quotable quote :: ken schenck

Ironically, never in history have Christians so easily confessed themselves as sinners, and never in history have they become so comfortable with it!

Quote taken from Ken Schenck's book Paul: Messenger of Grace (Indianapolis: WPH, 2010), 28.

So what do you think...I think Schenck is on to something here.  I hear this kind of thing a lot in certain circles.  What do you do with the places where the Apostle Paul calls his readers "saints"?  Are we saintly-sinners?  Are we sinner-saints?  Or are we poor wretched sinners?  Thoughts?

church in the making :: what makes or breaks a church before it starts

I do not consider myself a church planter.  I have, however, served in leadership capacitities in three different church plants in the last four years.  Just a couple of weeks ago I accepted a call to be the Assistant Pastor of a four-year-old church in Byron Center.  I may need to reconsider how I view myself. 

Recently, I was given a really good book to read from my pastor on what makes or breaks a church before it launches entitled: Church in the Making by Ben Arment.  Arment is a church planter and researcher who has experience and credibility in the field.  A good summary of his book can be found on pages 142-3 which I quote here:

Mysterious transplants are a fascinating study.  The trouble is, we carry this same fascination over to the idea of transplanted church planters.  We hear stories about ambitious, young visionaries who prayed over a map until God revealed their target city like an epiphany from Gabriel.  We hear about them packing up their cars without a plan an moving to strange cities to take them by storm...They give us hope that all we need is enough faith and determination, and we too can succeed...A church planter may, in fact, accidentally land on the perfect context for his vision.  But it's not the most likely scenario.

According to Arment's research, parachute drop church plants simply do not survive.  An alternative, and better church planting strategy is to plant from within:

Most successful church plants are not the product of imported visions.  They were the deliberate effort of a local leader to meet the need in his own community.  They were started by leaders who had a deep understanding of their own towns...They were started by people who understood what kind of church was needed in a particular community...A transplanted church planter cannot do this...He doesn't have the deep relationships...he doesn't know what churches are already thriving...He's never considered the ecclesiographics.

Here's the climax:

The most effective church plants were not imported; they were homegrown.

For a while now, I have been wrestling with God, much like Jacob at the Jabbok about His call for us to plant a church right here in Zeeland, MI.  When I write this and verbalize this - it seems absurd to me.  Zeeland is probably the last place on earth that needs another church, but when I look around my neighborhood I know there are people around me who are not connected to the churches already here.  Why?  I think quite frankly, because they would not feel welcomed in those churches.  And it takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.

I've seen church plants begin and fail here.  Which is scarry, to be honest.  But I'll continue to pursue this in prayer and pray you join me. 

barbara brown-taylor on our relationship to scripture

My own experience has taught me the value of regular and intentional study. My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage, and one I am willing to work on in all the usual ways: by living with the text day in and day out, by listening to it and talking back to it, by making sure I know what is behind the words it speaks to me and being certain I have heard it properly, by refusing to distance myself from the parts of it I do not like or understand, by letting my love for it show up in the everyday acts of my life. The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do (The Preaching Life, 56).

understanding the human spirit

C.S. Lewis is masterful in his understanding and expression of the condition of the human spirit in relation to God. He writes:

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil...We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world (The Problem of Pain).

The Bible - The Disicpline vs. Heschel

There is a Hebrew blessing that goes like this: "Blessed are you O LORD, our God, King of the universe for you have sanctified us by your commandments and commanded us to engross ourselves in the way of Torah." This is a great prayer! It got me thinking about the "way of Torah." What is Torah? For that matter, "What is the Bible?" I offer two different perspectives. The first comes from my tradition's definition of what the Bible is and the second comes from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. First, from The Discipline:

We believe that the books of the Old and New Testaments constitute the Holy Scriptures. They are the inspired and infallibly written Word of God, fully inerrant in their original manuscripts and superior to all human authority, and have been transmitted to the present without corruption of any essential doctrine. We believe that they contain all things necessary to salvation; so that whatever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man or woman that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation...

Now from Heschel's book, God in Search of Man:
Irrefutably, indestructibly, never wearied by time, the Bible wanders through the ages, giving itself with ease to all men, as if it belonged to every soul on earth. It speaks in every language and in every age. It benefits all the arts and does not compete with them. We all draw upon it, and it remains pure, inexhaustible and complete. In three thousand years it has not aged a day. It is a book that cannot die. Oblivion shuns its pages. Its power is not subsiding. In fact, it is still at the very beginning of its career, the full meaning of its content having hardly touched the threshold of our minds; like an ocean at the bottom of which countless pearls lie, waiting to be discovered, its spirit is still to be unfolded. Though its words seem plain and its idiom translucent, unnoticed meanings, undreamed-of intimations break forth constantly. More than two thousand years of reading and research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning. Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen, as if we had not even begun to read it. Its spirit is too much for one generation to bear. Its words reveal more than we can absorb. All we usually accomplish is the attempt to appropriate a few single lines so that our spirit becomes synonymous with a passage (242).

I don't know about you but I would like my tradition's understanding of the Bible to reflect the sentiments of Heschel rather than taking a vanilla, "can be found anywhere" kind of position on the reliability and sufficiency of Scripture. Heschel - 1; The Discipline - 0.

work, space, time & sabbath

The Hebrew word for "work" is melakhah or melakhot (pl.). The operative definition of "work" according to (modern) rabbis is basically summarized like this: "work is an act which man can manipulate creation for his own purposes." In the oral tradition of of Judaism (halakhah), there are 39 specific acts prohibited on Sabbath including (but not limited to): baking, sowing, reaping, threshing, pounding, writing, plowing, harvesting, spinning, weaving, hunting, kindling and extinguishing fires, and transporting from private to public spheres. All of these specific acts are by consistent with a Hebrew understanding of "work."

Rabbi Heschel, in his book, Sabbath, elaborates on civilization's manipulation of creation ("space" in Heschel's term) at the expense of time...

Technical civilization is man's conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time. But time is the heart of existence.

To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks. The danger begins when in gaining power in the realm of space we forfeit all aspirations in the realm of time. There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own, but to give, not to control but share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.

Sabbath, on the other hand, is a God-centered time to be, to give, to share and be in accord with God, eachother, and creation.

lewis on the intolerable compliment

"And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."

~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Chapter 3.

pastoral work: job or calling

Recently a good friend accepted a pastoral position in congregational ministry and no fault to her declared in her joy, "I got a job!" While I celebrate with her, I also wonder, "Is pastoral work a job or a calling?" Eugene Peterson has something excellent to say about this in his book Working the Angles (a must read for all seminary students - if not all pastors). Peterson says,

At some point we realized the immensity of God and of the great invisibles that socket into our arms and legs, into bread and wine, into our brains and our tools, into mountains and rivers, giving them meaning, destiny, value, joy, beauty, salvation. We responded to a call to convey these realities in word and sacrament and to give leadership to a community of faith in such a way that connected and coordinated what the men and women, children and youth in this community are doing in their work and play...In the process we learned the difference between a profession or craft, and a job. A job is what we do to complete an assignment. Its primary requirement is that we give satisfaction to whomever makes the assignment and pays our wage. We learn what is expected and we do it. There is nothing wrong with doing jobs...we all have them.

But professions and crafts are different. In these we have an obligation beyond pleasing somebody: we are pursuing or shaping the very nature of reality, convinced that when we carry out our commitments we actually benefit people at a far deeper level than if we simply did what they asked of us.

With professions the integrity has to do with the invisibles: for physicians it is health; with lawyers, justice; with professors, learning. And with pastors it is God.

faith

Faith is certitude in the midst of doubt rather than certainty with no doubts. Faith is a journey with a compass which points us in the right direction, not a detailed map which tells us every step to take. Faith is going because you have heard the good news that the Guide is trustworthy and that the trip is worth the cost.

~Will Willimon, The Gospel for the Person who has Everything

quotable quotes

"He took dust from the earth and made the man; He formed him. The devil came, and perverted him. Then the Lord came, took him again, and remolded, and recast him in baptism, and He suffered not his body to be of clay, but made it of a harder ware. He subjected the soft clay to the fire of the Holy Spirit...He was baptized with water that he might be remodelled, with fire that he might be hardened" ~John Chrysostom, Eutropius

check the vital signs

"...teaching in today's church is producing limited results. Teaching is good only where there's life to be channeled. If the listeners are in a spiritual coma, what we're telling them may be fine and orthodox, but unfortunately, spiritual life cannot be taught. Pastors and churches have to get uncomfortable enough to say, 'We are not New Testament Christians if we don't have a prayer life.'"
~Jim Cymbala, Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire, 50.

peterson on leadership

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor's responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God. It is this responsibility that is being abandoned in spades.

~Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles, 2.

Still Rings True Today

"Oh, if we only had persons of prayer among those who oversee the fate of the nation and the fate of the economy! If, instead of relying on human devices, people would rely on God and on his devices, we would have a world without injustices, a world with respect for rights, a world with generous participation by all, a world without repression, a world without torture."

~Oscar Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, July 17, 1977

Mission as Love in Action

The church represents the presence of the reign of God in the life of the world, not in the triumphalist sens (as the "successful" cause) and not in the moralistic sense (as in the "righteous" cause), but in the sense that it is the place where the mystery of the kingdom present in the dying and rising of Jesus is made present here and now so that all people, righteous and unrighteous, are enabled to taste and shre the love of God before whom all are unrighteous and all are accepted as righteous. - Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret 55.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Costly Grace

I started reading Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship this week and I'd like to share some of his thoughts on costly grace versus cheap grace.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon His Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered Him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

The Cost of Discipleship, (39).

Bishop N.T. Wright says...

The universal early Christian belief was that Jesus had already been demonstrated publicly to be Israel's Messiah and the world's true Lord through his resurrection. That, as we've seen, is part of the whole point of the Christian story. And if we believe it and pray, as he taught us, for God's kingdom to come on earth as in heaven, there is no way we can rest content with major injustice in the world.

From Surprised By Hope (216).


More on his book to come.