My Favorite Reading

For the past several years, my favorite resource concerning changes going on in business and culture is called Trendwatching. Incredibly, this amazing resource is free.

Trendwatching uses 8,000+ trend spotters who scan the globe for emerging consumer trends, ideas, and insights. While the intended audience is business focused, the content allows amazing opportunities for the church to glimpse what's going on in the world around us and in the lives of our congregations.

Trendwatching does an incredible job if identifying and summarizing the forces and desires that shape our culture and institutions. For the church, it is helpful tool for understanding some of the tension between 21st century post-Christian culture and the modern church's structures and culture. It is also offers valuable insight into the types of theologies we need to develop in order to reach this new post Christian world.

Either...Or

Several years ago, I met a preacher at a conference in San Diego. We were discussing the creation stories of Genesis when he made a few lights pop on inside my head. We were talking about God declaring pleasure at the goodness of all that had been created. I was thinking pretty one dimensionally about what had been created. Stuff like light, land, lakes, and Llamas were on my creation list. My new friend helped me think through God also creating and being pleased with laughter, art, music, joy, mystery, beer, mullets, etc. We decided that God was pleased with all that had been created. That prior to being sullied by sin, everything was at its essence good.

Chew on that for a few days and you'll start to get a headache. I began to see people and things around me in a new an unexpected light. Before this I lived with the Christian subcultural view of "either..or." Either something was good (sacred) or it was bad (secular). Music, movies, books, aerobics classes, t-shirts, greeting cards, etc. were either good (Christian) or bad (worldly). I realized we treated outsiders in the same way; a person was either for us (Christian) or against us (pagan). So for an outsider to join us, she or he had to admit that we Christians (along with our structures and subcultures) were 100% right and that he/she was 100% wrong .

What if at the core of every one's being there is still some of that goodness left over from creation? I am not advocating a universalist view of salvation, but what if we dropped the either...or worldview and instead searched for common ground as a starting point?

It changes the conversation doesn't it? It changes the conversation radically. Instead of, "We're right and you're going hell", we now are able to search for this common goodness, this common longing for God implanted within each of us. We then can help people see what Jesus is already doing in their lives and that Jesus is the best way to finish the journey that they have already begun.

Book of Common Prayer

Want to have some fun? The Anglican Church has preserved this amazing and beautiful little prayer book call the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). There is an online version of the book which can be found at BCPOnline. It is full of wonderful prayers and liturgies, some of them dating back to the early days of the church.

If you've never played with the BCP before, I am inviting you to give it a whirl. I think you'll dig what you discover in there. When you clink on the link above you'll arrive at the intro page with an index to the left. If you click on links like the Collects, the Daily Office, or Prayers and Thanksgivings you'll find some great stand alone prayers you can use in a variety of settings from individual to small group to corporate.

The real fun, however, is The Holy Eucharist service. Click on that link and navigate your way to Rite II. This is a standard worship service for an Anglican Church. It is a beautiful service. You can do it just as it is written-OR-you can run wild with it and make it your own.

I love giving this service to a group of folks and telling them to use the Rite II liturgy as the overall structure, but to express the individual elements of the service in anyway they can dream or imagine. Then I get out of the way and allow the Holy Spirit to go to work.

Prayer Station: Confession

While this is a familiar way to do an interactive prayer of confession, this particular set up worked really well the night we did it. People reflected on Ephesians 4:30-5:2 in the worship space. No time constraints were placed on folks while them sat with the scripture verses. The band played instrumentally underneath.

Everyone was invited to react to the passage in writing on 3x5 cards. Once they were done, people moved outside where we had a large chimenea set up inside of a prayer space.

Written instructions (this was all done in silence) invited all to confess their sins to God in prayer and then to ask God for healing and a changed heart/life. They were then to burn their 3x5 card(s) in the fire while reflecting upon the fact that the sins represented on the cards existed no more.

Finally, as an assurance of pardon, everyone dropped a few pieces of incense into the fire as a symbol of the prayers reaching heaven and of their desire to live as a fragrant offering for God.

As we threw our 3x5 cards into the chimenea, the fire just smoldered. Nothing really burned outright (yes, I was getting nervous), but as I stood to deliver the ending assurance/prayer the cards all burst into flame and the incense caught fire. The burning incense delivered this incredibly thick plume of white smoke that shot 100' feet in the air. Visual symbol trumped words so I kept my mouth shut. Amen.

So Mad

I am an angry man today. I lost interest in Christian radio long ago, but I decided to give it a whirl again this week and see what's changed. This morning I stumbled onto a new station I've not listened to before. The music was what you'd expect, no surprise there. Some of it was pretty creative, some of it was pretty tired. The station promos though...Arrrrgggghhhh! Every half second they promoted themselves using the words safe and positive (safe alternative, safe for the family, positive music, positive force...). Extreme nausea.

One of the songs they played this morning kind of summed up the problem. The line in the song declared that this world isn't our home. It explained that we don't belong here and that we're just waiting for heaven. The implications of these kinds of thoughts and theologies cause me to mourn for the church. Since when did Jesus tell us to save people and then stash them in a Christian subculture/ghetto so that they won't get sullied by the "real world". It's a theology that says people are saved so that they can go to heaven.

I thought Jesus declared that the Kingdom of God had arrived HERE (not some ethereal future elsewhere). I thought Jesus was teaching us to live a Kingdom lifestyle HERE. I thought Paul was fleshing out how to live this Kingdom lifestyle HERE. I even thought Isaiah was describing how beautiful the Kingdom could be HERE.

So much for thinking.

Purification

This is one of my all time favorite prayers of Confession. No matter how many times I read it, there is always something new to chew on. It is a Puritan prayer from the book Valley of Vision. You can pick up a copy from my bookstore.

The entire book is filled with incredibly rich and deep prayers like the one below. Most are too long for typical church use, but I still use selected parts or rewrite them into meditations and responsive readings.

LORD JESUS,
I sin-
Grant that I may never cease grieving because of it,

never be content with myself,
never think I can reach a point of perfection. I
Kill my envy, command my tongue, trample down self.
Give me grace to be holy, kind, gentle, pure, peaceable,
to live for thee and not for self,
to copy thy words, acts, spirit,
to be transformed into thy likeness,
to be consecrated wholly to thee,
to live entirely to thy glory.
Deliver me from attachment to things unclean,
from wrong associations,
from the predominance of evil passions,
from the sugar of sin as well as its gall,
that with self-loathing, deep contrition,
earnest heart searching
I may come to thee, cast myself on thee, trust in thee,
cry to thee,
be delivered by thee.
0 God, the Eternal All, help me to know
that all things are shadows, but thou art substance,
all things are quicksands, but thou art mountain,
all things are shifting, but thou art anchor,
all things are ignorance, but thou art wisdom.
If my life is to be a crucible amid burning heat, so be it,
but do thou sit at the furnace mouth
to watch the ore that nothing be lost.
If I sin willfully, grievously, tormentedly, in grace
take away my mourning and give me music;
remove my sackcloth and clothe me with beauty;
still my sighs and fill my mouth with song,
then give me summer weather as a Christian.

Stock Exchange

Good (& legal) worship graphics are hard to come by. I can't tell you how many watermarked photos (i.e. illegal) I've seen in worship services across the country. Several years ago I stumbled across a great free graphics site called Stock Exchange (www.sxc.hu).

Anyone can post photos to the site, but each photo must pass a quality review before it will be added to the site. Many of the submisions are from true professionals. Most of the other submissions are still heads and shoulders above what you'll find at the typical photo-album-online site. Once you register online, which is free, you have access to watermark free, royalty free graphics. These are accessed through a great search engine as well as multiple catagory listings.

I like to type in a word or words that visually represent a theme for a worship gathering. The ensuing results allow me to build a coherant graphic representation of the planned worship journey. That way the images used for the music, prayers, sermons, liturgies, etc. all reinforce and add to the worship experience intead of being a a random mix of disjointed pictures.

Bad Food

There’s this guy I used to know that was very vocal about the restaurants he liked around town. He would find a place he liked and brag about it for hours on end. He also did the same for places he didn’t like to eat.

At first I followed his recommendations and would try each place excited about the new gastric adventures that awaited me. It never went very well though. I quickly found that what he liked I didn’t and what he didn’t like I absolutely loved.

What it came down to was that he’d simply grown up eating in a certain way. The food he loved was what he knew best and felt the most comfortable… even, umm, if it wasn’t very good.

Isn’t that true of all of us? We express church or worship or structure in the way that we know best or are most comfortable with. We do what we know.

The great blessing of living in this time of denominational unraveling is that we get to sample the hidden treasures of others. It’s a chance to break out of simply doing what we know and taste the goodness of what our brothers and sisters and Christ have been doing alongside us all these years.

Sometimes we love new food from the first bite. Sometimes it takes some adjusting before we really begin to enjoy it. Sometimes we spit it out never to try it again. But unless we taste it, we’ll never know.

Define Chair

I was talking to my wife the other night and she was explaining about the word manna or man hu in the Old Testament (Exodus 16). I thought it meant bread or bread from heaven. I didn't realize that man hu means, "What is that?" What a strange name for such a beautiful gift. Yet it sort of makes sense. Put yourself in the Israelites shoes. How do you give name to something that you have no experience with?

Define chair. It's easy right? Of course it is. You've seen one, touched many, used hundreds, and probably even misused several on occasion. In other words, because you've physically interacted with a chair, you understand what a chair is. How would you describe a chair to someone who'd never interacted with one? There would be no context for understanding chair.

Isn't this true for the emerging church right now? We're trying on new theologies, structures, activities, relationships, but there aren't really names or contexts for these new experiences yet. We're trying to express this God given longing in our hearts, but the language we've inherited seems so inadequate to the task.

I'm sure it took more than a few tries around the campfire before the Israelites got the hang of transforming manna into something tasty and then developed community wide recipes and traditions. We too must dive in and get our hands dirty experimenting with this cultural man hu we find ourselves within. Some days will be better than others, but it is the only way we'll discover the names God has waiting for what the Spirit is doing in our midst.

The Big Four-0hhh

I just turned 40 and I decided to hold the big birthday bash down at McDougal's Village Chicken Coop (My friends' mid-life crisis involve fast cars and new guitars. Mine involves an insatiable need for chicken fingers). We sat around after dinner swapping stories over beer and cookie cake.

My Godmother came and joined us for the party. I was teasing her and trying to find out what she'd done for her 40th birthday. She got to laughing because that was 56 years ago and she had no idea what she did.

Wow, 56 years ago she turned 40. Kind of gave me a new perspective on time. I get so impatient with my perceived the lack of progress in the emerging church. Yet in reality, only a handful of people were even in the early stages of this post-modern-culture-meets-church conversation just 7 years ago.

When I was 7, I was still reading Dick and Jane books. Maybe things are going better than my tv sitcom attention span comprehends. So now maybe I should look forward to the emerging church's growth spurt at 12....our sweet 16 when we get our licence and gain a little freedom...our 21st birthday when we become legal and full members of society...and maybe even our 40th birthday when we can sit around over beer and cookie cake reliving the glory days of our youth.

Textweek

Here is a fun website to get the brain jucies flowing as you plan a worship gathering. It is called Textweek and it is this massive gathering of links to resources including art, movies, lectionary readings, commentary, writings, sermon prep, group studies, reflections, and more! You search by entering a scripture passage or by the lectionary readings for a certain week. It will take you to a single page that shows all of the links that textweek has gathered for that passage or week.

Breakfast In Bed

Now my wife loves breakfast. There're no two ways about it and I used to make breakfast for her every Saturday. We'd sleep in and then make a big production out of this ritual and drag it out all morning. However, if I woke up before her, she didn't just get breakfast, she got breakfast in bed. Week after week she'd eat it up and smile dreamily all morning.

I on the other hand, can't stand breakfast. I'd sit around drinking Diet Coke all morning while counting down the seconds until I could eat lunch.

One Saturday, I woke to an empty house. As I stumbled groggily through the house looking for her I heard the front door open. She peaked around the edge and ordered me to get back in bed. Though full of curiosity, I obeyed right away. I heard her rummaging around the kitchen for a minute and then she appeared in the bedroom wearing an impish grin on her face.

She was carrying the tray I used to serve her breakfast each week and it had this huge white takeout Styrofoam box sitting on it. What was in it? IT WAS BBQ!!!!!!!!!!!! YEAH! She'd brought me a huge heaping mound of BBQ beans and sausage for breakfast. Oh, the ecstasy. I slurped Diet Coke and smeared sauce all over everything as I ingested this forbidden delight.

Breakfast...yummy for the first time. For one beautiful morning, I got to be me and break all the breakfast rules, customs, and traditions.

Sometimes I wish the church would take a lesson from my wife. God has called beautiful communities of faith together in every corner of your town or city and filled each congregation with people who have all of these amazing gifts, abilities, experiences, and passions.

So what happens when we hit rough spots or loose our relevance to the community God has placed us within? We latch onto the latest church growth book...curriculum...trend-OR-we entrench...do it like we used to...or hold tightly to structure and traditions.

In and of themselves, none of these reactions are bad. However, we often forget to look inward at the most important tool we have...the Holy Spirit working through the incredible people that already make up our communities.

When we imitate other churches in our search for answers, we chance missing out on discovering what God is doing in our midst. When we forget to look inward at the incredible community God has already called together, we often become weak reflections of what God is doing somewhere else.

It is hard to trust that who you are called to be as a church may already be expressed in who God has called to be in your church. Your special place in the kingdom may best be found by giving voice to the folks who are already a a part of your community.

In other words, we may have to eat BBQ instead of eggs for breakfast when we listen to the heart beat of the Holy Spirit within our congregations. Who knows where giving voice to our memebers could lead.