Category Archives: Leadership

Your conscience is in danger: The Bible can help

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Film/TV, Leadership, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

I was energized as I walked along Market St. on a beautiful day last Saturday. We periodically shouted “No Kings!” and “This is what democracy looks like,” and it felt good to hear my voice right out loud — there in public, and all. At one point we caught up with a couple of people in blow-up unicorn outfits. It looked like they might be young parents on a date — instead of the baby, their stroller carried a boombox. It was nice.

As we exercised our bodies we were exercising our consciences. Both have a tendency to get flabby. The latter desperately needs the restoration of a daily exercise routine before it gets burned out completely by the conflagration of kooks and crooks dominating our lives right now.

The dark side of conscience

I have spent quite a bit of time studying sociopath spectrum of humanity in the last few months. These are the people, probably not more than 5% of us, who either have a broken or missing conscience.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) collects these folks under the description “Anti-social Personality Disorder” (ASPD). The ASPD person has a severely wounded, inactive, broken or absent conscience. Conscienceless behavior is their distinctive across the spectrum. They are shameless.

The TV loves these people. You’d think they are around every corner, mostly carrying knives — they are not. But they make for good stories because they are strange and frightening. And we all know we might meet one and suspect we share some of their traits. Think Joe Goldberg in You, Dexter Morgan in Dexter, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones and Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, to name a few. Eric Cartman fits the description, too. They are more generally men, it seems, but women demonstrate the behavior, too. They are conscience-challenged, to say the least.

A conscience is the inner sense or faculty that allows a person to distinguish between right and wrong and guides their moral decisions. It acts as a moral compass, influencing behavior and causing feelings of guilt or pleasure based on whether actions align with one’s values and, importantly, fit in with one’s relationships. Hindus see this capacity as a seventh sense, beyond our five physical senses and beyond our ordinary awareness; it is “higher consciousness.” Contemplative Christians see it as spiritual awareness, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the place of intimacy with God and personal transformation.

Sociopath training

Conscience is considered a universal human ability, though its judgment can be shaped by experience and upbringing. It is what is happening in the deepest part of us, but not just that. Conscience needs a bond to form and to stay strong. That’s why many observers right now are wondering if we can fight off totalitarianism, since the opposition cannot unite. Postmodern, technology-isolated people have bonding issues.

Our bonding issues may have made us ripe for sociopathic manipulation. I think the  sociopaths are shaping our behaviors right now. The president is their leader. The innumerable lawsuits being filed are all about combatting behavior on the ASPD spectrum.

A sociopath cannot bond, most of the time. According to Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door),  leaders with no seventh sense, no inner awareness, no gut instinct for good, no spiritual connection can hypnotize the group conscience which leads to catastrophe.

ASPD leaders and ASPD-influenced systems make enemies “its,” not people, and see them as mere impediments to what is good, threats to safety and prosperity — and they find people to hate these “its” with them. Stephen Miller regularly strokes this proclivity in humanity. At Charlie Kirk’s funeral he said:

The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil, We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil. And we will stand every day for what is true, what is beautiful, what is good….

And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Why don’t we follow our individual consciences and follow sociopaths instead? Stout says we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences. Our basic instinct to bond and be acceptable in community can be turned bad. This has been demonstrated repeatedly, beginning with Stanley Milgram’s experiment to see if he could get college students to shock other undergrads who were getting wrong answers. They gave up their power to the authorities and shocked! A sociopath knows this tendency and plays it. Bullying works.

Protecting your conscience

If you are a Christian, you probably agree with the New Testament writers who teach that our consciences can be injured, and blunted — and if you develop a “hardened heart,” it can wreck your all-important bond with God. There is a lot of healthy discussion in the Bible about maintaining a conscience that resembles Jesus’ and stays open to the Spirit of God. But let me give you the teaching in just one little book: 1 Timothy.

But the aim of such instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith. Some people have deviated from these and turned to meaningless talk, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make assertions. (1:5-7)

The antidote to sociopath leaders may be as simple as dancing down the street in a unicorn costume — exercising stubborn joy (which, Jesus says, no one can take away from us), in the face of domination.

Paul reminds Timothy of heart, mind and soul — his spiritual awareness: pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith, as he stokes his courage to keep teaching the gospel. Timothy needs a strong inner life. Because it seems like he was up against some shameless, ASPD-type people who won’t stop talking nonsense and people are believing them.

This charge I commit to you, Timothy, my child, in accordance with the prophecies made earlier about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, having faith and a good conscience. By rejecting conscience, certain persons have suffered shipwreck in the faith; among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have turned over to Satan, so that they may be taught not to blaspheme. (1:18-20)

One’s conscience is in danger if it is not in good shape. The speaker at our beginning rally before the march chided us for being spiritually flabby, essentially. I took exception since I was, after all, in attendance. But she knew that one protest does not make a transformation. Sociopaths never rest. For instance, last week the White House hired Kurt Olsen, the Stop the Steal lawyer, to investigate the 2020 election (!). The resistance cannot rest, either.

It is possible that Hymenaeus and Alexander did not completely reject conscience out of some evil agency. They may have been born without the capacity to have a conscience because of amygdala defects, or their environment was so traumatizing it made them shameless in order to survive — and ASPD appears to be heritable, too.

When Paul “turned them over to Satan” he did not condemn them to hell. He just recognized their intractability. They needed something more than regular church community to teach them.

The word blaspheme, here and many places in the New Testament,  is a direct transliteration from Greek. It means slander, defamation, or reviling, especially against God, and includes speech that defames others. Hymenaeus and Alexander were not just impious, they were bond breakers, dividers, loveless.

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron. (4:1-2)

When the Spirit “expressly says” something we primarily hear it with the seventh sense, which is the main reason we should keep it in shape. The message is mainly tested in community, which is why we need to stay connected to discerning believers. That sense can be dulled. A conscience can even be cauterized so it becomes impermeable to grace, joy and love.

Lies are the poison of conscience. Donald Trump’s lies have their own Wikipedia page. They are the main tool of sociopaths who only care about “winning.” Jesus calls liars children of the devil. The capacity of A.I. and our media in general to spread lies is breathtaking. Hopefully you have some children whose consciences are not seared who can build a new society in the wild years ahead.

If you feel like you must be living in the “later times,” you might be right. Pundits, protesters, prophets and preachers are working overtime to stand against the present “hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared with a hot iron.” I thank God for that. We need all the help we can get. Because, as Paul teaches Timothy, having a living relationship with God, which keeps our consciences soft and clear, is the daily, fundamental step, not just in our self-care but in the formation of a society worth living in.

It might be a kairos time for renewal

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The president of Sojourners, Adam Russell Taylor, is prophetically optimistic about what might emerge from the rubble of this fractious, darkening time. As he pondered what’s going on, he drew from what he learned in the 1990’s from South Africans, especially Desmond Tutu. He faced the question: “Will we meet the opportunity of this Kairos moment like they did?” You are probably asking your own questions – or avoiding them.

A kairos moment is the perfect, critical, or opportune time to say or do a particular thing. The ancient Greek concept of kairos is a qualitative kind of time, which is different from the quantitative, linear concept of chronos. In a kairos moment, like Taylor says we are in, the weight and meaning of the situation matter more than the duration. We tend to sense a kairos moment when we run into it, if we are aware enough. We respond to one rather than  create one.

I was also in South Africa in the 90’s, not long after I came to Philadelphia to help plant Circle of Hope [link to the book]. The Philadelphia Leadership Foundation recruited members from its ranks to create a multiethnic mediation team to apply some skills to bridging what divides our city. We travelled to South Africa to learn from the experts. Unfortunately, our time with Tutu was cancelled because he was an important guy and needed more elsewhere.

We did not become an ongoing force for change as a group, but I know we carried some great lessons to apply to our individual situations when the time was right. The church and the dreamers in the world have spent a lot of time since the 90’s filling our minds and hearts with a yearning for justice and equality. They have salted the Earth and made a difference. Maybe more of what they planted is about to come up at just the right time, right now. I think we could see some fruit when millions of young people around the world took to the streets this year to demand an end to the mass killing of Gazans. Trump is flying to the Middle East to take credit for a cease fire deal. But millions of people caring for the poor and oppressed was what really turned the tide. And one day all that caring applied to the rest of what is being broken will win the day after the oligarchs and their enablers are dust — or so Taylor and I hope.

Here is part of what Adam Russell Taylor wrote in an editorial for Sojourners last week.

I first learned about the theological concept of kairos while studying abroad in Cape Town, South Africa in 1996. South African faith leaders taught me that, as compared to chronos, or time as we know it and traditionally experience it, kairos moments are precipitated by times in which our current reality becomes so pernicious and fraudulent that God can create a moment of opportunity for propitious action and transformation.

As I think about the alarming things we’ve seen in the U.S. this year—eviscerated foreign aid, a gutted federal workforce, tax cuts for the 1% at the expense of Medicaid and food stamps, National Guard troops deployed against U.S. cities, indiscriminate immigration raids, an almost complete retreat on addressing our climate crisis, attacks on media outlets and free speech, and other tactics that mirror authoritarian regimes—I’m increasingly sensing that we are in the midst of a kairos moment. Further signs came to a head this past week with the horror of five mass shootings in one weekend, a costly government shutdown, and an alarming and bizarre summoning of 800 generals and admirals to the White House in which President Donald Trump pledged to dangerously misuse the military to come after the “enemy from within.”

We are not the first nation or the first Christians to face a kairos moment. In July 1985, South Africa was in an even deeper crisis. The apartheid government had declared a state of emergency and dramatically escalated mass detentions, repression, and state violence while cracking down on the media. Despite growing international opposition, the apartheid state was doubling down on its repression. Many church leaders in South Africa, especially in the Dutch Reformed Church, misused and weaponized the Bible to justify the apartheid system of racial separation and oppression. Meanwhile, many other Christians remained silent and complacent in the face of increasing repression, staying on the sidelines of the anti-apartheid struggle.

In response, a group of South African church leaders, theologians, and Christian activists gathered to pen the Kairos Document, an open-ended document of faith-inspired resistance to apartheid. Its authors critiqued “state theology,” which they defined as Christianity that justifies “the status quo with its racism, capitalism, and totalitarianism” and “blesses injustice, canonizes the will of the powerful and reduces the poor to passivity, obedience, and apathy.” They also critiqued factions of the church who accepted the argument that the South African government’s repression was justified to maintain law and order, as well as those within the church who pleaded for racial reconciliation without first attending to injustice.

“We are a divided Church precisely because not all the members of our Churches have taken sides against oppression,” wrote the authors. “Unity and reconciliation within the Church itself is only possible around God and Jesus Christ who are to be found on the side of the poor and the oppressed.” [Full article]

That weed-strewn kairos

For thirty years I have been inspired by the faithfulness and tenacity of the people who led the movement to overturn apartheid in South Africa and build a new nation. I don’t think their vision had a long shelf life, after Mandela. But their improved nation still chugs along. And the seeds of justice and people power they planted have grown into several generations of people who can’t be easily turned by more promises built on the lies of power-hungry men.

We’ll see what the seeds planted in the U.S. finally become when the sunshine of this kairos moment dawns on them. It could be amazing. People like Adam Russell Taylor, Desmond Tutu and probably you will feel the urge to sprout from the rubble like plucky spiritual weeds always do.

5 old churches in Norway: Lessons for now

A life in the Spirit, Leadership, Life as the church, The Mission, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have spent a lot of time learning the history of the world, focusing on the church. All my study did not prepare me for Trump — it should have.  But no matter how many similar leaders I find in the past, I still wonder, “How did a Trump inspire crusaders?”

How did the U.S. get to the place where Speaker of the House Mike Johnson would give public glory to God for final passage of the “big beautiful bill,” while other religious leaders decried the legislation as un-Christian, un-American, evil and dangerous?

But it happened. On July 3, after the House passed the bill in a process known as “reconciliation” with the Senate version, Johnson tweeted, “Soli Deo Gloria,” or “Glory to God alone,” followed by a Bible verse from 2 Corinthians 5:18 — “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

Believe it or not, he was comparing the reconciling love of God Christians know as the source of life to the Congressional process of budget reconciliation the Senate uses to avoid compromises over legislation — in this case, legislation evangelical Christians support but many other Christians do not.

Over and over throughout history, people have followed wicked leaders and have used those leaders to represent and fulfill their own hateful agendas even as they were deluded and used by the despot for his. But over and over again, true believers have worked out their faith, speaking and acting out their convictions in confusing and threatening situations.

We saw both realities in Norway, represented in some fascinating, historic church buildings. Our trip has been, among other things, a living lesson on how the church has failed to and follow Jesus — but also brilliantly succeeded.  We visited five churches in four locations as we cruised up the coast that told us old tales with urgent lessons for today.

Bergen: Keep your simple faith

We had quite a bit of time to spend in Bergen, the gateway city to the fjords. We were wandering around on Sunday and climbed up steps to an old, monumental church sheathed in material masking its rehab. It was St. John’s Church, built in 1894, an impressive neo-Gothic building known for having Bergen’s highest tower

We found our way into the building just in time to kneel with the locals at the altar and hold out little silver cups as the pastor gave us bread and a deacon poured us sweet wine from a common pitcher. It was beautiful.

68.7% of Norwegians were members of the state sponsored and funded Church of Norway as of the end of 2019. However, only 20% of Norwegians say that religion occupies an important place in their lives according to Gallup, which makes Norway one of the most secular countries of the world. Only about 3% of the population attends church services or other religious meetings more than once a month.

The old church building and their church were falling apart but we were welcomed by a kind-faced mother attending with her two 20-something sons sitting in the back with us holding on to the faith. The whole thing struck me as beautiful.

Trondheim: Godless religious leaders with a personal motive

The mother church of the church of Norway in Trondheim, the cathedral, Nidarosdomen, was much less beautiful — although I found a marvelous statue of Francis of Assisi to inspire my memory of him leading up to his day last week.

Nidaros Cathedral was built over the burial site of St. Olav, the Viking king who became Norway’s national saint. Olav Haraldsson was born in the 990s. As a young boy, he went out “viking” (on sea expeditions). His travels took him to England, where he fought in the army of King Ethelred. In France, he spent two winters in Prince Richard’s court in Normandy. During his stay in Normandy, Olav was tutored in the Christian faith, and he was baptised in Rouen in 1014.

Olav returned to Norway the following year, with the goal of uniting the country as a Christian kingdom under his rule. He justified his right to the throne by claiming he was a descendant of King Harald Hårfagre (Harald I Fairhair). He was affirmed by the assemblies. By 1024, Christianity became the official religion in Norway.

Olav had powerful opponents among Norwegian noblemen, and his brutal actions made him unpopular. When King Knut of Denmark seized the country in 1028, Olav fled to his brother-in-law in Gardariket. He returned two years later to regain power but was stopped by a large peasant army led by Norwegian noblemen. On July 29, Olav was killed at the Battle of Stiklestad

If you watch Vikings Valhalla you will see another version of Olaf plotting to kill pagans. The creators do not have him die in battle but by the hand of Lief Erickson’s sister who is the living icon of the old ways and old gods

After the battle, Olav’s corpse was transported to Nidaros and buried at the edge of the River Nidelva. Soon people began telling stories of miracles that occurred around the king’s grave. One year and five days after the battle the grave was opened, and Olav was canonized as a saint. Those who were present said that the king looked as though he was sleeping. The corpse was unchanged, but his hair and nails had grown.

The saint’s body was placed in a beautiful silver casket. The casket was first taken to Clemens Church but was later moved to the church that was built over his tomb. Here it stood by the altar through most of the Middle Ages. The stories of Olav’s miracles spread across Norway and the rest of Europe, and the saint’s tomb became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Northern Europe. The church’s bio says

St. Olav is often depicted wearing a crown and holding an axe, with a dragon beneath his feet. The crown symbolises that he is Norway’s eternal king. The axe shows his authority as a just legislator, but it is also the tool that took his life. The dragon can be interpreted in several ways, both as an image of Satan and the evil that the king defeated. Perhaps it also depicts the king’s own sinful life.

Nationalism led by bloodthirsty men never works out. When lies are sanctified by the church, true faith is undermined. No one can kill it, but a murderous, mythic, supposedly-Christian leader is a spiritual virus. Venezuelans murdered in their boats and toddlers in zip ties are just the beginning of a U.S. epidemic.

 Tromso : Longing for the presence of Jesus

At the surprising town of Tromso we visited the dramatic parish church in the new part of town across the bridge from the old city. It is called the “Arctic Cathedral” in the tourist brochures. It is not a cathedral but it does evoke the snowy peaks of the “northland.” We somehow had no idea the territory above the arctic circle was so beautiful.

We enjoyed meeting our taxi driver from Somalia and walking back over the dramatic bridge. But the church was not really a good tourist destination for bus loads of tour groups finding something to do.

For a Jesus follower, however, it is an oasis of beauty and inspiration. The year I graduated from high school in 1972, Victor Sparre replaced the clear panes that had framed the city view with his most important work of glass art. It depicts the hand of God from which three luminous rays emanate; one through Jesus, one through a woman and one through a man. As the sun rises, a soaring Christ bedazzles in cobalt blues and golds.

The longing for Jesus to rise again among us is persistent in any age among Christians. But the Evangelicals are especially stirred up with thoughts of the rapture, I hear, just like they were in 1972. They have a wounded antichrist seizing power and are wearing hats on their foreheads to mark their obedience. So maybe they are right this time.

I was happy to wander into a striking piece of architecture and art in the middle of what I used to think of as nowhere. Jesus manages to meet me wherever I turn.

Kirkenes: Religion used as a nationalistic prop

Our turnaround spot on our cruise was Kirkenes, just miles from the Russian border and not far from Murmansk, where the nuclear subs live – the old ones are hazardous waste, the new ones are ready to lay waste. It is a dangerous area. Our guide begged us not to get cute with the border crossing.

Two churches in the area serve as cautionary tales from Christians caught in the nationalist urges of their leaders.

Boris and Gleb Chapel

In 1826, the demarcation of the Norway–Russia border was completed. The border was set as the Pasvik River. But there is an exception as the river nears the mouth because an old Russian Orthodox chapel was on the wrong side.

After the agreement there were still disputes between the Norwegian authorities and Russian fishermen. After further confrontations, the County Governor of Finnmark called on a ship from the Royal Norwegian Navy to show some force during the heaviest fishing months.

King Oscar II Chapel at Grense Jakobselv.

In 1851, the Interior Ministry sent an independent investigator to see about the disputes who did not share the governor’s views on a solution. Instead of a show of force, he proposed to build a chapel at Grense Jakobselv. A Lutheran chapel would be a boundary marker, in the same way the Russian Orthodox chapel of Boris Gleb had been used for border demarcation in 1826. In the summer of 1869, the new chapel was finally built.

In 1873, King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway visited the chapel. To commemorate this visit, he bestowed this chapel with a marble slab with the bilingual inscriptions: Kong Oscar II hørte Guds ord her den 4de Juli 1873 (Norwegian language) and Gonagas Oscar II gulai Ibmel sane dobe dam 4 ad Juli 1873 (Northern Sami language) which means “King Oscar II heard the words of God here on the 4th of July 1873.”

Mitrofan at Boris Gleb Church

According to The Barents Observer, in 2023, when Mitrofan, the Metropolitan of Murmansk, visited Boris Gleb church, he had a nationalist agenda. He was reasserting that  Borisoglebsk, the Russian exclave on the western shore of the Pasvik River, is holy land — the four square kilometer area where the Church of Boris and Gleb stands is a sanctuary honoring two Orthodox saints who were killed in Kievan Rus in the 11th Century.

He was memorializing the martyrs by connecting them with the present martyrs being killed by godless Ukrainians from Kiev. Mitrofan has made himself a leading spiritual proponent of his country’s bloody onslaught on the neighboring country.

In 2022 he said, “Orthodoxy is the only force of God left on earth, our Lord has no-one left but the Russian Orthodox Church.” In 2023, in Borisoglebsk, in Mitrofan stood on the border to another neighboring country and reiterated his Orthodox world view and anti-western position, “This is a holy site that stands on the border to another world, a world that is unfriendly to us.” Church leaders and pilgrims listening to his address prayed for “peace on the land of Holy Rus and for the strong spirit of the Russian Armed Forces.”

If all that seems strange to you, consider that Pete Hegseth, of all people, apparently sober and repentant for his wanton past, was the archbishop of the U.S. Army leading the silent generals in prayer last week, commissioning them to weed out the enemy among us. Here he is praying with the troops three weeks ago. You can find him praying for the generals last week during his infamous speech.

I have a lot more to learn from the churches of Norway. So far, they remind me that is frail and also surprisingly enduring. Leaders are fickle, stupid and brutal but many of them also reach us with the hand of God. The Spirit of God is invoked for all sorts of evil, yet my simple turns during my pilgrimage showed how easy it is to enter what is beyond us. Jesus is known and loved despite the grotequeries of European history and present day regurgitation of the worst of it. We may not feel OK but we will be saved.

Your small group in the church: Key to thriving?

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Leadership, Life as the church, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , , , ,

In a new survey, the Gallup organization interviewed people across 142 countries and asked them a series of questions to determine whether they felt they were thriving in their lives or struggling or, worst of all, suffering.  It reminded me of a presentation I made in 2016 to small group novices about how the church could be a place to help people thrive.

Last week David Brooks interpreted the Gallup findings for us in the New York Times:

The number of people who say they are thriving has been rising steadily for a decade. The number of people who say they are suffering is down to 7 percent globally, tying with the lowest level since 2007. This trend is truly worldwide, with strong gains in well-being in countries as far-flung as Kosovo, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Paraguay.

Unfortunately, there is a little bad news. Some people reported sharp declines in well-being. That would be us. The share of the population that is thriving is falling in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, 67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now it’s down to 49 percent….

People thrive when they live in societies with rising standards of living and dense networks of relationships, and where they feel their lives have a clear sense of purpose and meaning. That holy trinity undergirds any healthy society. It’s economic, social and spiritual.

I spoke with Dan Witters of Gallup, who broke down some of the contributors to social and spiritual health. People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community. They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning, he adds, is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.

The sociopath president Trump is terrible fruit of this awful decline of  economic well-being, relationships and meaning. He’s bankrupting us, dividing us, and doesn’t mean a thing he says, much less attends to deep meaning.

The young people in the West are the hardest hit by the decline in thriving. So my wife and I decided our basic reaction to Trump had to include starting a small group. Our first try has not totally failed yet. But we quickly found out just how hard it is these days to get people together who don’t know a lot about getting together.

The small group is the basic unit of the Church.

In the U.S. we Jesus followers might think the individual is the basic unit of the Church. If we are moral, we might think it is the family. But I think the Bible and common sense tells us it is a small group which is the basic unit. Many church people call that small group a cell, a construct within the Body of Christ held together by the Spirit of in love — not born of flesh but of God.

In Acts 20:20 Paul notes how he has been teaching the church in Ephesus in public, like most churches do on Sunday morning, and from house to house — or in all the places where they are gathered to love or serve as a small group. The house to house groupings were like cells in the body of Christ.

The towns and cities Paul visited were relatively small. The churches in them were small in number, too. His teaching assumes people know each another. He’s not writing for the internet. We say “it takes a village to raise a child” because we need to remind ourselves  we are that village. If we did not reinforce our relationships, we might be swallowed up in the huge media machine that makes sameness a substitute for connection. Being the church might become attending a Sunday event featuring Joel Osteen, thinking our common experience or common connection with the person on the screen is connection with each other.

We can lose the essence of what Paul is teaching house to house — to people who are supposed to love each other like family in practical ways, even though they are only family because of Jesus. If we are not a vital part of the basic units of the church, we not only lose the redemption inherent in those relationships, we lose the psychological development inherent in struggling to build them and we remain unfaithful and unhealed.

What do you think of that? Do you have a place in your church where you are the body of Christ? Where you can be healed and be a healer? Where you learn to love? Where you can have healthy conflict that convinces you the process of facing difficult things is not so scary?

Creating groups

I have spent my whole adult life trying to create a place where people can receive what Paul is talking about. So often church people have been in class where they are thinking about doing what Paul is talking about sometime after class! Then they go to the service, which is often another lecture and mainly individuals consuming a religious product.

When Jesus was walking around with his disciples, he was demonstrating the basic wisdom of living as a small group. People caught stuff as they went along. They found some people they could follow and discovered who was a betrayer. They fought over who was the greatest. They were indecisive and unsure. But Jesus was in the midst and they figured stuff out together. They learned self-giving love, they learned how to doubt and be restored, to grumble and be corrected, to ponder and come to agreement. They got a chance to earn a secure attachment, differentiate from their past, learn a new script and act it out in a safe place. In a lot of places the church has deprived people of a chance to mature in Christ, so twentysomethings want to go to therapy when they are mildly anxious – their therapists end up being substitute friends and spiritual guides.

The paradigm we came up with in my former church was simply designed to fly on two wings: a large group wing and a small group wing, everyone energizing our movement. Everything we did was done in groups. Even the pastors of the 4-5 congregations did most of what they did as a team. I think this is so important because the essence of what we do is love. We are meant to be together as surely as the godhead forms a small group – father, son and Holy Spirit.

In the early years, I had some interesting and sometimes wild cells.

In one new cell, we had multiplied from another one that got too big to be face to face enough. Our core group included a somewhat shy Asian architect, our host, a loud South Philly guy who had a coke habit he was trying to kick and his longsuffering wife, and a woman who had just come off heroin and had wandered into the church for a meeting because she saw “hope” on the door — a genuine borderline personality. There were a couple of others who were not so comfortable and me. I did not have my doctorate yet, but I was beginning to earn one practically through my work with this little system. It was a very dysfunctional system I remember fondly. The couple  would continue arguments in the group. The recently-clean woman was an expert at pointing out the vulnerabilities in everyone. The architect wondered why she had ever allowed these people to meet in her apartment, since she had mainly done it to get some friends, not experience this challenge.

Needless to say, this was not a cell that worked out for long. It died. Some groups must die a natural death, otherwise it is hard to get one to live.

Even though we did not thrive, I learned a lot about how to nurture a small group and help people live in them.

  • The couple needed marriage counseling, so my wife was already inventing Circle Counseling, since you can’t solve every problem in the small group, especially when it is not professionally led. This is often the problem with church groups – they are not porous, their “holiness” requires them to have all the answers so no one can admit they don’t have the answers.
White corpuscles gathering around the injured or unincorporated mass
  • Plus I began to think about how some situations, like a couple having conflict or a person addicted to cocaine, might need to get some space in a relational container to heal — a small group with a purpose, like white corpuscles rushing to wounds.
  • And I had my second chance to make a treatment plan for a borderline person to be part of the church. It would not be my last.

Most people who have BPD suffer from:

      • Problems with regulating emotions and thoughts
      • Impulsive and reckless behavior
      • Unstable relationships with other people.

People with this disorder also have high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides. The malady can be inherited. Is likely trauma-based or family-induced.

Borderline people are attracted to groups in the church but they often kill them. They desire stable people to balance their instability. Unfortunately, they like the ready “hosts” loving people are to feed their insatiable neediness.

Growth requires risk

The needy woman got better and ended up in her own apartment. Her growth required risk — hers and ours. I am amazed that a good third of the Christians in the country are obsessed with their own safety and are filled with fear. We should be the ones safe to risk our utmost and undermost for God’s highest.

A lot of small groups create a nice homeostasis that feels like mother’s milk but often curdles. Groups centered on Jesus need to keep moving with the Spirit, keep growing and renewing, to be healthy. Some churches have Sunday school classes that began when the members were the “young married” class and they are still together in their sixties!

Church leaders need to keep things flexible and changeable, as various and unpredictable as are the members. One reason for this is that spiritual and psychological growth takes risk.

Personal growth requires the interacting flows of relationship building and faith development. Healthy small groups have these complementary flows swirling around in them. That flow makes them good delivery systems for the spiritual food we need to grow and act. It’s a bit like I need to keep the air moving in my basement so the water that recently flooded it does not stay there long enough to grow toxins.

Small group leaders attempt to maximize the positive impact of the movement while minimizing the impact of the inevitable perils. They are always gently helping people to take the risks they need to take.

Making a relationship with a Christian, listening to the story of Jesus, entering a small group meeting, telling one’s story, listening to others, daring to express thoughts and gifts, praying with others, taking responsibility for others and the cell, bringing another person to Christ and the small group, joining in the Sunday meeting, taking action to serve others, making a covenant with the others in the church, giving birth a new cell — there are many risks along the way.

Here are some examples of the elements of each flow that we can encourage, and the risks we can learn to encounter with wisdom:

Do you have any experiences in small groups in the church that just didn’t work out well? Or just felt too risky to you?

Many times the risk reaps benefits

Not long after that other cell died, I formed a cell with a couple of bike messengers and their girlfriends. They all knew “A,” who was a sweet, but not-too-Christian guy in the church. This time the experience was electric and formative. These people became so close they met quite a bit outside the meeting. Some of them eventually became roommates and four of them became two married couples. They loved the opportunity to grow deep in love and to tackle the hard questions of faith and justice together. The group got so large that we multiplied it three ways and they sent me out to make another one from scratch.

What was so different about this one?

  • Groups like their homeostasis and if they can’t form it, they do not cohere. This one became a safe place.
  • Leadership. They liked “A” a lot and me enough. I was a lot older than them, but since they all came from relatively unstable families, I provided some parent power. If you therapists have twentysomething clients you are probably doing that, too.
  • Youth. They were pliable. I think groups are especially important for young people because they have so much to learn about having relationships. And do we really want to send people out into the world thinking that they can or must face all the huge issues of our day and the huge organizations that run it by themselves with only their hand held computer?
  • They wanted what the group offered. At least enough of them did so the others either went with it or kept their criticisms quiet.

Have you ever been in a group that worked out well? What was the best thing about it for you, personally?

A few main themes for training leaders

My presentation was mainly to leaders who were training leaders. So we concentrated on that quite a bit. Training small group  leaders is a lot like training group-therapy leaders. The big difference is the church’s twin flows of real relating and real-time experience of God’s presence.

Regardless of the flow, it is a major temptation to turn an expansive cell into a closed therapy group. People love therapy groups. Once they have been vulnerable with a small group, they don’t really want to repeat the initial risks of forming more relationships.  But it is just that risk which makes them alive and valuable.

Leaders who catalyze the growth we all need to keep experiencing are precious. Here are a few of the important things they must help us do to form life-giving small groups:

  • Learn how to listen and teach people to listen, to God and each other. — Everyone is writing their story, day by day, and they need to tell it.
  • Create an environment of safety. Leaders always need to wonder if they are controlling things out of their own fears and needs or effectively shepherding people along their uncertain, God-directed way of love and truth.
  • Encourage the dance of the big and small. The individual and group both matter. The promise of freedom and our deep need for covenant are dancing. We must honor uniqueness and promote mutuality.
  • Protect the EGR – There is always and extra-grace-required person — at least it will feel that way to people who are not good at relating. The leader protects that person from the group and protects the group from that person. We are all moving somewhere deeper and fuller. We are unfinished. Our present weaknesses and sins have hurtful consequences. That’s a given the leader monitors.
  • Embrace before people believe or behave. One does not have to believe to belong. A small group is like meeting Jesus along the way — therapists might call it “client-driven.” Implying that someone is not “doing the group right” probably won’t help them face the risks they must take to connect with God and their true selves.
  • Don’t deprive people of reproductive rights.  If a church expects their small groups to grow and change, we all learn there is enough love to go around. Love grows as big as it needs to be. We are always changing which always feels risky. When we give birth to the next basic unit of the church, we all get the thrill of bringing new love into the world.

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Today is Clare of Assisi Day! Celebrate her at The Transhistorical Body.

 

 

What do you do with a “Gotcha!” question? : VP Harris shows the way.

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Leadership, , , ,

What does one do with a “gotcha” question? Here is a lesson from Vice President Harris.

Dana Bash, after trying to get Harris to admit she flip flopped on fracking for no scientific reason after she became a national figure (and someone who needs to win Pennsylvania!), brought up Donald Trump’s remarks about whether or not she is really Black. Bash must have been asking about this because that is what every voter needs to hear from a potential candidate, right? “No!” you say? “It was because the CNN anchor, and her network, were hoping stoke a juicy pissing match to make some headlines?” You are probably right.

Unfortunately for Bash and CNN, the Vice President did not take the bait. Her entire response was: “Yeah. Same old tired playbook. Next question.” That’s one thing you could do with a “Gotcha.” Maybe sigh and say, “So boring!” or “So without grace, much less wisdom.”

Gotcha epidemic

Maybe we all need to rehearse our responses. I don’t know if this is happening where you live, but “gotcha” is like a cultural trait around here. Criticism appears to have become an obligation. And catching someone doing something wrong is a sport – even if one needs to make up the wrong out of whole cloth (meaning a patched up mess of scraps masquerading as whole cloth, which was quite expensive in the 16th century).

Trump’s unlawful invasion of the Afghanistan War veterans section of Arlington Cemetery was intended as a “gotcha.” They wanted to tag Kamala Harris with somehow ordering the evacuation during which thirteen soldiers were killed by a bomb — the same evacuation Trump caused by announcing a deadline Biden decided to approximate. Trump intended to show the world how little Harris cares for Afghan War veterans on the sacred day of observance his team concocted. It’s the same old tired playbook. But it happens every day.

I think it happens to most leaders everywhere these days. For instance, I told you I was elected to my condo board. I can’t decide if I was honored to be noticed or not, but one of the members of the loyal opposition to the board spread the rumor that I was illegit because I was delinquent in my payments. Gotcha! Our volunteer lawyer called me up in a tizzy, afraid my reputation was going down the drain. She assured me she informed them I was not delinquent. I think I disappointed her by not being too upset. I’ve been treated worse by people I loved more. And I was wondering if being deposed might just be a good idea.

Such indignities are so common news about them seems normal. For instance, an anonymous complaint was recently filed with the University of Washington where Robin DiAngelo submitted her 2004 dissertation, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.” She went on to write a hugely influential book based on it titled What Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Her book is true and was hugely successful. The internet says she might be worth $5 million now. Her writing and speaking contributed to institutional comeuppance all over the country.

The complaint accuses DiAngelo of “research misconduct,” and details 20 instances in which she appears to have drawn on the work of other scholars and reproduced it without proper attribution (I just cut and pasted that sentence from the NYTimes). A conservative newspaper got hold of the complaint and published it. At the University such complaints are confidential — but no more. Before there can be a rational or relational process, there is Gotcha! “Similar complaints have been filed against diversity officers at Harvard, Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison” (NYT – don’t want more complaints).

Tim Walz’ approach

At the CNN 20-minute-spread-over-45-minutes interview, Tim Walz was apparently there for eye candy. He wasn’t asked too many questions. But, of course, he was asked why he said he carried a gun in war since he was never in combat. He could have said “The U.S. has been at war since I was born and I served in the National Guard for 24 years.” He did not say that in the interview. Bash asked him, “A campaign official said you misspoke. Did you?” I’m not sure why he did not say he misspoke, exaggerated or whatever he was doing. So what? I’m sure he knew people knew he had never been on the front line or directing drones from Nevada. But make sure you don’t make any mistakes in what you say!

His reply was a pretty good example of what to do with a gotcha, however. He said,

“But again, if it’s not this it’s an attack on my children for showing love for me, or it’s an attack on my dog. I’m not going to do that, and the one thing I’ll never do is I’ll never demean another member’s service in any way. I never have and I never will.”

It is OK to talk back to deceivers or just mean people trying to make you look bad — the same people who are making all of us afraid to say anything. I heard from two clients last week who did not want to keep a journal because they actually feared someone would find it and publish it. Even private thoughts are subject to investigation! Gotcha has an impact on our psychological and spiritual development! So like Gov. Walz, we should talk back — especially if the fear has been installed in you.

Our condo building is full of gotcha, like I said. We have a lot of wonderful people, many Jesus-loving people. But even they get caught up in the zeitgeist of thinking some conspiracy is afoot and we’d better uncover it. (Hmmm. Could the nightly stories of about on all those crime dramas have anything to do with that? I was so glad when Marcella was finally over! [Exhaustive recap]. But the reruns of White Collar were still on the list [Matt Bomer shilling]). I get so many indignant emails I started deleting some senders automatically.

That’s sad, isn’t it? Everyone needs community. No one should be summarily deleted. Condo associations are some of the last associations we have left! We need to associate or we get sick. The gotcha era seems to be an hysterical reaction to being so alone and afraid. If someone is out to get us, a lot of us will get them first. If everyone is out to get us, then everyone needs to be got.

John McWhorter’s suggestion

What came to John McWhorter’s mind as he watched Harris find her way through the gauntlet of skepticism, criticism and lying that surrounds everyone in even mildly public life, was not joy, no matter what Oprah said. It was the cautionary tale he learned from being swept up in the adulation of the first black president.  He does not think people were crying at the DNC because Harris is a seismic shift towards a renewed era of democracy. He thinks they love her because her Blackness symbolizes something. He says:

It’s time, then, to evaluate Harris according to — you knew this was coming — the content of her character. When I urged that about Obama in 2008, some people took offense. They didn’t like being told that they were objectifying him. They said I was underestimating Obama’s record of achievement. I eventually fell in with the idea that his Blackness was cool and important. I know better now, and I hope we all do.

I wish Harris well, partly because I sincerely believe that my tween daughter — and possibly our guinea pig — would be a better president than the megalomaniacal, incurious, unqualified lout who is the alternative.

But just as it diminishes Harris to cherish her primarily because she is not Trump, it diminishes her to cherish her primarily because of her skin color and a vague sense of what it signifies. We truly honor Harris in fashioning the mental exercise — and it is an effortful one, I know — of assessing her as an individual.

That is another way to deal with the gotcha. Accept yourself and be content with  who you are. And let others be who they are. Have the courage to be who you are, tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may [American woodchopping idiom]. Keep your eyes on the main thing. McWhorter says he is an atheist, but he also says his views were influenced by the Quaker schools he attended here in Philadelphia. He sounds a bit like the Apostle Paul,  when he encourages us to see character not superficialities.

So let’s let Paul have the last word. He goes way beyond asking us to avoid seeing people according to the normal superficialities, shame and fear which divide us. He claims Jesus has made us all the same in his death and all unique in his new creation. Not even a “Gotcha!” can do anything about that!

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for the one who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! — 2 Corinthians 5:14-17

 

In this uncertain now: Who are you Lord and who am I?

A life in the Spirit, Leadership, Spiritual direction, , , , , ,

I thank God for every moment of honest soul-searching I run into during my week. Probably the best thing about the last two, terrible years is they have reduced people to asking the basic question of soul-life: Who are you Lord? And who am I? In an uncertain time, we have many terrible opportunities to ask those basic questions.

I would never tell you exactly what a client said, or even a recognizable story about them. But you probably know that Black people continue to be tormented by the violence and subjugation they experience. On April 4, Patrick Lyoya was executed when he ran from a traffic stop in Grand Rapids. On May 14, 19-year-old Payton Gendron murdered 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo — last week he was also indicted on 27 federal hate crimes and firearms offenses. On May 28, a hurting Jayland Walker ran away, unarmed, from a traffic stop and was shot 60 times by 13 Akron police officers. Black parents with young sons are terrified.

The Supreme Court rulings are returning the country to the divisions that started the Civil War. The main one I hear about is Roe V. Wade. A woman’s past choices are criminalized. Medical care is politicized. Husbands question wives about routine procedures following a miscarriage. People are again debating “quickening” and whether unused frozen fetuses can be destroyed (Embryo Project).

This just begins to describe the challenging times in which we live. Who am I, now that my post-pandemic church fell apart? (CT) Who am I, after the deconstructers upended our institution and grabbed power without a purpose? (Northern Architecture) Who am, I when the one percent continue to game the system (even during a pandemic!) to make record profits? (Fortune)  As we ask our immediate questions, the atmosphere continues to warm.

Burned on the bulb?

All my interactions last week seemed to lead back to these fundamental questions. Now that I am this age, in this country, re-forming community, surrounded by distraught people, who are you Lord? And who am I?

The other day a group of us in the Jesus Collective were drawn into a discussion on Jesus-centered leadership. The leader loves the Mural app so we each made virtual post-it notes of leadership traits we then offered to the whole group for discussion and ordering. The process was mostly bereft of personality, dialogue and context so it ended up more like editing than revelation. It used a method which, essentially, presumes deconstruction and so requires social construction, mostly centered on words and fragments of meaning (Wiki). But it still has me thinking. It was asking an abstract question, but it again begged the basic, organic question, “Who am I as a Jesus-centered leader?”

Two of my three post-it offerings (I can’t remember the third) about a Jesus-centered leader’s traits were “at rest” and “indomitable.” I think I was mainly recalling an analogy I often make about a lion and a moth. When a lion rests in the sun, he or she has little to fear; they are secure in their place. It is good to be at rest, indomitable, like a lion in the sun. When we live in the light of God’s love and truth, we have an inner security which allows us to be at rest even when we are working hard for a troubled world. The moth, on the other hand is drawn to the light but is always beating its head against the bulb — a frantic restlessness, always seeking and never finding. It is exhausting.

A Jesus-centered leader (or anyone) is not coercive because they can’t be coerced. They are who they are in Christ. They share the Lord’s sense of “I am.” The Mural exercise easily reinforced a moth-like seeking of “what” I am, what is required of me, how do I fit in. It took some effort for someone to be “I am who I am” doing this exercise with this beloved collective.

Or relentlessly asking the right questions?

Rubens – 1635

But, like I said, the process still has me thinking. It led me back to Francis of Assisi being spied upon by Brother Leo as he prayed.

About 100 years after his death this story appeared in a compilation:

Brother Leo knelt and with great reverence asked the saint: “I ask you, Father, to explain for me the words which I heard and tell me what I did not hear.” Saint Francis had a great love for Brother Leo because of his purity and his gentleness, and he said: “O Brother Little Lamb of Jesus Christ, two lights were opened for me in what you saw and heard: one, a knowledge of the Creator, and the other a knowledge of myself. When I said: ‘Who are you, Lord my God, and who am I,’ then I was in the light of contemplation in which I saw the abyss of infinite divine Goodness and the tearful depths of my own vileness. Therefore, I kept on saying: ‘Who are you, O Lord, supremely wise and supremely good and supremely merciful, that you visit me who am utterly vile, an abominable and despised little worm.’ The flame was God who was speaking to me as he spoke to Moses in a flame. (The Deeds of the Blessed St. Francis & His Companions 1328-1337)

Like a lion, Francis was “in the light of contemplation.” Who am I? I see the “abyss of infinite divine Goodness.” This is not a personal trait one can find by completing an inventory. It is reality one can experience. Who am I? I see the depths of my own self-deception and brokenness. I think being a worm, to Francis, is more about being tiny, meritless and slimy than being unlawful. But what quickly follows this wormthought is the question, “Who am I?” I am the visited one, the one to whom God speaks like in the burning bush that drew Moses into his true self and best action.

But who is God now?

In a socially constructed world, now habitually deconstructed, most questions end up answered through the lens of “me” (maybe “us”) and this moment – like the Mural exercise. But there is no true wisdom and little self-awareness if one does not know God.

Even though a lot of people are seeking to know God, God seems hard to find, these days. Many churches are just a big mess. And the church in the news looks terrible. A mentee was thrilled the other day when a man my age told him, “It is so nice that you aren’t an asshole like all the other pastors I know.” And where does one find a way for themselves, much less their grandchildren, through such an era? David Brooks calls it “some sort of prerevolutionary period — the kind of moment that often gives birth to something shocking and new.” Overwhelmed, uncertain, isolated are the characterizations someone will use to describe their circumstances almost every day in therapy.

I have the same experiences, so I have the same questions for God.

  • What about the future? How I knew you before won’t quite do for the next 20 years will it?
  • What can I trust? What we thought was certain or needed to be certain probably doesn’t matter, does it?
  • How do I find comfort? Our focus on ourselves is bearing its fruit, isn’t it?

We might have to stay up all night and pray, won’t we? We might have to commit months, not minutes, to build a community that matters. We might have to listen in new ways when Jesus tells us to leave it all behind and follow him. We might need to sink into the eternal now in this moment and hear God speak in the contemplative flame.

What Do I Do When My Leader Seems Half-Baked? — Rehoboam

Leadership, Life as the church, , , , , ,

[About 7 years into my service as Circle of Hope’s pastor I offered the congregation some teaching I first heard from Janet Hagberg in 1979. It stuck with me. I happened upon this forgotten message from 2003 on Rehoboam when I was searching my files for something else and thought it was worth repeating, since it is a very challenging time for leaders, inside the church and out, as so much is changing.]

You people are amazing. In our network we have 22 cell leaders and 20 apprentice cell leaders. 4 coordinators of cell leaders. A pastor. 5 PM team leaders. 2 PM facilitators. 9 Mission Team leaders. The list goes on. Lot’s of leaders. Not only is it amazing that we have found so many wonderful, gifted, willing people to lead, you follow them well, you nurture them well, you cheer them on and support them – even when they drive you crazy.

It is the being driven crazy part that we are exploring tonight. Someone wanted to know, “What do I do when my leader seems half-baked?” It is an excellent and frequently asked question. And it has lots of variations.

  • I’m fifty, my leader is 23, she seems to me like a cookie that was taken out of the oven after four minutes. What do I do with that?
  • I’ve been a believer for fifteen years; my leader has been a follower for fifteen months. He looks like a pretty loaf of bread, but the inside is doughy.
  • I’m working hard on my issues and repenting of my sins, the leader doesn’t know about some important issues, apparently, and I’ve heard a few too many things about his sins. Do I report them or something?
  • I am serious about my faith and our mission, I want to contribute time and energy to the cause, but the person in charge seems to be on a perpetual vacation and implies that I am a pain in the neck because she thinks I am being too critical of her lack of intensity. Am I being too critical or am I being criticized?

Do you recognize any of these variations? If you do, then you are not alone. And that’s why there is a lot to say about this subject. I am not going to talk about all the ways we have structured ourselves as a body to alleviate the stress of having a half-baked leader – which mainly boils down to our reliance on being a team and the accountability and nurture involved in having apprentices and being in cells. I want to answer it at the micro level : what do I do when the leader is half-baked – which, in one way or another, may be inevitable, since we’ve all got a long journey to completeness. Jesus is the fire, but we are the oven, and you are part of that oven. If the leader is half-baked, you may have a part in his or her completion. So let’s start with you and me this time and see where we get.

The Tragedy of Rehoboam

Rehoboam
Rehoboam. Fragment of the wall painting in the Great Council Chamber of Basel Town Hall. Hans Holbein ca 1530

A tragic story about a half-baked leader and what people did about him can be found in the history of Israel in 1 Kings 12. (I know how you love 1 Kings). It kind of starts with the prophet Samuel. You know that he was not too happy to be asked to give the nation a king. He liked the old way of letting God be the king and relying on prophets and judges that were raised up by the Spirit of God in them to fulfill the leadership functions necessary for the people. But Israel wanted to “go to town” like the nations around them and have a king. So Samuel anointed Saul, who turned out to be a disobedient disaster. He replaced him with David of the great heart but dysfunctional family. David was followed by the famous King Solomon, who was probably the most famous king Israel ever had, as far as being a king of note among the other kings of his age.

King Solomon, by most accounts was a great leader. He was famous for being wise. He expanded the borders of Israel and the whole nation prospered for the forty years of his rule. But there were some flaws. It seems like the more authority a person has the more important his or her flaws become.

Solomon may have had a wise beginning, and may have been very educated, but his method for solidifying his kingdom abandoned trust for God as King and relied for security on the common approach to kingdom building of the time – marriage. (Be careful about what your leaders tell you they need to do for security). Solomon filled his life with foreign-born wives, who were the guarantors of the treaties he was making with their fathers and brothers. What’s more, he let them keep their foreign ways as he moved them into the enormous new palace that he had built at the same time he built his enormous new temple for God. The simultaneous projects, tell you that something might be mixed up right there, plus, they cost the people a huge amount in taxes and conscripted labor. He was a flaming polygamist. The son who succeeded him (some people say it was his only son from all those wives, maybe he was just the oldest one) was the son of an Ammonite princess. His name was Rehoboam.

From the little we learn of him in the account, Rehoboam sounds like an insecure man who didn’t have much direct fathering or king-training. As soon as he is crowned he ruins the kingdom. His people wanted to go with him, but they had a few questions that people always ask their leaders, and Rehoboam answered all of them wrong.

12:1 Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all the Israelites had gone there to make him king. 2 When Jeroboam son of Nebat heard this (he was still in Egypt, where he had fled from King Solomon), he returned from Egypt. 3 So they sent for Jeroboam, and he and the whole assembly of Israel went to Rehoboam and said to him: 4 “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you.”

5 Rehoboam answered, “Go away for three days and then come back to me.” So the people went away. 6 Then King Rehoboam consulted the elders who had served his father Solomon during his lifetime. “How would you advise me to answer these people?” he asked.

7 They replied, “If today you will be a servant to these people and serve them and give them a favorable answer, they will always be your servants.”

8 But Rehoboam rejected the advice the elders gave him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him and were serving him. 9 He asked them, “What is your advice? How should we answer these people who say to me, `Lighten the yoke your father put on us’?”

10 The young men who had grown up with him replied, “Tell these people who have said to you, `Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but make our yoke lighter’–tell them, `My little finger is thicker than my father’s waist. 11 My father laid on you a heavy yoke; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.'”

12 Three days later Jeroboam and all the people returned to Rehoboam, as the king had said, “Come back to me in three days.” 13 The king answered the people harshly. Rejecting the advice given him by the elders, 14 he followed the advice of the young men and said, “My father made your yoke heavy; I will make it even heavier. My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.”

15 So the king did not listen to the people, for this turn of events was from the LORD, to fulfill the word the LORD had spoken to Jeroboam son of Nebat through Ahijah the Shilonite. 16 When all Israel saw that the king refused to listen to them, they answered the king:“What share do we have in David, what part in Jesse’s son? To your tents, O  Israel! Look after your own house, O David!” So the Israelites went home.

If you are a leader, of a cell, a family, a school project, an outing to the Camden Waterfront, make sure to pay attention to what the people asked Rehoboam. It really wasn’t much that he couldn’t supply if he would have relied on God.

People keep asking the same three questions.

Essentially they began with “Do you love us?” “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us, and we will serve you.”

Solomon got caught up in his own grand schemes and ended up enslaving his own people. By the time he got done people were resentful because it seemed like he cared more about himself than them.

They also asked “Can we trust you? Are you listening?” “He asked the elders, “How would you advise me to answer these people?” he asked.  They replied, “If today you will be a servant to these people and serve them and give them a favorable answer, they will always be your servants.”  He did not listen to their advice. He went back to his cronies, which was like looking in the mirror. It was like these guys he’d been playing the grand prince with since he was a kid were hungry to exercise some power. When all Israel saw that the king refused to listen to them, they answered the king: “What share do we have in David, what part in Jesse’s son? To your tents, O Israel! Look after your own house, O David!” So the Israelites went home. The ten northern tribes made Jeroboam their king and Rehoboam spent the rest of his life at war trying to put the kingdom back together again. If he just would have listened to one of his father’s proverbs: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes; but he that listens to counsel is wise.” (Proverbs 12:15)

I also think they were asking “Who and what do you serve?” The historian who wrote the story in 2 Chronicles said,  “Rehoboam did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the LORD.” (II Chronicles 12:14). People know when the leader can see a picture that is bigger than herself and her cronies. They can sense when the direction is coming from God or from one’s half-baked maturity. They can tell if you are open to understanding what is happening with the least as well as the greatest among us. They know if a certain action is about the cause or about enjoying the exercise of power or getting one’s needs met through draining the life out of one’s followers. They can tell if you serve or dominate. And that counts even if you are just taking your nieces to the mall.

There are not too many leaders who never have a Rehoboam day. If you get one that is as unbaked as he was, poor lad (although he was 41 years old!) I guess you’ll be wondering what to do. Normally, your leaders around here will be doing the best they can and not feeling like they are all that great at it. They will be serving because someone asked them or someone had to do it, not because they always had an aspiration to give their heart and time to further an extremely difficult cause for no pay, little recognition and the headache of having people ask them penetrating questions about their character. Even so, they will have half-baked days, they’ll have bad ideas and they will undoubtedly not be complete yet. What do you do?

I would take responsibility for your leader like they were your precious first-born child. When they spill the milk, do not slap them around; keep helping them to learn to hold that cup, because they will be dealing with milk again at the next meal. Don’t just leave the spilled milk there to stink, clean it up together – if they don’t want to deal with their stinking spilled milk, make them help you – and let’s go on. My conviction is that leaders are baked; they are nurtured into completeness by caring followers.

Love them

So if the leader is half-baked, for instance, they don’t love you or even God well, love them.

We have had leaders involved in some sins that became as public as their leadership. Getting drunk. Sexual sins. Major lacks of reconciliation with other leaders. And worse things will happen and may be happening right now. In the middle of that, I think our first responsibility is to love. They are having a problem, just like you and me. For instance, right now my parents are both terribly sick and might die soon. Some days I am going to act out of my grief and conflicted feelings about that. Before you decide my actions make me a bad, unholy leader, ask me some questions. When you think a leader is half-baked, talk to them, understand them. Figure out what is baked not just half-baked. They are people, so speak the truth in love to a person, not to your abstraction of what a leader ought to be or to your fantasy of what you would like or to your unfinished business with your mother or father or with the last leader who abused you. The talking will be very instructive. Talk to God about them, too. Prayer may soften your heart to love.

Please notice that I did not say, “Love them by pretending they are baked.” That will do no one any good. I did not say, “Learn to love unbaked food.” I did not say, “Turn off your brain and stop being so critical.” But I did say, “It is easy to see where someone is. And it is relatively easy to see where they ought to be. But love calls us to help them get from here to there, even if they are the leader. If everyone has to perform perfectly for you, they will either fight you or run from you because you are scary. Either way, that won’t help them lead.”

Trust them

Secondly, if the leader is half-baked, they are not altogether worthy of your trust, trust them.

Naturally, you’ll have to have hope like God’s to do this. To trust the demonstrably untrustworthy is God-like. After all, isn’t it true, that God entrusts us with his own Spirit and God is relying on you and me to advance his cause of redemption? God’s is an heroic trust. I say that trust breeds trustworthiness. It is true that we give people responsibility and authority and they get too full of themselves and run people over, their natural insensitivity is heightened, they say wrong things, say things that aren’t true, they alienate people. It is true that when my son Ben uses a butcher knife I find it almost impossible to watch, but I trust him with it. And it is also true that I have been known to cut myself, as well. He needs to learn how to do that and he needs a person who loves and trusts him and who has been cut to help him learn better.

If you can’t trust your leader, you may not be trusting God enough to bear the pain of seeing someone go through life as half-baked as he sees you are. Trust God in someone else, not just what you see them doing. Trust God’s precedent, not just their track record. Don’t build a case against them, build a case for them and then help them realize their potential. Your admiration will do more to make them trustworthy than your suspicion and anxiety.

Every leader is going to make mistakes, but we need them, and we need more of them. We live in a trust system so people can gain their fullness and serve us and transform the world. If you hold back all the time, they can’t do as much, and they can’t catalyze us to reach our potential as a body. Can you see how much power mistrust can have? I used to sit in Council meetings and have elaborate discussions about what we were going to do as the church. It seemed like I would end up paying special attention to people who could always find a flaw in any argument and always cast suspicion on the process. I finally stopped listening so carefully. What I had counted as discernment was just mistrust. People wanted to move, but the mistrusters didn’t.

You’ve noticed that I’m turning around every question people always ask of leaders and asking them back at the followers. Do you love me? Can I trust you? Now, Who and what do you serve?

Serve with them

When the leader is half-baked, when you’re not sure what they are serving, serve with them.

It is hard not to serve God when you are surrounded by people determined to follow Jesus. Our leaders either have to bake or flee the oven, because we are not changing our minds. I’d say that most of the time we get the leaders we deserve. If we are apathetic we frustrate them and make them lazy and ambivalent. If we are critical we make them defensive and short-lived, and maybe even cause them to give in and serve us, rather than the Spirit of God! If we follow Jesus first and allow the leader to catalyze and steer and discern the process of the journey, they end up being very valuable to us.

It is true, Rehoboam was a bad leader. He was worse than half-baked. He didn’t love them, couldn’t trust him and he served himself and the god of his own power, and maybe some Ammonite idol his mother brought to town. But while the elders did try a little bit with him, it probably should be noted that the people didn’t love him too well, they did not have a radical trust for God in him, and they never served the cause larger than him. So they ended up with half a kingdom and civil war and eventually a whole boatload of them got carted off to Babylon. It’s not just about the leader.

I think you know that, for the most part. But someone asked the question, and it will come up again, because we are going with the people God calls out to lead us and many people have answered his call. They are shaping us, nurturing us, guiding us, and helping us make a difference in the world. If God is doing so much with the half-baked, what might he say to you if you came before him at the end with a whole plate full of fresh leaders for his people and the cause of his kingdom, baked to perfection by you and your little oven in Philly? I think the Lord would really enjoy that.

The leader’s plow: C.S. Lewis seeds our imagination

Building community, Leadership, ,

In our church, most of us pride ourselves in generously allowing people to try out the deepest expressions of their true selves. We like supporting their good ideas and especially enjoy seeing people taking on leadership through our cells and teams. We’ve even raised all our pastors up from within our ranks to their present service!

Last week one problem with leading came to the fore. It had to do with “plowing.” I told the pastors the C.S. Lewis quote below “appealed to me because you all have the terrible and joyful task of plowing. But plowing always means the disruption of the surface so that the deeper, richer soil can be turned over. The earth should not feel violated when it is readied for multiplication, but it does. It is hard to be the ‘violators’ all day.”

plow up that surface

Lewis is the master of the apt metaphor and the following quote from Mere Christianity is a good example of his genius. For every leader of the mission of the church, he pictures a grassy expanse, perhaps like all those huge lawns in our region for which the air-cleansing trees were sacrificed. The lawns are like all the self-chosen identities of the people the leaders serve — identities the people carefully mow and weed until they, too, resemble  suburban lawns, each guarded by security cameras collecting data on intruders. The Lord which every leader of the church serves plows up those artificial interior landscapes so they can be penetrated with truth and love, and so they can bear the fruit of knowing God again. There is little doubt that most people feel the “plow” as a violation and see the wielder of the plow as a violator.

See what you think of this little gem from Mere Christianity

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes, and precautions—to Christ.  But it is far easier than what we are trying to do instead.  For what we are trying to do is remain what we call “ourselves,” to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be “good.” We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centered on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly.

And that is what Christ warned us you could not do.  As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs.  If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and resown.

That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through.

He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, “Be perfect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder – in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. — C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

Mowers can become plowers

It is encouraging to see that Lewis understood, even in the 1940’s, how distracting life is. I think he could imagine, even then, how our phones would wake us up every day and start notifying us to manicure our personal lawns. He could imagine a day of “fussing and fretting”  blowing into every corner of our consciousness until we could hardly be interrupted from our distractions. How sad to be stuck polishing our egg when we were meant to fly! — or stuck mowing our useless lawns when our souls were meant to sow the world with the seeds of real food and “gather fruit for eternal life.”

All Jesus followers put their hand to the plow. But the leaders, who are catalyzing our ongoing reformation, building a transformative community, and liberating our united action have a commission to handle the plow that keeps us from returning to the wilderness of an artificial, spiritually-unproductive landscape. They plow up the grass and plant a farm that grows life in Christ. They have to deal with causing the suffering they do when they stick their blade into the hardened earth of our false selves and sin. They have to deal with the alarm they cause when they tap on the shells of unhatched birds who should be learning to fly.

I’m not sure we will every feel good about our hard earth being violated or our thin shells being penetrated.  But I do think we can feel sympathetic to and thankful for our leaders: cell leaders, team leaders, congregation leaders, and church leaders, as they dare to play their vital role in catalyzing what the Spirit is doing to make us new and to redeem the world. As the writer of Hebrews teaches, when it comes to our leaders, we should “Let them [lead] with joy and not with sighing – for that would be harmful for you.” I can see how hard we make it for them sometimes. And I know they think it is hard to wake up every day with the plow right there beside the bed and all that hardened earth to face.

The Lord among us organizes us, not the program.

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The Lord among us is the organizing force, not the program.

The pastors finished their reading of Pete Enn’s book How the Bible Actually Works: In Which I Explain How An Ancient, Ambiguous, and Diverse Book Leads Us to Wisdom Rather Than Answers—and Why That’s Great News. They loved it. But one of them had to note that the Bible leads to a right-now experience of the Holy Spirit and discernment, not mere wisdom. 

I visited a church on my travels last week and a similar sentiment kept rising to the surface among my friends. They want to be led by the Spirit, not just their pastor or tradition.  Keeping the program running has value, but it is hard to do if the reason for doing so has become sketchy. A theology built on principles without Presence is hard to sustain.

Likewise, Hallowood Institute’s first offering on “spiritual bypass” last Saturday highlighted the tendency of Christians to find a work around when it comes to their deep healing and the difficulty of relating to God by keeping faith “in their head,” citing principles and following the program rather than opening up to the fullness of the Spirit (Ephesians 3:14-21).

Running a program is too easy

“Programming” can often be the hideout for spiritual cowards. Everyone who ever came up with a structured, even bureaucratic way to serve Jesus was NOT bad, of course. But “programming” CAN be the big temptation for people with big ideas who don’t want to bear the suffering of being personally responsible for them — that is, responsive to the Spirit, not just the manual. The main reason I cast such blanket aspersions (apart from needing to remind myself) is that I think people often put on blinders and lose sight of Jesus (even stop listening to the somewhat-rational Paul) when they commit to their program.

Why does it so often seem like making “programming” basic to following is a good idea to Christians? Why send an email rather than making the phone call? Why make an event rather than a relationship, etc.?

I’m not suggesting that scheduling things, making a plan to serve some felt need, or having a curriculum to follow, etc., etc. is always bad. Circle of Hope is a very well-planned enterprise! I’m protesting how we fill up every spare moment with an event designed to do what normal human relationships and organic connections can and should do. I’m protesting fulfilling the letter of the program’s law, rather than following the Spirit behind its genius.

Just because we went to school and got trained to create a programs to do what we should do personally and as a body doesn’t mean we should do that! Just because we train to be “experts” in charge of “things” before we love someone doesn’t mean we should exercise that training. And the big thing is: just because we don’t trust people and don’t trust the Holy Spirit, alive among us, doesn’t mean we should keep doing things designed to keep people in line and teach them what they, in our estimation, probably don’t know and keep them moving in the right direction we suspect they can’t figure out.

Is it a who or a what on which my hope stands?

I guess since we broke out into this song one night at our cell, it makes me afraid that people might rewrite it, now that we among the Circle of Hope have buildings and big ideas to fill them. Some prophetic people rewrote it to make my point:

My hope is built on oughts and rules
On principles and schedules.
Like counter-service is my grace —
A drop to each receding face.
On Christ the solid rock I stand
All others rest on sinking sand
I dare not grasp one sinking hand.

When we came up with the idea for Circle of Hope, we installed the simple thought that we wanted life to be simple. So we have two meetings a week: the cell and the public meeting. We think almost everything we need to “program” can fit into those meetings somehow. Extraordinary people may have extraordinary things to do, of course. So we wanted to leave a lot of time in the week to do them. What we didn’t want to see is the church filling up everyone’s calendar with obligatory things to do – as if the church were happening in the daily programs happening in our buildings. Daily things might happen, but it isn’t like you are supposed to be doing them to get with the program.

I think we are, basically, like this. The leaders are called to a “daily” kind of obligation to who we are and what we do that requires their time. Thank God for them! But most of us are free-range Christians. The problem is, preserving a habitat for free-range Christians is hard to do. As we get more capable, it is tempting to get real organized and programmed. We have some nice corrals all over the region, now, and it is tempting to herd everyone in all week and ride them, train them to jump over fake fences like show horses and such.

What is the basic thing Christians do?

Brave Christians love people face to face. Responsible Christians make teams. Paul says in Romans 13: Owe no one any thing, but to love one another: for one that loves another has fulfilled the law. Programming, at its worst, takes the one another out of the loving. The program does the loving. Love often gets mediated by the program. The “thing” is supposed to communicate – thus, I either don’t communicate or don’t have to. The event touches, the performances move — so I either can or do stay separate.

Not all programming is bad, of course, but you can see the temptation. It seems to me that Jesus is pretty much the anti-program. He is God coming into the moment and upending the control-system that violates his personal rule. I was going off on this subject the other day and someone quoted 1 Cor. 14:33 to me: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.”  They were telling me how God had ordained hierarchy and propriety and we dare not deviate. I think he had a point. But Christianity easily dies when men (in particular) order it according to their understanding and don’t think Jesus can do that himself. We are tempted to organize all those others rather than becoming one with them, suffering with them and for them. It is very easy to stand back and perversely admire a very tidy “love.”

It is the Lord among the “one another” who is the organizing force, not the program. If the life of Christ is pulsing among us, we’ll need to structure its expression. But if we just structure the idea of a pulse and expect it to fill with life, we may end up quite empty, and exhausted from all that effort, to boot.

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Ownership proverbs: More evidence that Jesus is risen

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Image result for You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.Do you think this old proverb is true? “You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” – Winston Churchill.

I love proverbs like that one, so I don’t care how “true” it is as long as it helps us ponder something worth pondering. In this case, I think we should be pondering, “Am I making a living or making a life?” Maybe even better: “Am I making something wonderful or just getting used by someone to make their fabulous living?”  

How Jesus-followers answer that second question right now is elemental to whether their church is a living organism or a demanding volunteer society, whether their church is a community with transforming power or just another inept non-profit overshadowed by the corporations that dominate the landscape.  When it comes to being the church, do we rent our lives or own them? Is life in Christ about ownership or volunteering?

Ownership proverbs from passionate pastors

New churches are boldly wrestling with how to get Jesus followers to be more like members of the body of Christ and less like members of the swim club they rarely have time to visit. They are trying out proverbs on their people:

  • “Members have rights, Owners have responsibilities!” Pastor Matt at Good News Church made “this quick video” about it.
  • “Battleship vs. Cruise ship” is the title of Pastor Josh’s teaching for Redemption Church. “Ownership is not just coming and seeing what’s happening at Redemption, but being willing to come and die for the mission of connecting people to Jesus for life change!”
  • “Customers vs. owners “ Ed Stetzer wanted to shift the the culture in his church from passivity to activity. His problem was when new people entered the church, most of them connected to the 100 passive people instead of the 25 active. A bad situation became worse.

Sometimes it is hard to know whether these church leaders are just being critical of people who aren’t making their dreams of church glory come true or they are prophetically noting sinful behavior that will destroy the work of Jesus. I suppose it could be both.

We’re having trouble even associating!

It is not just church people who are considering what is happening with associations in society — that is, entities that require mutuality to exist, not just paying people for their labor. I’ve spent my whole life hired by such associations, so I’m interested, too! People seem to be having trouble associating themselves, period, much more “owning” an association!

The famous Alexis de Tocqueville published  Democracy in America in 1835, but people think it still has relevant observations to offer about the American character. He said, “Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.” Supposedly, when Americans want something done, they don’t ask the government or the aristocracy, they associate. That tendency purportedly made U.S. democracy strong. I’d say the church in the United States created this character trait more than the Constitution.  But associating is a good trait. I am deeply involved in Circle of Hope, Circle Counseling and the Mennonite Central Committee, which are all good examples of highly effective associations.

 

Over time this character trait has been undermined by rapacious capitalism and the ascendancy of so-called democracy over the church. Robert Putnam famously captured the trend in his book Bowling Alone in 2000. It is even more true now that less people join clubs, have dinner with the family or invite friends over. So the associations I love are really bucking the trend. Circle of Hope is founded on cell groups, which is about inviting friends over every week! My cell is, essentially, a family dinner! Nothing could be more countercultural. Plus, our church assumes everyone will eventually share a covenant relationship with the others who form it. Our covenant members are the heart of the community and its many enterprises – they own it. That’s presently odd, as far as the direction the world is going.

I wish we had more fights about whether we are volunteering for or owning the church. This would be a good proverb to ponder: Volunteers help owners do good things. Owners do good things by nature. I think that is true, and it always makes me wonder who the volunteers think they are when they share some little bit of their limited good with an association. Manuals for non-profits remind the organizers to help volunteers “feel some ownership” during the hours they contribute. They generally don’t — what do they feel?

It is good to “feel some ownership” when we volunteer. But having ownership that is in one’s thoughts and feelings rather than in one’s hands and feet is hard to sustain. Just going to church can become so boring, it is unsustainable over the long haul. If you’ve been “going to” a church for over a year and you don’t own it yet, I can’t imagine what it does to your sense of self to keep doing it! How could one possibly see themselves in 1 Corinthians 12 or Acts 2 if their association was mainly a matter of being in the Sunday meeting twice a month, having stints in a cell group and doing random acts of volunteerism?

That sounded critical; I’d rather it was prophetic. But you see what the church is up against. We should be inviting people into our home when we go to a meeting, not tentatively entering someone else’s meeting. But since most people never invite people into their home and rarely are invited, since most of our time is spent making money for someone else, it is quite a leap to act like we own the place when it comes to being the church.

It is great to give our time for the owners

Most people are over “getting stuff” (maybe because the 1% has most of it). They are convinced their 86,000 seconds a day all need to be invested wisely. Or at least they feel guilty for spending 3600 of them at a time making Netflix a reality. They want their moments to count because they only have so many — so they think. This preoccupation with how short life is helps make volunteers scarce. People are out making as much money as possible in the least amount of time so they can get as many experiences as possible to fill their seconds before they are too old to have them. They make money to get experiences [Xbox ad].

Many people have trouble believing that wasting time on volunteering is worth their precious seconds. Some people won’t even get married because relationships take so much time! So associations that depend on volunteers try to make it seem like volunteering is a great experience so someone will do it:  “National Volunteer Week is…a wonderful opportunity for everybody to check out the volunteering options in their community. Proactive, hands-on service is an amazing way to meet like-minded people and give something back to your community at the same time. Whether you are looking to use your professional skills to help others, paint a school, or serve a meal at a soup kitchen, you will be able to find something to interest you!” Some people love that pitch. But many more, I think, have better ways to be self-interested.

Maybe this is a good proverb: Volunteering is a good experience. It can also extend one’s life. A few years ago, a therapist was researching how kindness affected health. He learned that volunteerism was associated with a markedly lower risk of dying. Depending on the study, the decrease in death rates ranged from 20 to 60%! This is huge. For perspective, another good example of lowering the risk of dying is the introduction of clean drinking water. After water filtration and chlorination were introduced early in the 20th century, death rates from contaminated water dropped about 15 to 20%. Volunteering should be a public health issue!

Even though volunteering is good, I still think feeling like a volunteer in your own church is unworthy of a Jesus follower and makes the Bible writers, who know they have become heirs of the kingdom of God (!), look silly. If a Jesus follower does not really believe they have an eternal life, like Jesus demonstrated when he rose from the dead, then what is the point of being a Jesus follower? Jesus followers are intimates of the King in immeasurable ways! But if volunteering is the best one can do, it is  still healthier than protecting one’s time, even though that volunteer time remains the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how much time the faithful have to “waste.”

For These Sheep I Lay Down My Life
Eugene Higgins (1874-1958)

It is better to give our lives because we own them

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.  — Matthew 20:28

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.” — John 10:17-8

The amazing restoration Jesus has brought us includes the astounding freedom to give our lives. No one can take our lives. We don’t have to buy one with our labor. We have been given it back as a free gift and we are expected to live free from our former masters.

This is the main reason we are owners of the church, not mere members of an association or volunteers in someone else’s enterprise. As good as those latter things are, they are shadows of what it means to be risen with Jesus. Like Him, we choose to serve for the joy set before us and the transformation it brings, not because we have to spend our precious time well enough to justify our existence or get what we deserve. We lay down our lives for others because it is what we are made for, not just because we’ll live longer or feel better about ourselves (although we will!).

Churchill had to convince Britain to give it all they had or the Nazis would have taken over everything. He did it for God, King and democracy, I suppose. His great success shoul have taught everyone a proverb for all time, don’t you think? — You’ve got to own your own country, not live under a Fuhrer. But immoral powermongers are hard to keep out of power, since they wake up every day with nothing to do but grab it.

In the face of our own challenges, our pastors struggle with our idealistic (and straight-from–the-Bible) vision of being the church. Like other places, our church is often colonized by consumers who admire volunteers, when who the pastors really need  to lead are owners. Fortunately, our pastors have an amazing preponderance of covenant keepers expressing their ownership in cells, compassion teams and all our other teams and businesses. We are so far from going along with the present societal trends we look weird. But the need is great and the temptation to become just another seconds-of-my-minutes-counter is ever-present.

“We are called out to be a living organism, building community together in love”

Some days I wonder if we have the stuff to keep being a “we” and keep giving our lives fearlessly for the transformation of the world. Usually, those are the very days someone does something that splendidly expresses the life they were given to give with real freedom. Then I am encouraged all over again that Jesus is risen and we are a circle of hope — and a church with some radical proverbs of our own!:

  • The church is not a “thing” that does things; it is not a building. We are the church and we support one another as Jesus expresses himself through us.
  •  We are living as a created organism, not creating a religious organization.
  •  Forming cells and teams is a basic way we keep learning how to express who we are and what we do as people called into a new community in Christ.