now comes the hard part

Have you ever heard of a “silent rave”? Someone starts a Facebook group and invites other people to join him/her at an appointed place at an appointed time. To the innocent bystander it looks very odd. As many as a couple thousand young people converge for no apparent reason on a public space. There might be a countdown, and then they all put in their earbuds, turn on their mp3 players and start dancing. The problem is that everyone is dancing to whatever music s/he chooses, so there’s no common beat. And there’s no loudspeakers, no thumping bass or flashing lights. People step on each others’ toes a lot because everyone’s listening to different song. And it’s not really “silent” because there’s a lot of apologizing and laughing going on.

I heard a radio news reporter giving an account of a silent rave. She commented that it seemed that people at the rave were somewhat isolated, even though they were all in the same space. But then after she left the rave she started getting a lot of greetings on her Facebook account, people who wanted to get to know her, who had been at the silent rave and were using that common experience as a way of expanding their social network. So there was the initial happening that may have seemed a little strange and awkward, and then the real networking began afterward.

As I was driving to the second meeting with Peter Kumar a phrase kept coming to my mind: “Now comes the hard part.” Peter is obviously someone who loves God and is gifted by God in a way that draws a lot of people. His teaching and prayer provided a lot of encouragement and motivation for people to explore serving God in ways they hadn’t considered before. That wasn’t true for everyone. I talked to some people who felt that what Peter said didn’t resonate with them at all and they just felt awkward about it all. But for others the meetings caused a stirring, an awakening for more of God in their lives. That’s the easy part, the part that’s attractive and exciting.

Now comes the hard part. What are we going to do with this? I’m not talking about just those that felt touched in some way. I’m talking about all of us. Our vision is to become like Jesus together. Our relationship with God is personal but it’s not private. We should be speaking truth into each others’ lives. And that takes time and diligence. Growth groups are where this should happen.

One of the guys in my men’s group emailed me to ask if we could talk about what Peter had prayed over him. That’s exactly what should be happening. If Peter said something that resonated with you, share it and get feedback on it and have people pray with you about what God wants you to do. If you went and felt awkward, then share that too because that can also be a way of exploring what God is doing in your life. Even if you avoided the meeting, if you share about why you did it can be a way for people to speak truth into your life.

“The journey is the destination.” Don’t worry if you don’t have the right answers or aren’t doing the right thing or don’t even know what the right thing to do is. Engage in the process. And don’t assume that you have the right answers when someone’s asking questions or sharing experiences. Seek God together. And trust that God will honor that process: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” Jeremiah 29:13

small things

I came away from the ministries tour on Saturday with the realization that God uses small things. Each of the places we visited were places where people from Grace had done some kind of volunteer work. Over and over we heard how much of a difference that work had made. In Zechariah 4:10 God encourages Zerubbabel to finish the re-building of the temple. Some had thought that the project wasn’t worth pursuing. But God says, “Who despises the day of small things?” Certainly God doesn’t. The small things that you and I do are the very things that God will use for the building of his kingdom.

catching my breath

Whew! The tenth anniversary celebration is over. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks preparing for a crazy weekend. I MC’d the ministries tour and then led worship and MC’d the anniversary worship service while overseeing all the attending festivities.

The CIT did a great job putting on the ministries tour: Hensen, Fidelia, Robin, Andrew and Marie, plus guest presenters Johann & June, and our bus nanny Marie M. But when it came to all the other stuff, I realized about three weeks ago that I couldn’t do it all myself (doh!). So I’m tremendously grateful for all the people who stepped up to help, even though it took me such a long time to ask.

Uncle Bob made sure we had an abundance of tasty food. Terry helped him pick up the food. Kenny organized the food service so that it moved faster than I thought possible. Brenda, Jason, Jusson, Liz, Dean, Yumi, and Angela did the actual serving. Liz organized the potluck desserts (thanks to everyone who added to the dessert table). Brenda, Angela, Bich and Brian also helped with cutting and serving anniversary cake.

Steve Y organized the set up of the lawn and carried it out with help from Karen, Rick, Dale and Patrick. And then Michael, Andrew, Kenny, Terry and Steve helped put it all away, along with numerous volunteers who pitched in ad hoc.

Marie got a bunch of older kids to help her give away and sell stuff (sorry kids, but I’m not sure who all was helping: thanks to all of you who did). Marie’s friend Erin scanned 200 photos from our early years, which Alan put together into a captivating slide show made more captivating by the great interviews produced by our Visual Grace team, David, Larry and Brian. The DVDs were then copied by Kenny, Brad, Ed, Randy and Terry.

The worship band was a bunch of people who responded to my pleas for help and did an amazing job: Gina, Rob, Eric, Russ and Jocelin. Ed made a worship band that had never worked together before sound smooth and polished. Jackson made sure all my songs and prayers got into the projection database. And Dean handled all kinds of last-minute changes in the projection run smoothly.

Of course, Wendy (and her clan) did all kinds of things behind the scenes, including ordering and picking up the cake. And there were many people who were
Just as we’ve seen over the last ten years, the body of Christ can accomplish wonderful things when we’re working together. Each part may be doing something that seems small, but the whole is becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

sighing for a better world

In the latest issue of "Christianity Today" magazine, Philip Yancey quotes George Orwell's essay "Notes on the Way". My curiosity was piqued, so I checked out the essay. At the end Orwell mentions that Karl Marx's statement "religion is the opiate of the masses" is taken out of context. I've always heard that Marx was indicting religious leaders for keeping people "drugged" so that political leaders could do whatever they wanted. But Orwell points out that the sentence immediately preceding the famous quote is: "Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world." In other words the soul itself creates religion as a way of coping with a world that is becoming less and less human.

Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." (John 14:6) Jesus didn't offer religion, he offered himself. And through His Church he continues to offer himself. We are offering, not a drug, but that which souls are truly longing for.

(BTW, Orwell wrote his essay in 1940. But Marx is still being taken out of context.)

shadowing

How does one learn to be a leader? One technique is to "shadow" someone who is a model leader. I've heard about people being given the job assignment of "shadowing" someone (which sounds like something from film noir or detective fiction) so that they can learn how to do a particular job. I've never been given such an assignment, but I was just thinking about leaders that I look up to and how they would handle situations I'm facing. I guess I'm mentally shadowing them and trying to learn from what I think their responses would be.

I'm sure that when people are given the assignment of shadowing an executive it's hoped that the underling will also pick up some of the higher-up's character qualities. So this little mental exercise is teaching me a couple of things. If I'm to become a better leader, I need to be a continual learner. Shadowing isn't just for newbies. And how good a leader I become depends on who I'm learning from. It's not just a matter of learning specific job skills. It's a matter of character development. And whose character do I most want to emulate?

My little shadowing exercise actually came as I was reflecting on a prayer from Sacred Space: "May nothing ever separate me from You." In my pursuit of being a better leader am I staying as close as I can to the Person who started a movement 2000 years ago that turned the Roman Empire upside down and is continuing to change lives today? How well do I know the details of Jesus' life? How would he handle situations I'm facing? And wouldn't it be great to have his character?

"Be imitators of me, even as I am of Christ." 1 Cor. 11:1 RSV

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.