photos

In order to help put together a visual retrospective of Grace Community’s first decade I’ve been reviewing photos. The reason that we take pictures is to remember people and what those people were doing at some point in time that we considered important. But reasons change. I looked at those pictures and tried to remember what was happening and what the people in the pictures were thinking. That led to thinking about what is happening now with those people and what they are thinking now. How and why people change is a mystery. There are a lot of people in those pictures that are no longer a part of Grace Community, some for reasons I know (or think I know), others for reasons I don’t. Some have left following Christ altogether. I felt a grieving over the fact that they’ve left.

And there’s mystery in those that are currently in Grace Community. I don’t know all of their reasons for staying. As a leader, I feel compelled to try to know, to try to sustain and grow whatever it is that keeps them participating in life together. So I’m in a constant tension of trying to please people and trying to please God. The two are not necessarily exclusive of each other. But it’s hard to give priority to trusting that God’s way is best. I’d rather go with what I think people want so that I can blame them later if things don’t go well (which, of course, doesn’t change the outcome at all). It’s hard for me to take personal responsibility for following God on behalf of the community. And it’s a great encouragement when others will join me and help to lead the church community. “Carry each other’s burdens… for each one should carry his own load.” (Galatians 6:2, 5)

Meanwhile, we keep on taking photos that we’ll look at later, remembering and wondering.

monastery without walls

One of Grace Community’s catch phrases is “a church without walls”. It’s a great picture: the people of God moving out of the confines of church buildings so that they can bring Good News into the world. It’s a picture of evangelistic proclamation and incarnational service to our world, of being salt and light that’s out doing what it should do to bless the world.

But there is a touch of the heroic in this phrase. We can start seeing ourselves as super(natural) heroes, fearless foes of evil whose deeds become the stuff of legends (or at least, comic books).

In Eugene Peterson’s book “Under the unpredictable plant” he reminds us that what we need is a “monastery without walls”. Monks went into the monastery in order to work on their Christian formation. Their spiritual work was accomplished using spiritual tools: prayer, Bible reading, worship, a holy sense of work, and the disciplines of hospitality, confession and forgiveness.

What we need today is sense of being in a monastery without walls, seeing our own Christian formation as taking place through our life lived in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and homes. Instead of heroic adventures, God calls the world to himself when they see how God does the slow and painful work of transforming grace as we humbly offer him our messed-up, unworthy selves, as we hurt each other and then repent and forgive each other.

We want people to see the fruit of the Spirit but fruit is borne for only a short time. People are more likely to see the cultivating and fertilizing and nurturing that precedes the fruitfulness. It’s useless to pretend that we’ve got it all together. People can spot plastic fruit a mile away.

Our inclination is to hide ourselves in a monastery, work on our Christian formation, and then re-appear as a mature Christian community. But that’s not God’s way. He would rather tear down the walls, letting people see that just as he is at work in us, he can be doing a transforming work in them.

cover up

I was recently reading about David, Israel’s second king and the father of Solomon, Israel’s third king. David wanted to build a temple for God, a magnificent structure befitting God’s glory. The prophet Nathan endorsed the idea heartily. After all, hadn’t God called David “a man after my own heart” (Acts 13:22)? But God told Nathan that wasn’t the plan. Nathan had to tell David that Solomon would build the temple. Meanwhile, God promises to establish the family of David as the royal line of Israel.

The curious thing is that when David tells Solomon to build the temple, he tells him that God hasn’t allowed David to build the temple because he has shed too much blood establishing the kingdom of Israel (1 Chronicles 22:8). He repeats this to the leaders of Israel (1 Chronicles 28:3) as he encourages them to support Solomon’s building of the temple.

Yet when I read both accounts of God telling David not to build the temple (2 Samuel 7, 1 Chronicles 17) I don’t find God telling David that he’s shed too much blood. In 1 Kings 5:3 Solomon’s spin is that David was too busy fighting wars to put time into building a temple. But that wasn’t exactly true either. 1 Chronicles 22 and 28 recount the huge amount of time and effort David spent gathering together the materials for the temple. Almost all that’s left is to assemble the materials into the building itself. Actually, it took 150,000 men to do the assembling, but you get my drift: David collects the materials but into perpetuity the building is remembered as “Solomon’s Temple”. That must have really set David’s teeth on edge. I get this sense because when the Ark is brought to Jerusalem David writes a beautiful psalm (1 Chronicles 16) and dances shamelessly (2 Samuel 6:14), but after being denied the privilege of building the temple David lapses into a more pedestrian prayer of thanksgiving (2 Samuel 7:18ff, 2 Chronicles 17:16ff) even though God has just told David that his family line will be established forever.

Why didn’t God just let David build the temple? All the materials were right there. It would have been a great crowning achievement to David’s career. Because that grand finale is denied, David seems to fall back on his warrior identity, pushing that to the forefront with Solomon and the nation’s leaders. As if they needed reminding!

As I’m looking forward to Grace Community’s second decade (we celebrate our first decade on September 14, 2008) I’m under no delusions that I’m as great a leader as David. But still, there are things that I would like to look back on as accomplishments, good things in their own right. And I’m not saying that God has told me directly that he doesn’t want me to accomplish these things. My lack of accomplishment is more likely due to my own ineptness than to God’s denial. The greater question is how will this affect my sense of identity. Will I try to create some face-saving excuse or can I humbly say, “May it be to me as you have said”? I may want to create something grand for God, but God wants to re-create me into the image of Christ and he doesn’t want my edifice complex to get in the way.

good news

There are two topics you’re not supposed to bring up in polite conversation: politics and religion. But as an evangelical Christian, I was taught early on that God wants us to bring up the impolite topic of religion on a somewhat regular basis as part of my Christian duty to evangelize. Interestingly, “evangelize” comes from a Greek word meaning “good news”, yet the topic of my faith rarely seems like good news to other people.

So how can I share what’s become the central organizing principle of my life in a way that’s not perceived as being boorish or a little crazy? Part of the problem is that our society keeps telling us that talking about religious matters is something that only boors and crazy people do. Rarely is there a TV or movie portrayal of a charming person talking in a winsome way about religious matters with an engaged and appreciative group of listeners. (Which is to be expected, I suppose: Jesus told us that we are “in the world but not of the world”, John 17:16, and that the world is hostile to Him and therefore to us, John 15:18.) But that doesn’t mean we should go out of our way to be boors or to act crazy.

If you’re looking for a simple, compelling way to share the Good News, I recently came across this 4 circle diagram. You can check it out on YouTube ( part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCVcSiUUMhY; part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4V60n6KiB8&feature=related). See if it speaks to you and let me know if you think you might be able to use it. It’s just a tool, so it needs to be used judiciously (“to the man with a hammer every problem is a nail”). But I like its simplicity and relevant language. For more on the author of the diagram you can check out http://www.christianvisionproject.com/2008/06/from_four_laws_to_four_circles.html.