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October Blogs
Radio is a new movie with Cuba Gooding Jr. that looks excellent. Hoping to see it this weekend.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Last Saturday morning I set aside some time to spend with the Lord, and found myself thinking about the distortion of biblical faith and community that was and is most of the western church. Suddenly I found the Lord talking to me about how serious this really was in His eyes... so serious that the dominant metaphor in the Old Testament for the church immersed in culture was a whore. "Israel running after her lovers" is a common theme in Isaiah, and in many other prophets too.
I wasn't in a mood to hear about it, and I found myself staring at the bare facts (no pun intended) and feeling very grieved. So I got busy doing something else.. cleaning junk from the garage.
On Monday morning I sat down to read my bible and found the Lord taking me to Ezekiel, ch 20-24. There it was again. I felt the weight of it all in my spirit and found myself in tears, realizing how badly compromised the church has been.
This isn't a message that is well received, or a metaphor that is popular or pleasant. And naturally, it is never we who are running after other lovers, we are never the ones who have compromised and compromised and accommodated to our culture until we are not a distinct or Holy people at all. It's always the other guys who have lost the edge. We are the passionate and pure ones... right?
Er... right?
* * * * *
Film Review at Next Wave: Bonhoeffer
From Ananova
Halloween banned in Moscow schools
Halloween has been banned from schools in Moscow after Russian education chiefs ruled it was too pagan.
Officials caved in to Church demands and issued a blanket ban on all Halloween celebrations from carving pumpkin heads to dressing up.
The Moscow Education Department has ordered all schools in the capital to ban any Halloween celebrations, Izvestia newspaper reported.
In a letter sent to school heads and governors teachers were warned that: "The very fact that Halloween activities contain elements such as the cult of death, rejecting death, personification of death and evil spirits produces a destructive effect upon the psychological, moral and spiritual health of students."
To get alone-- to dare to be alone-- with God, this, I am persuaded, is one of the best ways of doing anything inthe world.. . If we are ever to be or to do anything, if we are ever to be full of deep, permanent, rational enthusiasm, we must know God. If we are ever to know each other, we know Him first... I believe that we do most for thos whom God has begun to teach us to love, not by constantly thinking of their goodness, their grace, their simplicity, but by never thinking of them apart from God, by always connecting their purity and beauty to a higher Beauty and a higher Purity, by seeing God in them. Let us learn to make every thought of admiration and love a kind of prayer of intercession and thanksgiving. Thus human love will correct itself with, and find its root in, divine love. But this we can only do if we are willing to be alone with Him. F. Robinson
Roland Allen, "The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church"
Feast Of Fools, 1976
At the feast of fools
At the feast of fools
It's time for the silent criers to be held in love
At the feast of fools
At the feast of fools
It's time for the silent criers to be held in love
It's time for the singers of songs without hope to take a hard look and start from scratch again
Bruce Cockburn
Poised at the millennium, we confront two critical challenges: how to address deep problems for which hierarchical leadership alone is insufficient and how to harness the intelligence and spirit of people at all levels of an organization to continually build and share knowledge. Our responses may lead us, ironically, to a future based on more ancient -- and more natural -- ways of organizing: communities of diverse and effective leaders who empower their organizations to learn with head, heart, and hand. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline
"When the old wineskin is dying, the new wineskin is created by people who are not afraid to be vulnerable. "
"The willingness to be born,--and this means the willingness to let go of all "certainties" and illusions,--requires courage and faith. Courage to let go of certainties, courage to be different and stand isolation."
"The church must not be equated with the reign (kingdom) of God. The church as a messianic community is both spawned by the reign of God and directed toward it. This is a different relationship from what at times has captured the church's thinking. The church has often presumed that the reign of God is within the church. The two have been regarded as synonyms. In this view, the church totally encompasses the divine reign. Therefore church extension or church growth is the equivalent of kingdom extension or kingdom growth, and the reign of God is coterminous with the people who embrace it through faith and gather together as the church. This view esaily leads to the affirmation that there is no salvation outside the church. The church then sees itself as the fortress and guardian of salvation, perhaps even its benefactor and author, rather than its grateful recipient and guest."
"The church is the offspring of the kingdom of God. It is its fruit and its evidence.."
From "Missional Church," p. 98. The confusion between these two realities is responsible for much bad theology and poor practice. Apart from an understanding of these distinctions we will tend to idolize the church and work with firm and exclusive boundaries in the modernist sene. Without this distinction we will not see the fallenness in our midst and we will not understand how God can be at work in the culture around us.
Somewhere someone asked this question: "Can we be of the church but not in it?"
* * * * *
On Friday morning six guys gathered at the Bean Scene in downtown Kelowna. Of the six of us, two were well known beyond the local area. We varied in age from about 27 years to 49 years. We represented four denominations, with two of us currently not anchored in any identifiable group.
Discussion was passionate, stimulating, sometimes poignant, always relevant. I was reminded at the end of an article by Andrew Pritchard some time back. In his discussion of James Fowler's stages of faith development, Andrew looks at the phenomenon of people leaving their churches. One of his conclusions is that for some people, leaving their church can be a step of spiritual growth. This was true for me personally, and in our gathering Friday morning I saw a similar reality in two others. We talked a bit about why this was true.
I think it is true first of all because within the system many of us confused the purpose of man with the purposes of God. In some cases this extended to our confusing human agency with God's power or activity. We began to idolize the system or its leaders.
Where this was true we wrapped our own identity in the flag (the church) more than in Christ. At that point we were set for a very nasty fall. It's true that the old system of hierarchy elevates leaders (clergy) above the ordinary human being and so encourages such idolatry.
But another more ordinary dynamic is also at work, and it is simply developmental. In the process of human growth we must first know who we are before we can give ourselves away. We must form boundaries before we can safely move beyond them. This is called individuation. It is also part of spiritual growth.
At some point in our lives we have to stand alone. We have to discover who we are without the support of others. We have a desert experience. It is a dark and lonely time, filled with temptation, danger, and personal demons.
Some of us left the system because we could no longer survive safely within it. Others of us left it because we were on a personal journey of discovery. But either way when we left it, we discovered it had its mirror inside us. The same striving and love of position or hunger for power that we saw around us was within us. We realized that either our personal growth had been twisted, or that there was something about the system itself that encouraged this kind of striving.
And there is something even more interesting to me personally. It is that only those who are free of the punishment or rewards of a system can hope to change the system. If you want to move the world, you need a lever outside it.
As we talked yesterday morning I realized that there is also a paradox in all this. The paradox is that we can't simply lead people out of the old system; to do so is to encourage the same dependence on leaders that we knew within the old system. But dependence stops people from growing, it keeps them immature. Unfortunately, the only way to have a deep personal encounter with ourselves and our own darkness is through crisis and pain. Offering others an easy solution.. that they simply join with us in some new movement.. would not be a path to inner transformation for them. We would eventually rebuild the old system on top of the new one.
Instead, we have to become mentors for those who are hurting within the system, or who have already left it. We have to come alongside them and help them understand and survive the process. We have to affirm that they are not bad people because they have left the church or because they see the fallenness of the system. We have to support the work of the Lord in their lives, both inner and outer, and help them sift the true from the false. God could be at work in their leaving, God is dancing outside the walls, God is active and alive in the culture around us. We can find ways to partner with Him wherever we are.
And perhaps slowly, by His grace, we can reconstruct.
Why some won't join the old guard in the trenches
Fowler, Faith and Fallout by Andrew Pritchard
How People Grow by Cloud and Townsend.
"GENEVA - Researchers have more than doubled the world speed record for internet data transfer. Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland sent the equivalent of a full-length DVD movie in about seven seconds.
Scientists Smash Internet Speed Record
Love Song
In the place my wonder comes from
In your heart where the world comes from
Come with me
Though my eyes be closed forever
Come with me
In the place my wonder comes from
Bruce Cockburn, 1977
"So here's the question I want some input on -- it's actually a two-part question. I'm starting from the premise that (and please feel free to comment on this premise, as well) :
"The goal of leadership in discipleship is to co-operate with the Holy Spirit in bringing people to the point where they no longer 'need' the leader but have learned to follow the Spirit of Jesus for themselves."
From Robbymac. Please visit Rob's site to comment.
I had a dream this morning that a friend was showing me a book he had written on Christ and Culture. But I wasn't happy with it...
When I woke up I got thinking about the primary paradigms the Church has tried throughout history, all in an attempt to live the meaning of the words "in the world, but not of it."
As we reconstruct, and as we re-imagine the Church and its relationship to Jesus and to the creation He loves, we need to find a better way. Christ transforms culture.. but not as if the Kingdom of God will suddenly appear. We will live between the times until Jesus Himself reappears to rule.
In the meantime, what will our relationship to our culture be like?
If we are all priests, we have to find ways to live that out in our gathering, and in our going. This is what we mean when we talk about ourselves as a missional community where all are chosen and all are sent, and not just the few.
Bill Carroll's article at Next-Wave is helpful in re-imagining a gathering of priests, though I think it will be easier to live those implications in smaller gatherings. And The Church of the Savior in Washington, DC has always been an incredible example of living out the priesthood in our going.
The reality is if we are all priests, we will see that expressed in all areas of life, because we are priests in all our vocations.. painters, plumbers, tree-planters, bottle makers, candle makers, cup-bearers, sailors, soldiers.. all of us.
Some years ago I was reading a book on "the laity" by Paul Stevens, a teaching elder at a Plymouth Brethren church in Vancouver, BC. In one of the chapters Paul reviewed the two mandates, and it was revelational for me.
In its barest form, here is a summary:
After the first mandate came the fall: people were alienated from God, from their fellow creatures, from themselves and from the creation. Instead of harmony there was violence; instead of love, manipulation and domination. Failure to keep the first commandment resulted in God's plan for restoration through the New Creation mandate, commonly called the Great Commission. What we commonly misunderstand is that the intention of the second mandate is to restore the first. Evangelism has as its goal the reconciliation of the whole person to God, to neighbor and to the environment. Rather than intending to create religious people, God's intention is to make us fully human.
Thus we move from speaking narrowly of the Church and evangelism to speaking of the kingdom, redemption and reconciliation. It is revealing that one of the New Testament words which we translate as "save" (as Luke 6:9) actually means "to save from disease and its effects" or "to heal" (Sodzo, TDNT). Both these meanings are present in the more embracing Old Testament concept of "shalom."
God's plan to heal all things by restoring them to Himself begins with the Church as the first-fruits of His cosmic plan. Much more than a means of collecting disparate individuals evangelism initiates a healing and integrating process that is personal in application and broad in scope. Jim Wallis comments that "Community is the place where the healing of our own lives becomes the foundation for the healing of the nations" (Call to Conversion). He states that
Community is a place to grow in truth, wholeness, and holiness.
We are priests inside the walls when we gather, definitely. But the far more important vocation is to carry that priesthood with us into the world where it is needed. We are sent just as the disciples were sent in Luke 9. Our vocation.. to heal and to reveal.. the same vocation that Jesus had. For a summary of his call see Luke 4. To hear it sung to you click HERE. For a theological treatment read Why Does God Baptize His People in the Holy Spirit? and find Roger Stronstadt's earlier work, "A Charismatic Theology of St. Luke."
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon you,
"But to what shall I liken this generation? It is like children who sit in the market places and who call to others, saying: 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance, we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.' For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said: 'He has a demon.' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they said: 'Look, this man is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' And wisdom is justified by her deeds."(Matthew 11:16-19)
A portion of the notes that our prof gave us on this short passage:
"An Observation: Our kind of Christianity assumes that the more we abstain, the more godly we are. (Or, conversely, the more godly we become, the more we will abstain from things.) This assumption is in our hearts, and minds, and pulpits, and schools. But it is not in the Book. The Bible warns against such false spirituality in quite a few places. Our God is no friend of excess. But an abstinence kind of godliness is very hard to find in the Sermon on the Mount. And it was very hard to find in Jesus himself. Drop it."
Last night I picked up my daughter from a youth gathering at a large church building here in town. She had dropped in on her way to dance lessons to support a friend who was playing drums for the first time in a specific worship setting.
As I wandered around in the bowels of the place waiting for my daughter, feeling quite comfortable, I felt the Lord say to me, "This place is an idol."
From all that you may know of me or may have read on my blog, you might think that that would not have surprised me. But it did. It surprised and pained me. I found myself asking, "How could it be? So much that is good happens here. Your people gather here to worship, to serve one another, to build one another up.. How could what was a good thing become evil?"
The Lord's answer was simple: "This building stands between Me and my people."
I've been pondering that answer as I read in Isaiah 43-45 this morning. In these chapters Israel complains that the Lord has abandoned her. The Lord teaches about the foolishness and futility of idolatry.
Israel grew distant from the Lord in part because she was too comfortable in the land; in her wealth and safety, she forgot about God.
But she didn't realize that she was distant from God, because she trusted in His presence as symbolized by the temple and priests. In the same way, we have trusted in our churches and leaders. We say, "The temple of the Lord!" We assume everything is fine because the religious system rumbles on week by week. Certainly, many of the priests are happy because they have a listening audience, and their wages are still being paid.
We falsely assumed that our leaders symbolized God and spoke for Him. We gave over our right to hear from Him for ourselves; we even let our leaders tell us who we are.
The Temple model centralizes authority and turns a community of people into a passive congregation. Instead of a circle we have the traditional triangle, and a hierarchy (hieros is the Latin for "priest").
Somewhere along the way we substituted the vehicle for the journey. And the priests told us.. "you are followers.. we are leaders; you are listeners, we are speakers; we are priests, you are the people." We believed in this false identity and became passive. And the food they gave us was not good; it was milk instead of meat; it was fast food and not nourishing.
NO! YOU are a priest! YOU are a son or a daughter of the king. Your inheritance is the world, the kingdom, to rule all creation.
The Lord proclaims to the Powers: "Let My people go!" He proclaims that He will rescue Israel, and could never forget her. He will bring comfort and deliverance. Isaiah cries out to the Lord to awaken in strength to deliver Israel.
Let's do the same. Cry out to God to deliver His people from idols. His heart breaks because of the system we have created that separates His people from Him. The Lord cries out,
Rise up, my love, my fair one,
"The danger is that the emerging church is a re-run of evangelicalism, but with powerpoint. We’ll keep trotting out the same words, without thoughtful reflection on our faith in light of new technology. We’ll remain caught up with our words and our retro-theologues. We’ll never consider image, community and chaos in our theology; what Christ as the Image of God might mean (Colossians 1:15), on the impact of revelation in community (Emmaus Road), on the power of chaos to invite new ways of being (Genesis 1).
"And so the emerging church will be the emperor with no new clothes. Sure some new visuals. Sure a coffee machine in the foyer. Sure a few more loose community gatherings. But underneath the same jaded offerings of modernity.
"I am not keen on novelty for novelty’s sake, newness for newness sake. I just believe that a brave new world brings us some gifts. The Spirit is at work outside the church. The Spirit is at work in the culture. Postmodernity will bring gifts, new ways to see, understand, theologise, talk about God. The ancient resources of Scripture and tradition will resonate in new ways."
From Emergent Kiwi
Good thoughts from Steve. Last night I had some similar thoughts as we were praying for a friend when an image of a building under fire came to mind. It seemed to have both immediate application and another meaning..
I believe that much of the work of the Lord in our day is tearing down old structures and institutions. I believe He is doing this because the buildings we have built became walls also in our imaginative world, walls to our spirits. We increasingly dwelt in safe and isolated places, losing touch with our culture, with the needy, and without knowing it, with our God. In spite of the many conferences and worship festivals, in spite of our conviction that God loved our assemblies, He was increasingly unimpressed.
So, as painful as it has been and continues to be for many, and in particular for the early adopters (first out the door).. it is the Lord's plan. He is at work outside the walls, and we need new paradigms of a mobile and EPIC church that is a community and a network, not a congregation, a mission, and not a consumer culture.
"A final area of ministry is from the standpoint of leadership or administration. It is a question of the goal of the ministry. At one time, the aim was building the kingdom of God. That meant evangelizing the lost, building up believers in the faith, and overcoming societal evils. Increasingly of late the goal is building the church. By this is meant the local church, the institutional church. The model of the pastor becomes less and less a matter of the spiritual teacher and healer, and more the chief executive, whose task is to build up the congregation, which usually means enlarging it numerically.
"This is usually related to several factors. One is the personality of the pastor, which often becomes the centre of the ministry, message, and appeal of the congregation. Personal charisma, or the ability to attract other persons, is a cardinal qualification for being the pastor of such a church. Further, this type of church is often characterized by 'techno-ministry'. The very best marketing methods are employed. Seminars are held by successful pastors of such churches for the benefit of other pastors, who come to learn how to make their own churches successful in similar fashion. The implication is that if properly planned and executed, results can be virtually programmed or guaranteed. One cannot help but wonder what the place of God in all this is, if the results are somehow directly correlated with human plans and efforts."
From God - The Father Almighty, by Millard Erickson - page 27. Thanks to Jeremy.
I believe this model is dying; at least, I hope so. But the other problem with it is that it conceives of administration as a hierarchy, which effectively divides God's people into two classes: leaders and followers, clergy and laity. That model was never biblical and has hampered the growth of the kingdom for too many years.
My family took a three day holiday to an area northwest of Kelowna from Thursday to Saturday. It was 500km one way, a six hour trip, and we left around noon on Thursday.
My father and my uncle Fred purchased the land around 1981, and in 1982 both began building log buildings on the property. I worked with my Dad for part of two summers as we built a log structure that is 28' by 18'. It was great fun and great exercise. We cut the logs on the property, pulled them in with a tractor, peeled them in the traditional manner (by hand with a blade attached to a pole), and then cut and fit them with a standard notch using scribers and chainsaws.
My uncle and aunt and one cousin (David) now reside there permanently, though without electric power except that which they generate by solar panels. My uncle retired about twenty four years ago and has a good pension. David served about 22 years in the Canadian Armed Forces and retired about four years ago. My aunt and uncle raise cattle, while my cousin breaks and trains horses in the listener/observer tradition made popular by Monty Roberts otherwise known as "the horse whisperer." It was pretty interesting watching him work with a beautiful four year old gelding that is not yet green broke.
For the rest of the story and more pictures, go to Cabin near Horsefly
"If men and women today began by the thousands experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way, there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into the present-day straitjackets of Christianity. Protestant or Catholic, neither one is structured to contain a mass of devoted people who long for spiritual depth. We are structured towards infancy." Gordon Cosby, Church of the Savior
Finally I have written an article that has wanted writing for months. Here is the first page .. until I complete another revision..
Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by
when you're lovers in a dangerous time
These fragile bodies of touch and taste
when you're lovers in a dangerous time
When you're lovers in a dangerous time
When you're lovers in a dangerous time
We live in dangerous times, and there is no escape. We live in constant danger of accommodation to our culture.
We live in danger of becoming merely consumers of religious services.
We live in danger of substituting the menu for the meal, or of worshipping the temple and not god.
We live in danger of maintaining the values of the cultural church: efficiency, success, individualism, privatism.
We live in danger of abandoning the fight, receiving the plastic identity offered by the world, retreating into privatism and neglecting the poor. The challenge is to become lovers, even in these dangerous times. How will we get there?
Maybe the answer is in a U2 song..
Grace, she takes the blame
Grace, it's the name for a girl
"The mission of a community is to give life to others, that is to say, to transmit new hope and new meaning to them. Mission is revealing to others their fundamental beauty, value and importance in the universe, their capacity to love, to grow and to do beautiful things and to meet God. Mission is transmitting to people a new inner freedom and hope; it is unlocking the doors of their being so that new energies can flow; it is taking away from their shoulders the terrible yoke of guilt and fear. To give life to people is to reveal to them that they are loved just as they are by God, with the mixture of good and evil, light and darkness that is in them; that the stone in front of their tomb in which all the dirt of their lives has been hidden can be rolled away. They are forgiven; they can live in freedom." Jean Vanier, Community and Growth.
Post Religious Stress Disorder
I don't think this newly identified state will make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatric assessment, but it was really helpful for some friends of ours. I coined the phrase in a conversation with them, as I observed their hypervigilance, lack of trust, general anxiety and readiness to blame themselves when things go wrong.
Sadly, the condition is not uncommon, particularly when we invest so much of our life and our dreams in a given faith community, and our precious things are soiled and dirty through religious abuse. May the God of all grace comfort and heal such ones.
* * *
You, You are my wholeness;
Looked for and found the lyrics for a Gordon Lightfoot tune I have often enjoyed. Easy to play on guitar, and sounds great on my twelve string..
Wherefore and Why (end of the song)
Then all at once it came to me, I saw the wherefore
Come on sunshine, what can you show me
My D-Day expansion for Microsoft's CFS 3 is almost complete. I'm waiting on the LOD models for the Spitfive Vb and some information from MS on how to add the new voices we have recorded. It's been a long.. mostly interesting and fun.. project.
With the 60th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion coming up in June, 2004 the timing couldn't be better. I am now planning a similar add-on for Forgotten Battles. Today I'm ordering two new books to do further research. "Normandy" is an Osprey Publishing volume that includes play by play and some excellent maps. Angels Eight is a diary of the Normandy Air War by a Canadian author named Dave Clark.
"We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality." Walter Brueggemann
The Evolution of the Clergy, Part II (from "Missional Church")
Leader as Counselor
Privatized Christianity moved from a God focus to a focus on humanity, with an understanding of the church that was similarly human centered. Pastoral identity was thus reframed into psychological categories, with a gospel centered on meeting individual potential. Clinical and therapeutic models then dominated pastoral education.
Leader as Manager
Technique and rationality root modernity and have become paradigms for church leadership. Modernity required leaders shaped by management and organizational skills; but those skills are not value free. Rather, they are rooted in assumptions and how the world is constructed and about our ability to exercise control of that world. One of the chief assumptions regards effectiveness. In late modern society, effective ends are defined in terms of market, consumption, and privateized personal need. The good manager maximizes organizational effectiveness in resource capacity and market growth.
[Operational understandings] of the church have come to be based on managerial models. The church renewal movement emphasizes inner organizational design. The church growth movement focuses on effectively reaching target groups of people. At denominational levels the management model dominates thought on leadership development.
Leader as Technician
The technical application of scientific rationalism assumed that it is possible to control life by manipulating our environment to achieve the ends we desire. With the right tools and skills it is possible to get the job done. The reign of God becomes achievable with human ability. Numerous seminars offer church leaders methods on "how to ____ ." What we have lost in the process is openness to mystery and [the importance of surrender and dependence on the Holy Spirit].
As the professional model rose among us it became the an operational ecclesiology that dominated the agenda of church leadership. The marginal reality of the church in our culture is an opportunity to recover the character of the Gospel as God's reign in Christ through the power of the Spirit. But leaders have little preparation for a marginal identity..
For such communities to emerge, leaders will have to become like novices, learning to recover practices that are alien to current experience..
Forming Missional [Apostolic] Leaders
Missional leadership will require skills in evoking a language about the church taht reshapres its understanding of its purposes and practices. The practices of a disciplined community will require a language different from that of a voluntary society. The practices of missional life call forth a people who live by standards of judgment and action quite different from those of the culture in which they are set. Leaders will enable God's people to give voice to this laguage of the reign of God as a way of living into such practices.
These leadership gifts will not be found in a single individual. God never intended the church to function that way. The roles of pastor-teacher and apostle function in a plural leadership. Pastoral gifts are important, but in the current setting in North America, the apostolic gifts need to be called forth and equipped. While Ephesians 4 outlines as series of leadership gifts, the contemporary church focuses most of its energy on identifying, training, and credentialing that limited section of those gifts related to the pastor-teacher.
Apostolic, missional leadership wil be learned through apprenticeship within communities. Such leaders will learn firsthand how to live out the practices of community formation that require a profound involvement of the self and deep roots in Bible and theology. Becoming a people who are a sign, foretaste, agent, and instrument of the reign of God, who embody the life of Jesus through the Spirit, and who function as a city on a hill, calls for leaders schooled in such communities.
Awoke thinking about worship this morning and the evangelical tradition of worship leading.. a team or an individual at the front who lead us in praise and adoration and worship.
In the Old Testament the priests led worship, and the format was very tight. There are hundreds of passages that tell us about the OT forms.
In the New Testament the term "worship leader" never occurs, and when worship is mentioned there is never any reference to a leader or a team or any planned song list or agenda. Instead, it seems the entire body participates with songs, words, exhortation etcetera (1 Cor.14). Even in the gathering, the priesthood of believers is an expressed reality.
How did we get so far away from the New Testament?
1) professionalism and the cult of the expert (see Monday's blog below)
A personal example.. I have been playing guitar since since 1979, but if I am asked to use my guitar in worship the first thing that comes to mind is the professional musicians I know who are far, far better with guitar than I am. Thankfully, I do occasionally use my guitar in private worship, but I am somewhat intimidated to use it publicly, and it is very easy to surrender that use in the name of some ideal of excellence.
The result of all this is that we grow passive and don't participate. We cut others off from the gift of simplicity and the joy of participation. We contribute to a few experts feeling grow over-responsible and tend to burn them out.
It isn't going to be easy to find freedom... as Eric Hoffer writes,
"Moses wanted to turn a tribe of enslaved Hebrews into free men. You would think that all he had to do was to gather the slaves and tell them that they were free. But Moses knew better. He knew that the transformation of slaves into free men was more difficult and painful than the transformation of free men into slaves...Moses discovered that no spectacle, no myth, no miracles could turn slaves into free men. It cannot be done. So he led the slaves back into the desert, and waited forty years until the slave generation died, and a new generation, desert born and bred, was ready to enter the promised land." -Eric Hoffer, diary entry, May 20, 1959
* * *
The privatism of worship really worries me. It's a bit too easy to think that if we have had a great time of gathered worship, we have done all that needs to be done. But as David Ruis is fond of pointing out, "justice is the fragrance of worship." By all means we need to personally and corporately encounter God, but we need to rediscover the communal aspects of worship at the same time as we remember that worship is about a life of devotion and service.
"Rest is the ultimate humiliation because in order to rest, we must admit we are not necessary,
that the world can get along without us, that God's work does not depend on us."
Mike Yaconelli
Some thoughts from Chris on Intentional Community. His main point seems to be that we can build with the best of intentions, but no matter how good the PLAN on Whom we rely when building will determine the result.
In the end, community is as much a gift as an achievement. And if all community means is that we have nice times together, we aren't a biblical community at all.
I think this is more or less where I was aiming when I wrote about the ethos of community and the intangibles of community and kingdom.
The Evolution of the Clergy (from "Missional Church")
"The term priest was not applied to Christian clergy until around the year 200 [no wonder since the limited priesthood ended with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost]. But thereafter a theology and practice were forged that created a priesthood of sacramental, holy orders in which the power of Christ's presence resided. The emerging priesthood removed chruch leadership from ordinary existence, as priestly leaders were expected to practice a specialized order of life different from everyone else... rank and role increasingly displaced the New Testament experience of gift and charisma.
"Constantine's sanction of Christianity.. accelerated these changes as the church forged a new relationship with the state.. Images of the body of Christ as a minority band following in the footsteps of an alternate Lord from the margins of society disappeared.. The emergence of celibacy among the clergy futher accenturated the division between leader and people.
"As the church took over pagan basilicas or built worship centers with similar design, liturgy and order too thsape to fit the baslica and the social appropriation of power implicit in the form. ..
"Membership in the church through baptism was concomitant with citizenship in the state. Thus mission was politicized and missio Dei comleted. The church was a static poeple focused on worship, sacrament and spiritual care. Leadership had a settled and pastoral identity. The apostolic, as in missional, nature of the church evaporated.
From Priest to Pedagogue
"The Reformation did not substantively alter the role or understanding of clergy developed in earlier centuries.. New definitions of the "true church" based on the markes of pure doctrine, pure sacramental administratoin and pure disciple shaped the Protestant-Christendom conception of church and clergy...
"The Reformation challenged and reformed the inherited priestly categories of leadership only to create a more pedagogical identity for the the clergy in which such leaders became keepers of the Word. The clerical paradigm remained embedded..
"The Radical Reformers created alternative [visions of the church]. Rejecting the state church, they sought to recover a more apostolic and functional leadership based on neither a priestly nor pastor-teacher model...
From Pedagogue to Professional
"The Enlightenment challenged the church and its place in the social context. The church and its theologians sought to respond to the new demand for a foundation rooted in reason. The place of theology and the training of clergy were significantly altered by these efforts. A University education provided the cognitive foundations for law and medicine, and so it should provide the same for church leadership...
"This paradigm continued into the twentieth century; seminary training remains firmly committed to the model of preparing a professional clergy for a set of tasks considered to be "ministry." In the twentieth century the clerical paradigm as shaped and determined the curricula and ethos of seminaries in North America.
"[The concept of] leadership functioning as specialized professionals .. effectively eclipses the gifts for leadership in the non-ordained contingent of God's sent people, those known as .. the laity. Ministry remains identified with the static roles of clergy as priest, pedagogue, or professional, all dispensers of spiritual resources. Even where the priesthood of all believers stands as a theological conviction of the community, it is rarely practiced ..
More Recent Shifts
"The North American perception of living in a churched culture has collapsed under the weight of change. The identity of religious leaders at the center of society was lost as clergy found themselves in a social context that did not recognize, honor, or require their function except in the passages of life. In like manner, the church was decentered as its role shifted from public cultus to private vendor of spiritual resources.
"This decentering resulted in an anxious search for new identities and roles. A rediscovery of the laity returned to the agenda for future church leadership, but the symbols that continued to dominate leadership indicated that the North American churches still sought to restore themselves to the public square. Clergy leadership paradigms were reformed but not replaced... The three revisionist images of counselor, manager and technician illustarate that the churches appropriated without question modern images of the leader as their primary means of equipping their leadership for a return to the cultural center. In doing so, they missed the opportunity to receive their marginalization as an opportunity to recover a missional [or apostolic] identity.
From "Missional Church," ed. Darrel L. Guder. More tomorrow...
"In Genesis 12:1-3 God's command launches Abraham on a journey, and God's people have been on a journey ever since. The journey is a journey of blessing, to be sure, but it is not an elite and exclusive blessing. Rather, God's people are blessed instrumentally, blessed in order to be a blessing to others." Brian McLaren, "More Ready Than You Realize."
Gordon Cosby on Leadership
"The first quality of leadership is to understand that the real issue is always an internal one... 'What in me blocks the coming of the Holy Spirit?'"
"The second quality of leadership is the capacity to take hostility. Any situation where there is hostility has the potential of being a step in a person's spiritual growth if that person has the capacity to receive anger without lashing back. Hostility is the consequence of fear which has its origin in separation from God.
"The third quality is the capacity to accept another person where he or she is. There is a bit of the manipulator in all of us, and a bit of the perfectionist.
"A fourth quality of leadership is the perspective which enables us to sort the little issues from the big ones. We need perspective; little issues act as smoke screens.
"The fifth quality of leadership is a willingness to fail and to let others fail. If God does a new thing through us, we must necessarily be trying that which has not been tried before, and there will be no way of knowing the outcome in advance.
"The sixth quality of leadership is a deep caring for people -- not just those who are important to us, those who can give us something, but for all people. Unless there are two or three persons at the heart of a community with the capacity to truly love, it is doomed."
From Elizabeth O'Connor, "Call to Commitment"
Blessed is the one whose strength is in you,
Apples and Oranges
While living in Fresno in 1989 we picked fresh oranges from the trees, as well as lemons and pomegranates and grapefruit. It was a cool experience.
Now we live in apple and grape country. I don't believe there are nearly as many varieties of apple in the world as there are grapes, but we certainly suffer with fewer varieties than God intended, in the name of convenience and economics.
The stores generally carry MacIntosh, Spartan, Gala, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious and a couple of others. But out in the hills around town you can also find Creston, Russet, King, Honeycrisp, Fiji and a few others. Honeycrisp and Fiji are my current favorites.
If you can imagine a large, crispy, sweet apple with a small core, an apple that is shaped similar to the spartan but just a bit less round, with a yellow and rose complexion, then you can imagine Honeycrisp. The type comes from Minnesota, keeps better than the early apples and is great for eating fresh as well as for cooking or for applesauce. I really enjoy them.
Technology and the food industry push toward standardization, a long shelf life, certain colors, bruise and disease resistance, and generally away from diversity. Thankfully, local growers don't have to worry quite so much about those things.
"Or to put it positively, models of the church must not be dictated by cultural reality, but they must be voiced and practiced in ways that take careful account of the particular time and circumstance into which God's people are called. Every model of the church must be critically contextual.
"It is the royal mode of Israel from David in 1000 B.C.E. to 587 B.C.E. that gives us the core model for the people of God in the Old Testament. This model dominates our thinking even as it dominates the text itself... My thesis concerning this season in the life of ancient Israel is that as this model dominates our reading of the Old Testament, it has served well the interests of an established, culturally legitimated church [he then identifies chief characteristics.)
"This pattern of stable religious institution, sympathetic civic leadership, secularizing intelligentsia, and passionate prophecy all come to us as a cultural package. (I dare suggest that this is, mutatis mutandis, the governing model of modern, established Christianity in the West.) As is well known, this entire model in ancient Israel was swept away in a cultural-geopolitical upheaval.
"At the other end of the Old Testament, we may identify yet another model for the community of faith. The temple model came to an abrupt end in 587 B.C.E. My suggestion is that this exilic, postexilic period after the collapse of the temple hegemony is one to which we must pay considerable attention, for it may be echoed in our own time and circumstance.
"In the face of political irrelevance and social syncretism, a main task of the community was to work very hard and intentionally at the cultural-linguistic infrastructure of the community. Daniel L. Smith has called that work the development of strategies and mechanisms for survival, because the threat was in fact the disappearance of the community of faith into a universalizing culture that was partly hostile to any particularity and that was partly indifferent. Among these strategies for survival, three seem crucial for our reflection.
"First, this community, in the face of sociopolitical marginality, worked at the recovery of memory and rootage and connectedness. The primary evidence of this in the Old Testament are the extended genealogies [in order to] connect the threatened present generation with the horizon of reference points from the past. A studied recovery of the past intends to combat the "now generation," and the disease of autonomy and individualism that imagines that we live in a historical vacuum.
"A second strategy for survival in a community at the brink of despair is the intense practice of hope. The rhetoric of the community filled its imagination with the quite concrete promises of God. In its extreme form, this rhetoric of hope issues in apocalyptic... The community at the margin, when it functions at all, is a community of intense, trustful waiting.
"The third strategy of survival worth noting is that the postexilic community became an intensely textual community. It was busy formulating the text, so it is widely believed that the period around the exile is precisely the period of canonization, the making of normative literature. It was also busy interpreting the text.
"With a high and passionate view of Scripture, we must not miss the point concerning social power. The point of sustained textual study is not objective erudition, information, or conclusion. The point is rather to enter into and engage with a tradition of speech, reflection, discernment and imagination that will prevail over the textual constraints of Persian power and Hellenistic hostility. A textless Jew is no Jew at all, sure to be co-opted and sure to disappear into the woodwork. And my sense is that a textless church is no church at all.... "
. . .
"The point of this linkage of late and early is to suggest that in doing textual work (which became a primary activity of the marginated community), the late community must recast what the early community had done for the sake of its own crisis. This means that after the establishment, as before the establishement, this was essentially a "new church start." Postexilic Jusaism is a vibrant act of new generativity, not enslaved to its oldest memories, and not immobilized by its recent memory of establishment power. Ezra is the great "new church start" leader. A new church means reformulating the faith in radical ways in the midst of a community that has to begin again. For Ezra, as for Moses, new church starts do not aim at strategies for success, but at strategies for survival of an alternative community. What must survive is not simply the physical community; what must survive is an alternative community with an alternative memory and an alternative social perspective rooted in a peculiar text that is identified by a peculiar genealogy and signed by peculiar sacraments, by peculiar people not excessively beholden to the empire and not lusting after domestication into the empire... (Italics Mine) From Cadences of Home by Walter Brueggemann
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The property is 150 acres on the plateau to the east of Williams Lake and just south of the town of Horsefly. Don't worry.. this time of year there are virtually no insects of any kind to be seen.
You have seen "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers." But from December 12-16th there will be a screening of the extended edition of "The Two Towers" in major theatres. This will be followed by the release of "The Return of the King" to theatres on December 16th. For more information visit 
