What will you do when you get to the end of yourself? In Frozen, the main character goes a typical route. First, she withdraws in order to save everyone from having to deal with her and then enjoys the perverse freedom of being alone to be fully herself without any responsibilities.
Her sister goes another route. She teams up with bad people and good, but their combined strength saves the day.
What will you do when you get to the end of yourself? Do you typically go for autonomy? Or do you react by turning to the community? Most of us try both. Sadly, they both supply about equally dissatisfying results.
There is a third, spiritual way
We need what seems like a “third” way to us. We need spiritual resources, not just personal or communal resources. Think of the pursuit of spiritual resources as “paradigm shift.” If you think you have to solve it yourself, or if you think you have to solve it withall these people because, in either case, those options are all you’ve got, then think again.
In Jesus, you have God coming alongside to give you resources beyond what you have inside or at your fingertips. Beyond your ordinary awareness or even your spiritual awareness, is strength from the living God. When we have become a wound or we are being wounded and we can’t stop it, where do we go? Dig deeper? Connect closer? Those are not the worst ideas unless that’s all you think there is to do. Because there is more.
Jesus shows the way
In the famous scene of Jesus praying in the garden the night before his crucifixion, Jesus came back from praying alone to find his community. It says in Luke: “When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. ‘Why are you sleeping?’ he asked them. ‘Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.’”
Luke is generous to say that the disciples are “exhausted from sorrow.” It is also likely that they had not learned to turn to prayer when they are exhausted or exasperated or confronted with their typical temptations. They came to the end of themselves and conked out.
Many of us have a habit of falling asleep right when we need to pray. Many of us come to the end of ourselves and purposely put ourselves to sleep with some drug or media. Frozen has anesthetized millions, for instance. When Jesus is crucified the next day he demonstrates how he has accessed resources beyond his personal strength or the power of his community. When he receives the wounds of the world, he cries out, “Father forgive them.”
Prayer is our access point to life
What do you cry out? The other day when I was praying, I again realized I have a few places in my daily life that provide regular temptations. I have unhealed wounds that are easily injured, typical exasperation points, and things that make me want to take a long nap somehow. I have some things I often cry out, but I need to follow Jesus and access resources beyond myself rather than just sitting at the end of my meager capacity feeling alone and resenting my meager community. What are those places for you? A few of mine are:
Leaders who are out for themselves and do not listen, do not serve, do not know.
Cars parked in bike lanes.
Parents abusing their children because they are at the end of themselves.
Being falsely accused by customer service people.
When the power of my convictions is eroded by the apathy of my colleagues.
Like Jesus, we are also dealing with the wounds of the world. We are exhausted and exasperated. I think Jesus is sometimes frustrated with us, too, because we prefer sleep to prayer.
But I also think Jesus looks on us fondly even when he is frustrated because he knows we are mostly dust in our own eyes. He is calling attention to that place deep within us that we can access by prayer. We have access to spiritual resources beyond ourselves and our communities. Our perverted instincts might tell us otherwise, so it is going to be a battle to get healed — some things will have to die. But in the midst of that battle, amazing capacity is gained and we give birth to the wonders of God with us.
First of all, are there any wrong people on the Lord’s bus?
The answer is emphatically “NO!”
We’re all Bozos on this bus. God is not accepting us because we eradicated all of our bozo-like attributes. Much the contrary: “one righteous act resulted in justification and life for allpeople” (Romans 5:18), bozos included — even those who don’t admit what a clown they are. “All people” includes anyone reading this. So don’t worry, you are the right person on the bus.
I wanted to start there, since this bus analogy could take the wrong off ramp rather easily. We have been talking about how to apply one idea from Jim Collins to our dialogue about how to get down the road as a church. When Collins talks about deploying leaders and staffing strategically, he talks about getting the right people on the bus and getting them into the right seats. He’s one of the business gurus that everyone listens to — partly because he comes up with good metaphors to help us get his points. Since Circle of Hope is a unique family business, in our own way, we listen to business gurus who might have some good ideas for us.
The idea we’re listening to has to do with how to lead and how to staff for meeting the goals God gives us: We get somewhere when we have the right people on the bus and get them in the right seats.Here’s the idea:
You are a bus driver. The bus (your church, in this case) needs to go further and it’s your job to get it going. You have to decide where you’re being led, how you’re going to get there, and who’s going to lead the expedition.
Most people assume that great bus drivers (read: pastors and other church leaders, including cell leaders) immediately start the journey by announcing to the people on the bus where the bus is going—by setting a new, improved direction (something like we do when we publish our yearly Map).
In fact, good strategists do not start with where but with who. They start by getting the right people on the leadership bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline—first the people, then the direction—no matter how dire the circumstances. If Jesus is not doing this when he chooses his first disciples, I don’t know what he is doing. He told them, “I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.”
Here is an example from Collins’ business research. When David Maxwell became the bus driver (CEO) of Fannie Mae in 1981, the company was losing $1 million every business day, with $56 billion worth of mortgage loans underwater. The board desperately wanted to know what Maxwell was going to do to rescue the company. Maxwell responded to the what question the same way that all good bus drivers who want to get somewhere respond. He told them, “That’s the wrong first question. To decide where to drive the bus before you have the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus, is absolutely the wrong approach.” He was a great bus driver for ten years. As you might know, his successors almost drove the bus off a cliff.
When it comes to getting started on getting somewhere next, we need to understand three simple truths:
First, if you begin with who, you can more easily adapt to a fast-changing world. If people get on your bus because of where they think it’s going, you’ll be in trouble when you get ten miles down the road and discover that you need to change direction because the world has changed. But if people board the bus principally because of all the other great people on the bus and, of course, because of the One person riding with all of us, you’ll be much faster and smarter at responding to changing conditions. Like Jesus says, “Good trees bear good fruit” wherever they are planted.
Second, if you have the right people on your bus, you don’t need to worry about motivating them. The right people are self-motivated. They want to do it. It is fun to do it with them. Nothing beats being part of a team that expects to produce great results. Like Jesus says: “I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things.” It will be an “abundant life.”
And third, if you have the wrong people on the bus, nothing else matters. You may be headed in the right direction, but you still won’t achieve greatness. Great vision with apathetic or preoccupied people still produces mediocre results. Like Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” Great Christians are bozos moved by Jesus; they discover what they have been given and find the best way to give it. Their passion makes them transforming transformers.
So why get all corporate-sounding about Circle of Hope?
1) We have a lot of leaders and we want them to be happy and passionate
We deploy a lot of leaders to drive our rather large bus. They have a lot of space to be creative and everyone is personally responsible for the success of our ‘business” in all its permutations. At least that is how we set it all up to work.
As we think about staffing and as we engage people who don’t get paid for serving (the precious “volunteer” – or as one might name them: “the people who have a life in Christ”) we sometimes run into the complaint that we are not providing “career level” staff position or well-delimited volunteer positions, so we don’t get the people we need to lead.
I wonder what people are talking about. Do people really just give what they are paid for? We are relying on more than that. Will our staff really reduce their “job” down to something that is commensurate with their pay? Will volunteers really prioritize the paying side of their time and be left with not time to serve our cause in Christ? The fear that people might do such things seems like a negative view of people! — are they doomed to be that subordinate and “slavish?” I don’t think so. On the contrary, I think we have found a lot of people who are called — the kind of people who would make tents to be able to be an apostle. It’s true, we want to pay our staff well and we aren’t looking for people who only work and never rest; but we know leading and serving with passion is also rest for our souls, not just a job.
2) We want to make sure people are in the right seats on the bus.
I think we are amazing. The fact that we survive, adapt, inspire, serve, grow and make new disciples is great. I’m happy. We have done well and we are doing well.
However, basic to our goal is also to make many new disciples and grow in number and capacity for transformation. It is hard to be satisfied in the middle of a burgeoning mission field! Our main “product” is new faith and deeper capacity to cause transformation. We don’t want to grow for growth’s sake, but we didn’t get called to be a Circle of Hope to end up as an island of faith in a post-Christian world! Our bus door is open.
The quality and discipline of our leaders (paid and not) are the keys to getting from here to there. We want to get the right leaders in the right seats: hiring who we need to hire and training and encouraging the many more servants who give their lives to follow Jesus. Being in the wrong seat wears people down; being where you belong makes momentum happen. When people are exercising their gifts, their passion revs up the bus; when they are feeding the institution because they are dutiful or kind, things get stale. When we’re well-deployed we don’t need to be tightly managed or constantly fired up; we are self-motivated by our inner drive to fulfill our calling, make a difference and be our part of creating something great.
We obviously want to create something great. We did it — and we are doing it all the time. What now? Change is on the horizon. The world certainly does not stay still! We need to do what it takes to keep doing the best we can with what we’ve been given. When we map this year, let’s expand our vision, ask the right questions and even have any healthy conflicts we need to have in order to express who we are and imagine the possibilities in store. Like Jesus says, “Open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.”
[My former church upgraded their teaching many times before they disbanded. This post is more where we began and I think it might have been a good place to say. Here is the link to their last.]
All year we have been trying to get out of the Congress-type polarization of the Church’s dialogue about sexual expression and get into the grace of staying focused on everyone’s redemption. I think we are doing a good job. The pastors came up with a statement on marriage in March and taught it to the cell leaders. I think it is a good summary of where we have come so far. This post is based on that statement. What follows are three big points about marriage and sexuality and some basic ideas that might help apply them.
We need to keep the love chapter where it belongs
The apostle Paul places his famous “love chapter” in the middle of his teaching about how the Holy Spirit is making the body of Christ out of the Lord’s followers (1 Corinthians 12-14). He does not place it after his chapter on marriage (1 Corinthians 7), which he could have easily done. The placement is important to note. Paul fully respects marriage as part of the order built into creation, but it is not equally important in the new creation.
In Christ, we are all bigger than the traditions that used to make up our identities. For instance, when Paul is talking to the church in Galatia about their temptation to follow the Jewish law he says, “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” and “what counts is the new creation” (Galatians 5:6, 6:15).
When we are talking about the new traditions people are making and legislating about marriage and sexuality in our era, it is important to remember that what counts is the new creation. How I relate to everyone who is finding their way: relationally, sexually and otherwise, is based on this kind of thought: “From now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17).
There is more to you than your marriage or lack of one
Making families is great, but the ultimate in family comes from relating as brothers and sisters in Christ and respecting God as our true parent. That is a reality that takes the work of our Savior and the power of the Spirit to experience.
Jesus affirms the oldest teachings in the scripture about marriage (Matthew 19:5-6). Elsewhere in the New Testament we are taught that marriage is to be honored by all; all the Bible writers assume they are talking about a relationship between a man and a woman, lifelong and exclusive. At the same time, marriage is not considered the ultimate expression of love and commitment; love and commitment come from Jesus and are most fully realized in the body of Christ. Within that inspired and diverse body, composed of everyone who can name Jesus as Lord, “there are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.” Every Jesus-follower is honorable and must be honored because each is given “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:5-7).
Our relationships with God through Jesus Christ are what define us. Our ultimate identity is not about how we are married or how we have sex, just like it is not about where we live or any other labels the world may slap on us.
The Church has slapped some labels on people, too.
Circle of Hope’s way of responding to our era’s new approaches to sexual expression has been based on the spirit of the preceding teaching from the Bible. At the same time, we know that the church has rarely been a safe place, historically, for sexual nonconformity. Many people have been oppressed and injured. One of the reasons people are deserting the church in vast numbers these days is not just because the members of the church do not live in the Spirit or do not express new creation life, it is because the church is even more oppressive than the world!
Because of this reality, we have tried to be even more careful to welcome every person as they are, no matter where they are on their journey, and have been committed to walk with them as they discover the fullness of what God has for them. We don’t do this just because people won’t like us if we don’t; we do it because Jesus is doing the same thing with us! Especially in regard to how people experience marriage, we don’t need that to be a big issue when we first meet someone. After all, we think that the best place to find fullness as one’s true self is as an honored member of the body of Christ, not in a sexual relationship, married or otherwise. So we try to keep our focus where the focus should be.
Some people might prefer a detailed policy statement
Our approach requires a great deal of love and personal commitment, not just careful adjudication or implementation of regulations. As Jesus-followers we need to love real, complex people with an unfolding future, not just organize identities as if we were the Social Security Administration. We want to have faith that requires our best — and loving people as they are will require our best. Being personally gracious and hospitable takes a lot of time and patience, but the commitment it takes to work out our love in the ways we are directed is worth it.
Here are some basic applications of the scripture that answer questions people have about what we are talking about:
What about the pressure to choose a sexual identity? Sexual arousal is a characteristic of a person, not their identity. How we respond to our arousal and the feelings themselves tend to be fluid and are subject to the same temptations and maturation as are all our ways. Jesus is Lord of all our feelings and ways. We seek to honor each person as they experience their feelings and find their way along their unique journey as a member of the body of Christ.
What about the increasing experience of living together as sexual partners before marriage? Generally, sexual expression should happen within a relationship founded in a marriage covenant. Couples who cohabit as sexual partners without a public commitment should consider themselves married. Likewise, if they break up, they should consider themselves divorced. The rights the nation gives or withholds regarding marriage and other relationships are superseded by our life in faith as part of the new creation.
What about “same sex attraction?” Jesus followers who desire sexual relations with people of their own gender are no less honorable than anyone else. They are going to work out their sexuality in a variety of ways, as they are convicted and gifted.
Some will choose celibacy and struggle alongside Jesus and Paul.
Some will choose to have a committed relationship that can be a faithful response to their desire.
Some will marry a person of the complementary gender and not express their other attractions, as all married couples are called to do.
There does not need to be one approach to marriage and sexual expression that supposedly meets the needs and aspirations of all people. All approaches to marriage do not need to be seen as equal in value or validity. The key to unity in diversity is the work of grace that enables disparate people to manifest the Spirit for the common good. We all experience brokenness, sin and loneliness in our loves; so we will bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2). What counts is the new creation.
He was honest, at least. He told the counselor, “If I tell you about it, you will take it away.” The counselor asked, “Can we talk about why you don’t want to talk?” He looked at her and said, “No.”
We love our addictions. Around the church, where people often want to keep relationships tidy and, irrespective of our openness and grace, persist in trying to look presentable — even when they don’t think they are presentable, someone can easily teach us the rules about what topics are on the table and what aren’t. I learn what you don’t want to talk about quickly. When someone says, “I only smoke to go to sleep,” we may not be welcomed into a conversation about how addicted that seems. The other night at a wedding one of us caused quite a stir because he was not carrying a flask full of whiskey like all the other guys. It was assumed that getting drunk was one of the goals for the evening so he caused a little problem by not having the right equipment. No one had ever violated the flask rule before, apparently!
Given that environment, it is no surprise that it was socially unacceptable last week to ask questions about coffee. This time it was me. My friends were talking about coffee and I discovered that both of them do not think they will be able to function well if they don’t get up every morning and drink coffee. I had a dilemma, “Can we talk about that?”
I thought the answer was probably, “No.” But I had just seen a graphic somewhere (I haven’t found it again, yet) that gave all these crazy stats about coffee drinking that I did not know, like
About one-third of the country’s drinking water is used to brew coffee each day. and a lot of that goes to waste when we pour out what’s left in the pot. If every household measured more accurately and saved just a cup of water each time, America would conserve about 7 million gallons of water a day. We would also save the 259 million gallons that would have been used to grow the wasted coffee beans.
60% of U.S. coffee drinkers claim to need a cup of coffee to start their day. 54% say coffee makes them feel more like their self.
$18 billion is spent on specialty coffee in the U.S. each year.
One Vivarin caffeine supplement pill (200mg) equals a cup of coffee.
Coffee conviction
I kind of wandered back into a subject that I had stopped talking about. I am not a coffee drinker, mostly because I can’t stand the taste (although I can enjoy mocha ice cream now). But due to an immersion trip to Colombia back in the 90’s I also feel conviction about not drinking coffee out of principle.
Coffee is not just a drink. It’s a global commodity. As one of the world’s most traded products—second in value only to oil—the coffee industry employs millions of people around the world through its growing, processing and trading. But while the coffee trade is vital to the politics, survival and economies of many developing nations, the industry’s pricing and futures are decided in conference rooms and on stock exchange floors in some of the world’s wealthiest cities. Recently, big operators (like the IMF) undermined Colombia’s growers — who are overwhelmingly poor farmers managing mountainous plantations, by finding even poorer farmers in Vietnam to flood the market and drop the prices.
Doing what I can to stick it to Nestle by abstaining from a useless, addictive, and expensive drink makes sense to me. (It is even easier to abstain from soon-to-be-legalized marijuana and stick it to Monsanto). The rush to deregulation of everything is a great boon to the one-percent who want cheaper beans produced by poorer people to provide ever-higher-priced coffee to you and me.
I am not talking about a new holiness code, here. I don’t want to assess your relationship with God by how you eat, drink or smoke. But are you over assessing it, or assessing at all? The fact is, one of the basic expressions of my freedom is how I do what I can choose. If I am addicted to what I don’t need, if I adopt a lifestyle that is an expression of excess and exploitation, or if I even make my body subject to some monster like Monsanto, shouldn’t I be thinking about that? Besides, a lot of these societal habits Jesus-followers adopt without thinking are not just a matter of personal holiness, they are a matter of justice. Who are we serving and to what end are we living? I think talking about that makes a difference. But can we still do that? Is there a rule against that now?
The other day at our pastor’s meeting we were talking about communication and all the different ways we try to hold together and influence the world as a network of cells and congregations in Christ. We are pretty good at holding together and influencing the world, but it is difficult.
In the middle of an elaborate dialogue about how we can best communicate, we had a little “Pentecost.” It centered on Facebook. We started talking about what Facebook makes us do to talk to people: how it restricts us, how it commodifies us, and how it tries to use us to make money. We asked, “Why are we doing this? What monster are we paying to communicate? What rules are we learning for relating?”
Be the media
Someone said, “Why don’t we just desert it and stop using the medium and focus on being the medium? We already have a great communication system. It is called living in community. Let’s focus on being the media, not on conforming to some other rubric. Let’s be face to face, not Facebook.” It was like a little fire burned through us. I heard Peter preaching “Be saved from this wicked and perverse generation!” in Acts 2. I have been building the Facebook pyramid for a long time. Increasingly, it tells me to produce bricks without straw. Why would I willingly do this with all the people I love best?
So I am going into the wilderness without Facebook all through the summer at least. Maybe I will be led to escape from all the other social media, as well. I won’t be Instagrammed any more or pinned, tumbled or tweeted, perhaps. I started saying good bye to my 1600+ friends on Facebook the other day. I could tell that I might be doing the right thing because it was hard to disentangle myself from that “everyday affair.” For one thing, it is not like I don’t use Facebook for good things, influence people for good, represent Jesus there or keep up with all sorts of loved ones.
But for another thing, in just one decade (surprisingly, the same decade in which Circle Thrift has been thriving) Facebook has conformed me to a brand new way to think of “friends,” to say happy birthday, to announce important things in my life and to present myself to the world. It has been fun and beneficial in some ways. But has it been right and are the results what I really want? I’m not so sure. The fact that it is hard to extract myself, makes me wonder. “Has the social media got so many of my friends locked in that I won’t even know anything about them unless Facebook mediates our communication?” That one question is enough to make me want to flee back to being a person again and not just an image or message mediated by a faceless machine. I think I want my face back.
Yesterday we celebrated how God honors us by including us in his spiritual reality and investing himself in ours. I am the vessel God chose to fill with his content. When the Holy Spirit came upon the gathered believers, God made his preferred media plain; it is people. God’s face can be seen in Jesus followers and in the acts of the body of Christ. Every time that reality gets undercut by locking it in a book, even the Good Book, especially Facebook, I think something goes missing. We lose the significance of God becoming incarnate in Jesus and undermine the reality that the Holy Spirit is continuing to incarnate Jesus in each and all of us.
So for the summer, for sure, I want to get rid of as much internet communication as seems reasonable and have a face-to-face season. The more I think about it, the more important it seems. I began wondering what “face-to-face” really meant, and I realized more about how conformed we have become to machines. If you are twenty, you’ve spent ten years with Facebook. Mark Zuckerburg may have influenced you more than Jesus when it comes to making relationships. The other day some therapists who were part of my research were lamenting that they often run into children texting their parents from their bedroom! One teen said, ”I don’t talk to my parents about my grades; they can check it all on line.” You probably have your own anecdotes, like all the times you want to say something to someone on the bus and you have to get them to stop looking at their screen or to take out their ear phones in order to do it.
Human communication
We may not be able to change the way the world works. It often caves in on itself anyway, so we don’t always need to figure that out. But as far as we are concerned as the body of Christ gathered as Circle of Hope, we should perfect the amazing, human communication system we already have, not conform to the monsters that eat our time and don’t produce truth and love. I am talking about perfecting the face-to-face network we have in our cells and public meetings, and all the other ways we connect in our neighborhoods and teams. Why shouldn’t I rely on you to speak the truth in love? Why would I “go over your head,” so to speak, and rely on some faceless machine to broadcast what the Spirit is offering through me? Why would I reduce your importance to a “like” icon or a comment?
Why shouldn’t I be saved from this perverse generation?! So I am going off social media so I can be social media. I am not interesting in damning all use of whatever “social media” is, or in adjudicating what being off it might mean as if I were trying to create some postmodern holiness code. Not me! I just want to reinforce our own communication system rather than spending the hours doing all the work it takes to use the machines that try to get in the middle of it and wheedle their way into being indispensable until they can steer me where they want and steer my riches into their coffers. What do you think? (Don’t tell me on my wall).
Both of Gwen’s parents died in 2012. The loss changed our lives in significant ways. One of the greatest changes was financial. After surviving since we were eighteen by our own ingenuity and living most of our marriage in something of a voluntary poverty, we got slammed with a significant boatload of money to manage. Now, among the things my spiritual director and friends hear about, are the new experiences Gwen and I are having, now that her inheritance from her parents has arrived. My director convinced me to embrace it and see where God is taking me now rather than avoid or resent the new reality.
The embarrassment of riches is upon me. For a year I have been keeping our new circumstances mostly to myself, just like you keep your finances to yourself. But, I recently rediscovered that I live in a pastor fish bowl and most people who were interested were peering right into my decisions. So I might as well talk about what other people have been talking about. While I am not sure you need to know everything about me; I’d also hate for my loved ones to get the wrong idea because I just left them alone to make things up for themselves.
Even before we received this windfall, I felt unspeakably rich. The $90K house we bought when we moved to Philly got Penntrified. When we bought it, our boys were all teenagers living with us, plus a single guy moved to Philly with us, and a family of four moved in to help with our church planting effort. Later on we invested most of our savings in a building for Circle Counseling and it got gentrified, too. Then we used equity from our house to buy a home for Shalom House and even that building went up in value. Most of our investment has been in our mission. We were major donors to Broad and Washington’s rehab, too. As a boy who grew up with parents who were straight off hard-scrabble farms, I felt wealthy beyond my expectations. As a Jesus follower who had taken constant financial risks to fulfill my calling, I felt like the Lord had taken care of me very well.
Now we have even more wealth to consider — and I find that others are considering it, too. I am a little uncomfortable dealing with it in public, but God called me to have my faith in public, just like you, and I ended up a pastor to boot. So I hope what I do doesn’t make Jesus look too bad. It’s not that I think everything I do can be or should be an example someone should follow — but what I do gets noticed. As one of your leaders, you can discern whether what I do is imitating Christ and then imitate me. As far as how I handle our inheritance, I don’t think we have all the answers yet for you to imitate. But I am sure you will help us figure them out.
General investment principles
We have a couple of general principles we’ve been working with so far. We don’t trust the stock market and most retirement funds because we think they are run by the one percent for their own profit. I like to buy property and to see how debt free I can get it so that when the system collapses on its bloated self, at least we will all have some place to live. So we decided to put most of what we inherited in useful pieces of property. The properties also seemed like good places to store up some of the inheritance for the uncertain future of our grandchildren. Some of them might be in need later on. We have already decided on two properties. They are what I discovered many of you have been talking about
The first piece we bought with the new inheritance money was a retreat in the Poconos. It is on a gigantic swimming-pool of a lake on a little, wooded road called Hallowood Drive: the holy wood drive. We see it as a great place to contemplate, and we already laid out the outline for a labyrinth in a little meadow. It is also the clan’s vacation home and has a bed for everyone, if we can get them all together.
The second building we are working on buying has been condemned to rezoning and is expected to be redeemed on June 17. We decided to invest in another site for Circle Counseling, which has grown to full capacity in West Philly. It is at 1226 South Broad, just a block away from Broad and Washington’s meeting place. Not only will this allow us to engage new counselors (some we may have in our own network!), we may be able to incorporate some Christians who are doing a good work on their own and would like to join in with us. It also gives room for Gwen to create an institute to explore how Christians use psychotherapy and for us to provide a more professional level of spiritual direction.
When I was digging in to this story with my spiritual director, at one point his face kind of wrinkled up in puzzlement. I think I was expressing my fears about what spending money looked like to others. How I talked about it concerned him, and how he talked to me sort of calmed me down. Basically, I liked the righteousness of relative poverty more than I like this embarrassment of riches. But talking about where I find myself now made me remember Romans 14:8: “If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” That goes for being rich or poor, too. Whether we are rich or poor, we belong to the Lord.
Do “gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people” (whatever that might mean)? And what does Jesus think and feel about that? Let’s mentalize about it.
The other day one of our pastors, Jonny Rashid, posted an interesting article on Facebook about which I have been thinking ever since. It was a potpourri of commentary on changing Eastern cities in reaction to the new mural Amtrak and the National Endowment of the Arts have commissioned Philadelphia’s famous Mural Arts program to oversee. They want to do something to beautify a bit of the ride from 30th St. Station to the usually-deserted North Philadelphia station. Sarah Kendzior labeled the whole project an example of The Peril of Hipster Economics and Aljazeera printed her thoughts. Her criticism was in direct response to a Wall Street Journal article called Fighting Urban Blight with Artby Jessica Dawson.
Your aesthetic
Among the many colorful and true things in Kendzior’s article was this incendiary gem: “Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.” She did not define the term aesthetics, which was probably a good idea, since people are having trouble doing that. The term generally refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty. What she really meant to say, probably, was that “hipsters tend to see people in relation to their aesthetic.”
We are not doing too much fighting about the philosophy of aesthetics these days, since it was a very modern invention of German philosophers and we are pretty much post-modern, or heading there. But we are talking a lot about the ideas and feelings that characterize and guide artistic movements — their aesthetic. Everything has a design aesthetic (Applebeing notorious for this). But since in consumer capitalism people are also commodities it becomes logical to decide what your personal aesthetic is, the “look” that fits your “brand.” “Hipsters” (do we still call people hipsters?) have their own sense of what is aesthetically pleasing. Even more, they, as individuals, have their own aesthetic. They have a “look” they are constrained to present. That’s the part of all of this that interests me. In this sense, we are all becoming hipsters and have our own personal aesthetic.
We should not be surprised that the great grandchildren of people who appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour have multiplied into a society in which everyone can sing, dance and feel obligated to present themselves as a work of art, because America’s got talent! Everyone has a sense of how to present themselves according to their own aesthetic. We have TV shows devoted to our living rooms and wardrobes and the image-driven social media into which we are locked demands a certain art of self-definition. Critics will tell you if what you have done is “overworked” or over-designed because we are supposed to look like we don’t really fret over how we look! We are so generally narcissistic, as a society, that it might be possible, as Kendzior accuses, for people to see other people as elements, or not, of their aesthetic. Ethics may be in the process of quickly being reduced to aesthetics.
Facebookization
Is the new mural just more Disneyfication of the landscape? The Inquirer said, “Soon…droves of art-hungry tourists may be making” a “pilgrimage” to North Philly to see the strange experiment. Like the surreal Disney World carved out of the uninhabitable central Florida, a bit of unreality is creeping into North Philly. Like facades on Mainstreet USA, the artists can mask the reality of poverty and injustice behind their aesthetically-satisfying mural. Masking reality is the Disney specialty. Will the natives of North Philly dance for the tourists when they come to visit like “cast members” (that’s Disney employees are called) do in Florida? Will new North Philly trinkets be invented to sell as a memento of a tourist’s visit to the foreign country through which they have been speeding all these years?
Or is the new mural just a logical expression of the Facebookization of persons? Can we really even talk about differing communities talking to one another now (like Amtrak talking to North Philly), since relating is reduced to images connecting virtually so often? Everyone is required by the omnipresent social media engines to present themselves with some kind of aesthetic choice. How I decide to present my image is important, since most of our communication is reduced to images. Our lives tend to be captions to pictures, titles to images that represent our interests and accomplishments. We are reduced to gravatars and icons. We no longer even have to have someone take our picture; we’ve been reduced to selfies. Is it any surprise that so-called hipsters would be more interested in a neighborhood’s aesthetic than with the people in it? How it photographs is important to them.
The mural gives people still interested in ethics a perfect example of the insanity of how money is spent in Philly. $300,000 will be spent on a temporary mural while behind it people will keep scraping by and starving. It is an ethical nightmare — a Disney choice by Facebooked numbskulls, it would appear. But don’t blame it on the so-called hipsters, as if they actually clamoured for this mural or have some amazing influence on Amtrak! If anything, blame the one-percent who are decorating their infrastructure according to the aesthetic of conspicuous consumption. Hipsters ride the Megabus, not Amtrak! The hipsters are serving the one percent in their restaurants and trying to get a gig on the latest version of Ted Mack! The hipsters I know are much more likely to be a good neighbor than Amtrak. Like the people who claim North Philly as their native land, they are likely to be reduced to finding a rare, affordable place to live, not merely decorate.
Hard to stay conscious
I think it is important for Jesus-followers to argue the philosophies and unconscious actions that dominate our days. What Christians bring to the process is a demand for reconciliation: with God and with others. Then we can get somewhere with justice.
Commenting on Jonny’s post, Marquita said: “The mural being made has a greater benefit to the city in hiding what should be its shameful failure to adequately provide jobs and educational for its citizens.” So true.
Nick said: “Reconciliation is a process, and there’s room in the process for some redistribution to go along with the love. Now, how do we get the so-called ‘job creators’ to even join the process?” Great thought.
Great question! I am a pretty optimistic guy and I think God is with me when I prophecy to the powers that be. But unbelievers are shameless and greedy (and plenty of believers are too!). My hope remains in the message of reconciliation delivered by authentic people of God acting in an alternative community. Otherwise Disney, Facebook and their inevitable successors are the future. There is another future already present in Christ; we know Him.
N.T. Wright thinks Ascension Day is important and he suspects you don’t. I think His theology is so seldom-considered that I decided to write out a section of his book Surprised by Hope and let you consider whatLuke sayshappens to Jesusafter he rises from the dead.
What do you think? Can you do some theology with N.T. Wright? Happy Ascension Day!
“Many people insist — and I dare say that this is the theology many of my readers have been taught — that the language of Jesus’ “disappearance” is just a way of saying that after his death he became, as it were, spiritually present everywhere, especially with his own followers. This is then often correlated with a nonliteral reading of the resurrection, that is, a denial of its bodily nature: Jesus simply “went to heaven when he died” in a rather special sense that makes him now close to each of us wherever we are. According to this view, Jesus has, as it were, disappeared without remainder. His “spiritual presence” with us is his only identity. In that case, of course, to speak of his second coming is then only a metaphor for his presence, in the same sense, eventually permeating all things.
What happens when people think like this? To answer this, we might ask a further question: why has the ascension been such a difficult and unpopular doctrine in the modern Western church? The answer is not just that rationalist skepticism mocks it (a possibility that the church has sometimes invited with those glass windows that show Jesus’s feet sticking downward out of a cloud). It is that the ascension demands that we think differently about how the whole cosmos is, so to speak, put together and that we also think differently about the church and about salvation. Both literalism and skepticism operate with what is called a receptacle view of space; theologians who take the ascension seriously insist that it demands what some have called a relational view. Basically, heaven and earth in biblical cosmology are not two different locations within the same continuum of space or matter. They are two different dimensions of God’s good creation. And the point about heaven is twofold. First, heaven relates to earth tangentially so that the one who is in heaven can be simultaneously anywhere and everywhere on earth; the ascension therefor means that Jesus is available, accessible, without people having to travel to a particular spot on earth to find him. Second, heaven is, as it were, the control room for earth; it is the CEO’s office, the place from which instructions are given. “All authority is given to me,” said Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel, “in heaven and on earth.”
The idea of the human Jesus now being in heaven, in his thoroughly embodied, risen state, comes as a shock to many people, including many Christians. Sometimes this is because many people think that Jesus, having been divine, stopped being divine and became human, and then, having been human for a while, stopped being human and went back to being divine (at least, that’s what many people think Christians are supposed to believe). More often it’s because our culture is so used to the Platonic idea that heaven is, by definition, a place of “spiritual,” nonmaterial reality so that the idea of a solid body being not only present but also thoroughly at home there seems like a category mistake. The ascension invites us to rethink all this; and, after all, why did we suppose we knew what heaven was? Only because our culture has suggested things to us. Part of Christian belief is to find out what’s true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.
This applies in particular to the idea of Jesus being in charge not only in heaven but also on earth, not only in some ultimate future but also in the present. Many will snort the obvious objection: it certainly doesn’t look as though he’s in charge, or if he is, he’s making a proper mess of it. But that misses the point. The early Christians knew the world was still a mess. But they announced, like messengers going off on behalf of a global company, that a new CEO had taken charge. They discovered through their own various callings how his new way of running things was to be worked out. It wasn’t a matter (as some people anxiously suppose to this day) of Christians simply taking over and giving orders in a kind of theocracy where the church could simply tell everyone what to do. That has some times been tried, of course, and it’s always led to disaster. But neither is it a matter of the church backing off, letting the world go on its sweet way, and worshipping Jesus in a kind of private sphere.
Somehow there is a third option. …We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom will come as the church, energized by the Spirit, goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always–as Paul puts it in one of his letters–bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.
What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer is that the church expands to fill the vacuum. If Jesus is more or less identical with the church–if, that is, talk about Jesus can be reduced to talk about his presence within his people rather than his standing over against them and addressing them from elsewhere as their Lord, then we have created a high road to the worst kind of triumphalism. This indeed is what twentieth-century English liberalism always tended toward: by compromising with rationalism and trying to maintain that talk of the ascension is really talk about Jesus being with us everywhere, the church effectively presented itself (with its structures and hierarchy, its customs and quirks) instead of presenting Jesus as its Lord and itself as the world’s servant, as Paul puts it. And the other side of triumphalism is of course despair. If you put all your eggs into the church-equals-Jesus basket, what are you left with when, as Paul says in the same passage, we ourselves are found to be cracked earthenware vessels?
If the church identifies its structures, its leadership, its liturgy, its buildings, or anything else with its Lord–and that’s what happens if you ignore the ascension or turn it into another way of talking about the Spirit–what do you get? You get, on the one hand, what Shakespeare called “the insolence of office” and, on the other hand, the despair of late middle age, as people realize it doesn’t work. (I see this all too frequently among those who bought heavily into the soggy rationalism of the 1950s and 1960s.) Only when we grasp firmly that the church is not Jesus and Jesus is not the church when we grasp, in other words, the truth of the ascension, that the one who is indeed present with us by the Spirit is also the Lord who is strangely absent, strangely other, strangely different from us and over against us, the one who tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him — only then are we rescued from both hollow triumphalism and shallow despair.
Conversely, only when we grasp and celebrate the fact that Jesus has gone on ahead of us into God’s space, God’s new world, and is both already ruling the rebellious present world as its rightful Lord and also interceding for us at the Father’s right hand–when we grasp and celebrate, in other words, what the ascension tells us about Jesus’s continuing human work in the present–are we rescued from a wrong view of world history and equipped for the task of justice in the present…. We are also, significantly, rescued from the attempts that have been made to create alternative mediators, and in particular an alternative mediatrix, in his place. Get the ascension right, and your view of the church, of the sacraments, and of the mother of Jesus can get back into focus.
You could sum all this up by saying that the doctrine of the trinity, which is making quite a come back in current theology, is essential if we are to tell the truth not only about God, and more particularly about Jesus, but also about ourselves. The Trinity is precisely a way of recognizing and celebrating the fact of the human being Jesus of Nazareth as distinct from while still identified with God the Father, on the one hand (he didn’t just “go back to being God again” after his earthy life), and the Spirit, on the other hand (the Jesus who is near us and with us by the Spirit remains the Jesus who is other than us). This places a full stop on all human arrogance, including Christian arrogance. And now we see at last why the Enlightenment world was determined to make the ascension appear ridiculous, using the weapons of rationalism and skepticism to do so: if the ascension is true, then the whole project of human self-aggrandizement represented by eighteenth century European and American thought is rebuked and brought to heel. To embrace the ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), and to enjoy our status as creatures: image-bearing creatures, but creatures nonetheless.
The ascension thus speaks of the Jesus who remains truly human and hence in an important sense absent from us while in another equally important sense present to us in a new way. At this point the Holy Spirit and the sacraments become enormously important since they are precisely the means by which Jesus is present. Often in the church we have been so keen to stress the presence of Jesus by these means that we have failed to indicate his simultaneous absence and have left people wondering whether this is, so to speak, “all there is to it.” The answer is: no, it isn’t. The lordship of Jesus; the fact that there is already a human at the helm of the world; his present intercession for us — all this is over and above his presence with us. It is even over and above our sense of that presence, which of course comes and goes with our own moods and circumstances.
Now it is of course one thing to say all this, to show how it fits together and sets us free from some of the nonsenses we would otherwise get into. It’s quite another to be able to envisage or imagine it, to know what it is we’re really talking about when we speak of Jesus being still human, still in fact an embodied human — actually, a more solidly embodied human than we are–but absent from this present world. We need, in fact, a new and better cosmology, a new and better way of thinking about the world than the one our culture, not least post-Enlightenment culture, has bequeathed us. The early Christians, and their fellow first-century Jews, were not, as many moderns suppose, locked into thinking of a three-decker universe with heaven up in the sky and hell down beneath their feet. When they spoke of up and down like that they, like the Greeks in their different ways, were using metaphors that were so obvious they didn’t need spelling out. As some recent writers have pointed out, when a pupil at school moves “up” a grade, from (say) the tenth grade to the eleventh, it is unlikely that this means relocating to a classroom on the floor above. And though the move “up” from vice chairman of the board to chairman of the board may indeed mean that at last you get an office in the penthouse suite, it would be quite wrong to think that “moving up” in this context meant merely being a few feet farther away from terra firma.
The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. We post-Enlightenment Westerners are such wretched flatlanders. Although New Age thinkers, and indeed quite a lot of contemporary novelists, are quite capable of taking us into other parallel worlds, spaces, and times, we retreat into our rationalistic closed-system universe as soon as we think about Jesus. C. S. Lewis of course did a great job in the Narnia stories and elsewhere of imagining how two worlds could relate and interlock. But the generation that grew up knowing its way around Narnia does not usually know how to make the transition from a children’s story to the real world of grown-up Christian devotion and theology.”
Memorial Day weekend just came to a close. I spent most of it with my delightful family, in a delightful place with delightful weather. The other part was spent with the delightful people at Circle of Hope Broad and Washington. Nice.
Even though I was having the perfectly-divertive, potentially-numbing weekend (like everyone else was trying to have), the reason behind the holiday kept running through the back of my mind. I was reminded on Sunday that Memorial Day is for putting flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers. What’s more, as Jerome said in our meeting, it is for mourning the meaninglessness of war and the tragic loss of lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
Then, on the way home tonight, I was listening to Sound Opinion on NPR. They included a section called Memorial Day: Songs from the Front Lines. It gave my mind a chance to get free of my commitment not to think so much for a while as the music critics collected their most-respected war songs in honor of the holiday. They re-minded me and took me back to some places I need to stay.
The rich send the poor to fight for them
Wars always elicit songs. In my lifetime, American wars have increasingly spawned protest songs. One of the songs from the show took me back to the Vietnam War (when I was fifteen). Creedence Clearwater Revival sang a protest song that Jon Fogerty has been singing ever since called:Fortunate Son. It is about how the rich send the poor to fight battles to maintain their wealth. That’s a truth that has only become more true since the sixties. What’s worse, is that today’s young, unlike Fogerty, have much less hope that a song will change anything. They seem to be sure that the “powers that be” will just reduce their passion to a ring tone or a jingle and sell it back to them. They act like their only hope is to sell their soul for a lot of money, not just a little, since they’ll be selling it one way or another.
Fogerty was not the son of a Senator or millionaire. So as a young man he felt very afraid that he would be drafted into the secretive, fruitless, and divisive war in Southeast Asia. Because he was not rich, there was no way out. Because he was not connected to the oligarchy that ran the country, he had no power but his song. So he sang it hard:
Some folks are born made to wave the flag
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays “Hail to the Chief”
Oh, they point the cannon at you, Lord
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no Senator’s son, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one.
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don’t they help themselves, y’all
But when the tax men come to the door
The house looks like a rummage sale, Lord
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no millionaire’s son, no, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no
Yeah, some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war.
And when you ask them, “How much should we give?”
Oh, they only answer, more, more, more.
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no military son
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one
When Bruce Springsteen covers it, we fellow-locals need to sing along. There are still prophets out there! We grow them ourselves — Raleigh Booze will give it a go for you, too — just ask him (or ask him to sing)! We can at least sing, “It ain’t me” hard — even if we are only going to sing.
We Christians should be singing along with Fogerty and Springsteen, but that’s hardly the best we can do. We don’t have to thumb through the Bible very far to be reminded that they are singing our song. We could, for instance, “sing” along with James and plan some fearless resistance with him. For one thing, he’ll remind us that we are all poor in the eyes of the Lord, whether we write hit songs and fill arenas or not. And he’ll remind us to forgive our exploiters for the sin of their corruption even as God has forgiven all our sins — but not by overlooking them. Our faith unleashes radical forgiveness but also releases prophetic love-anger over what needs forgiving that the world so desperately needs:
“ Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong?” James 2:5-7.
Yes, James, they are exploiting us and we elect more millionaires to do it. They dishonor the poor and we wring our hands. They blaspheme Jesus and we are afraid to tell them the truth. Forgive us. Sing us the old song again. Help us to sing along and at least make the right kind of noises.
Every once in a while we need to ask the Lord if we should just close up the enterprise and do something else for which we are better suited! There is nothing worse than a church that doesn’t need the Holy Spirit to keep functioning, right?
So I asked a few questions of our Leadership Team the other day which I had been asking myself. A few people got right back to me with some encouraging answers. I am sharing them with you, basically unedited (but anonymous since I didn’t ask them) to see what you think. What would you add?
I know people read this blog from all over, but I hope you won’t tune out. It would be interesting to hear what you say. We’ve been told we are full of it before, so no need to be shy. But also, what you see from far away might be helpful for us who are way into this quadrant of the Church over here. Leave a comment or send me a note.
Why should Circle of Hope survive?
We have deep roots, so much lore, so much mutuality, and I think “blossoming” for this particular season is possible if we keep asking these kinds of questions and clarifying our purpose.
I did not make this up.
Circle of Hope should survive for as long as we are creating a community to exist in opposition to the evil in the world and to do so through Jesus. Perhaps the hardest part of this is creating a community in which we live up to “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
Circle of Hope should survive because people need to know Jesus and I think our model gives most people the best opportunity to do that. It’s that simple for me: people need to meet God and I think our people are best suited to make the introductions.
Today I say Circle of Hope should survive because cells are still a very good way to communicate the gospel. People need the good news of a community that loves them into life in Christ. The days are darker and more crooked than ever and we do shine like stars (see Philippians).
Because it’s God’s will for us to fulfill the Great Commission. It should survive because Jesus wants it too. We are God’s dwelling place in an explicit expression. As it turns out, it’s the most authentic expression I’ve experienced, and the best delivery mechanism of the Gospel.
In a soul-killing day, in a church-killing area — Why does God want us?
Because existence is one form of resistance. And because we have a unique voice that we still need to learn how to keep using. Many (most?) of us are not from the neighborhoods we now live in. We are people who didn’t find a home in our home churches. We have attracted high numbers of creative types who have hung around the margins and have prophetic insight, but we have more unleashing to do.
I think that God has called us to do something specific and distinct in our region. It might even be special. Looking into the future, I don’t see many of the churches that cater to the young people that are flocking back the cities surviving/thriving with their models (that seem to be popping up more and more frequently). There is a pretty substantial dichotomy that exists between our missional model and their attractional one. In an increasingly post-Christian and digital society, it’s only going to get harder to attract people to something they don’t care about. In the bluntest terms, I would rather bet on some iteration of Circle of Hope existing in 100 years than whatever next Acts 29 church plant that comes down the pipeline.
A lot of the local Christian Churches in the area are Reformed. Their theology is about being in the right position with God (humble, dependent, worshipping). These are good things. Our theology is more about doing the right things with God (serving, prophesying, witnessing). The propositional, principle based theology that is mostly about protecting God’s attributes is dying and was dead from the start. The Mission has a Church and we’re trying to be that church the best way we know how. The other churches are too, God bless them and bless God for using them despite their suspect strategy. All that being said, let’s figure out how to reach into groups of people who aren’t even close to Christian yet. There’s plenty of work to go around.
We are diligent and loyal, and self-reflective (case in point is this question). We are radical Christians following God in an era where many are selling their souls to false idols and gods (war machine, corporations, nuclear family, material acquisition). We provide an alternative community and lifestyle that the 99 percent need (and the 1 percent, too). We help unchurched people find God in a way that other churches cannot. Christian burnouts get new faith in Circle of Hope, the evidence of which is overwhelming. Those Christians don’t just consume, they lead us. We covert people, disciple them into leadership, and end up planting more churches because of it.
We lead and it makes others anxious because it causes so much disruption. Presbyterians get offended, the City Paper writes a negative article, the Fishtown message board criticizes us. We are self-differentiated as a church, but we are not unchanging. We adapt when we need too. The latest teaching on marriage and sexuality is evidence that we are listening and changing, that our conviction about dialogue isn’t just rhetoric.
The way Circle of Hope maintains its intimacy and connection as a community is because of our dynamic leaders, and because literally, our Map leads us. We have goals and agreements, a mission and vision that helps us focus together. Our family system doesn’t undergo the typical dysfunctions because we are committed to a cause and our Leadership Team is generally committed to convincing people of that.
We are a tangible expression of the love of God breaking through in the world—God wants that kind of action and purpose and understanding in our “being.”
There is a lot of something out there to be saved.
What are we offering that you can’t just pick up anywhere?
Our bias toward action. I’ve never been a part of or visited a church where so much onus was placed on the “lay” people. “We” really are the church. We have learned so much from each other and have more skills than we realize, I think. When we’re just around each other a ton we forget how talented and supported and capacious (whoa that’s a word!) we are.
Honesty and vulnerability. When it happens in an attractional church, it’s a miracle (based on my church planter friends that are doing attractional model churches). In Circle of Hope, it’s a Tuesday. I had a really smart friend, who church hopped across the country as he finished his doctorate, connect to my cell for a while actually tell me that we talk too much about “social justice stuff” (which everyone is doing now that it is hip to care about people) when we really should be championing the richness of relationships that are cultivated in cells and PMs — “‘You really are the church.” Our model, which is always changing to meet the next person, is dynamic and simple in what it tries to do: put people in meaningful relationships with each other and God and give them a chance to flourish.
Honesty. But it can get us a bad rep among the Christians. We’re too honest about how sinful we are. This gives us the unique ability to let people be in before they are in with Jesus. You don’t have to be a Christian to explore with us.
Cells, original worship, a connected pastors team, both big and small incarnations of the church, good teaching, peace, justice, compassion. Committed pastors who are planters, shepherds, ship captains, and military generals–when they need to be. Circle Counseling.
We offer a rare opportunity to be unified as a body and differentiated as a person. (Can’t pick that up anywhere, it seems.)
What gift do we bring that the Church needs?
Dialogue skills, conflict resolution skills and building up an alternative economy. The Church needs more of all of this right now and they are things we have worked especially hard at.
Conflict attraction (opposite of conflict avoidance — I just coined it). Devotion to Matthew 18. Devotion to the Sermon on the Mount- particularly peacemaking.
Incarnational evangelism, missional community, apostleship, prophecy, nerve, truth in love.
We bring an aliveness in Christ that demonstrates depth and expansion.
Refreshing, isn’t it? And quite a bit more than what I’ve printed came in after this first burst of enthusiasm. God is with us.
Really. It would be great to hear what you have to add. Leave a comment.
1) We have a lot of leaders and we want them to be 
We need to keep the love chapter where it belongs
