So then I wondered at the religious possibilities.  An apple has a well-publicized connection to the Christian faith.  Adam and Eve ate one and were kicked out of Eden.  The Bible doesn’t actually say that the

forbidden fruit was an apple, but the Latin word for apple tree, malus, is also the Latin word for evil, so the play on words contributed to medieval artistic portrayals of the garden.

The apple represents the Fall, the brokenness of the world.  And that is the thing that stops us from seeing the Son of Man.  His disciples missed it, his family missed it, certainly his enemies missed it.  God walked the earth and we couldn’t see him, because we were blinded by our own brokenness, by the Fall.

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Coincidentally, Beatles’ member Paul McCartney bought one of Magritte’s paintings of an apple and named his record company Apple Corps (a play on “apple core”).  Another young hipster who loved the Beatles started up a computer company and named it after McCartney’s record company – Apple Computers.

So that little icon on your iPhone is courtesy of a Belgian agnostic who couldn’t quite find God, but had a sense that the brokenness of the world stood in the way of us seeing him.  Think about that when you see the Apple logo.  It sits over devices that are supposed to allow you to see most of the knowledge in the world.  And yet, because of human brokenness, we’ll never quite see it right.  It’s only because God breaks through our brokenness and saves us that we can ever see.

 

Forwards and Backwards

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Faithful churches are looking forwards and backwards – forwards in methodology and backwards in creed.

Dying churches are looking forwards and backwards – backwards in methodology and forwards in creed.

Faithful churches exist for getting the gospel out and welcoming failures in.  We are always looking for new, creative, innovative, and box-breaking ways to do it.  Credally, we are ad fontes, back to the sources from which we sprang, back to Jesus, the Bible, the early church.  It’s an old story we’re retelling.  But the language in which we tell is is always new.

Dying churches do it exactly the other way around.  Methodologically, they say things like, “Remember how we did it 20 years ago?  Wasn’t that great?”  They go back to the same styles, the same sounds, the same vocabulary, and often the same (stagnated) leaders.  Theologically they may (or may not) then be open to wandering.  They have little left to be committed to than the way things used to be.  Going back as far as Jesus is a dangerous thing for them to do, because in him they’ll find a pioneer and an adventurer who will leave the religious people who feel safe at church to go looking for someone who is lost (Luke 15).  They tend to replace theology with tradition.

If you’re following Jesus, he’s only going forwards.  The front windshield is bigger than the rear view mirror for good reason.