Author: firstdelray

Patrick Keifert

Hugh Halter

Bob Verhelle, Elder, Lenape Valley Presbyterian Church, New Britain, PA

     Listen carefully and you will hear many church members express sadness that the church seems to be losing ground in North America, particularly with college and post-college age young adults. Membership is down, worship attendance is down and overall interest in church is down, with some exceptions of course. What is unfortunate, writes Hugh Halter and other cultural observers, is that many of the churches that are the exception are the exception precisely because they appeal to the “consumer denominator” of the culture. That is, they offer what the consumer wants, excellent worship, excellent need-meeting programs and excellent facilities.

     Let’s be clear, there is nothing wrong with excellence. Every church should strive for excellence in ministry. Excellence is not the problem. Often the trouble for many churches which are large and apparently strong is that their ministry is only about the delivery of religious services in a consumer marketplace: making sure every need is met with excellence. Little attention is given to the question, “Are we building disciples whose concern is less with meeting personal needs and more concerned about advancing God’s kingdom?” Here is the test: How many times have you heard from someone that the reason they left a particular church is because “my needs” were not being met or “I” wasn’t being fed? Whoever told them that the church was “about them?”

     Reggie McNeal, a leading thinker and writer about missional church and missional-driven ministry, writes that we have it all wrong when we say the church has a mission. That suggests that we are in charge, which again makes it about “us.” No, writes McNeal, the church doesn’t have a mission, the mission has the church. What is important is not “us” but “God” and “God’s mission” in the world. And the church’s primary purpose is not to meet our needs but to be an instrument in the hands of God for advancing “God’s mission.”

     George Barna, another observer of cultural trends that influence the church, recently had his organization ask several thousand young adults why they weren’t interested in the Christian faith any longer. Their response was surprising. “You got it wrong. We are very interested in Jesus. It’s the church we have lost faith in because the church looks no different from the culture…the church seems to be about giving people what they want. We are tired of it being about ‘us’. We want to be about something bigger than us. When the church gives us that opportunity, we will return.”

Joy,

Earl Creps – speaking of the inner change of persons who begin to live missionally.

     Here is one way of understanding what it means to be a MissionalChurch: a community of persons eagerly living for the Kingdom of God to come.

     Reggie McNeal, one of my teachers at Fuller Theological Seminary, made an interesting observation during my time in his class. He said that most church people are usually reluctant for the Kingdom of God to come. The unchurched persons living in our communities anticipate God’s Kingdom with great urgency. But those in the church are generally reluctant because church membership has become club membership. Familiar customs, traditions and relationships have been developed and club members don’t want to risk losing all of that with God coming along and doing something new.

     Club membership thinking is rarely recognized as such by those in the church, continues McNeal. Church members love God. They want to be about something that blesses others. Yet, in often subtle ways, they fall in love with the familiar and comfortable. Certain ways of doing things become the dominant culture of a local church. New people are invited to join, of course.  But they are invited only as long as they don’t move the furniture around and change cherished customs. No longer are church members willing to give-up their life, figuratively speaking, for the great commission of making new believers. They would rather settle for protecting the way things have always been done.

     I believe the primary reason for club membership thinking among church members is fear. Change in the world is growing exponentially – at a rather dizzying rate – and it always feels that we are about to lose our footing. If we can maintain familiar customs and language at church our lives are steadied. The winds of change may beat around us but at least in our church we can find a hiding place; a place where our spirits may rest. Trouble is – that is idolatry. If we seek rest in anyone or anything other than Jesus, we have misplaced our source of hope for the future.

     So what are we to do? According to the scriptures, we are to confess our idolatry and again place our hope in Jesus alone. And we are to pray. Pray that in following Jesus we may discover that our fears are absorbed in the cross and we become bold once again to look, listen and take notice of the new thing that God is doing all around us. Someone once said that prayer is “fast forwarding” the future – asking that God’s Kingdom will come, whatever it may mean for us personally. So the question becomes, do you have the courage to ask for the Kingdom to come?

Joy,

George Barna

D’Antonio

It seems to me that most of us want to contribute to building a cathedral. Trouble is we become so preoccupied with the process of building that cathedral that we forget why we even showed-up for work. Though it is true that the small things matter they can distract us from what its all about – building a cathedral. Of course, the cathedral I speak of is figurative for most of us. Our cathedral may be a meaningful relationship with another, a successful career, a comfortable retirement or purposeful involvement with a charitable and life-changing organization.

           

As disciples of Jesus Christ (or as “members of the church” some would say) we have each pledged ourselves to building the grandest of cathedrals, The Church of Jesus Christ. I’m not talking about buildings but about people – building people in relationship to the person of Jesus. Young congregations do this well, making new followers and multiplying disciples for Jesus Christ. And as a result, lives are transformed (Hear a mission statement in that somewhere?). Young congregations know that together they are building a cathedral. Unfortunately, as many congregations mature (grow older) they become bricklayers. More time is spent writing “Responsive Readings” for worship than making disciples and placing constraints upon people who want to do ministry. Example: Telling someone that before they do something great for Jesus in the church they must first have committee approval and then Session approval. And friends, do I need to tell you that both bricklayers and cathedral builders become tired? Yet, of the two, cathedral builders rarely notice.

If we are going to be effective for Jesus Christ many reading this will need to change their focus and the way they speak around the church. Bricklayers argue about such things as “the worship service is too long” or, “someone is sitting in my place.” Cathedral builders care more about whether lives are being changed.

DallasWillard

I have met very few “bad” people in my ministry though defining “bad” with any precision is a slippery slope. Most people I know, and have known, are basically good and decent people. They have been people who belong to churches and people who don’t. Membership in a church is a weak benchmark for identifying the character of people. That conviction has continued to be strengthened by people I meet who demonstrate considerable generosity, both financially and with volunteer time to nonprofits, and have a grace about them that simply blesses all who know them – yet they personally appear to have no interest in the church.

Many of those good and decent people have also shared with me that they intend much more with their lives, greater generosity, greater demonstration of love for others and greater movement toward some identified set of aspirations, core values or moral standard. They want to be so much more than they are now. The difficulty is that identifying a pathway “from here to there” isn’t done. What they “intend” for their life is rarely realized by the lack of a purposeful approach.

For Christians, the primary “intention” for life is to grow in the character of Christ. This isn’t one choice among several. Christlikeness is the intention, it is what “Christian” literally means: to become a little Christ. Naturally, this intention will rarely be realized without a purposeful approach. What is unfortunate is that for some who take a purposeful approach to growing in the character of Christ, they take the wrong road. That road may be marked by profession of perfectly correct beliefs, more study of the Bible or greater participation in the activities of the church. These are certainly good activities but each are insufficient for realizing our intention to be Christlike.

Dallas Willard, perhaps the most influential thinker in spiritual formation today, argues that there are two primary objectives for realizing authentic character development in the likeness of Christ: falling dearly in love with our Heavenly Father, constantly delighting in Him and realizing that there is no condition to His love for us and disrupting habitual patterns of thought, feeling and action that diminish Christ in us. The first is developed through the regular reading of scripture, not for more information but to experience the presence of God and regular worship, private and corporate. The latter is accomplished by developing intentional practices that, over time< become formative of our nature such as the practice of solitude and prayer, expressing gratitude regularly and financial generosity. The life that is pattern by these two objectives will find its way into the embrace of Christ.

Joy

 Ben Witherington III

I received a discouraging email this week from a friend in Pennsylvania. The email spoke of another friend who has decided to drop out of his weekly Bible Study. The reason was that he simply could not “feel” God. This man was weary of chasing a relationship with a God that seemed absent in his own life. What surprises me about this particular individual is the regular, disciplined approach he took to reading the Bible. His love for the Bible and hours given to its study each week would make most church folk blush. My surprise, therefore, is that given all the time he has spent reading the Bible he must have discovered that it is replete with characters who have felt the absence of God. Chief among them is Jesus, “My God, My God, why have You left Me?” (Matthew 27:46 Common English Bible)

Where did my friend ever get the notion that relationships must be built upon “feelings?” Not from me. I have been married too long, I know better. Certainly, I love my wife. And for most of the twenty-five years of our marriage I have “felt” that love for her. That is to say, of course, that there have been moments where I have felt other things than love. To be fair, there have been more than a few moments when my wife has felt much about me other than love. What has kept us from walking away from each other in those moments is a commitment to the relationship. “Feelings” is simply too fragile of a foundation to build something as important as a marriage. The same is true for a relationship with God.

Ben Witherington III makes another observation I believe is useful to the conversation, love in the Bible is an action word. “It is your ethic, what you do and how you act toward God, others, and self. It is not really meant as a feeling. Doing loving deeds is what the Great Commandment is about. I am rather certain that the greatest loving deed of all time, Jesus’ dying on the cross for all of us, was not accompanied by warm fuzzy feelings. On the contrary, the story in the Garden of Gethsemane suggests that Jesus faced that prospect with icy dread. (Ben Witherington III, A Shared Christian Life, p. ix.)

What I know for certain is that God hasn’t given up on my friend. I have been praying for him since receiving the disappointing email. But my prayer has been less out of worry for him and more from a position of confidence in God. In the Garden of Eden story Adam and Eve hid from God out of shame. Yet, God pursued them. And God pursues us. We all experience those moments when we lose our grasp of God. What we must never forget is that particularly in those moments, when we lose our grasp of God, God does not lose His grasp of us.

Joy,

“We are saved to be a community, not a church of individuals.” 

(Brad House)

            Perhaps one of the greatest obstacles to spiritual formation today is busyness. I have written elsewhere that a basic pathway for spiritual formation, being formed into the character of Christ, is fourfold: intentional formative practices, time in solitude with God, time in community of a small group and time sharing your faith journey with another. Each of these requires that we slow down our lives. There is a sturdy biblical foundation for this. The second chapter of Genesis opens with a declaration that God has completed God’s work in six days and now sets aside the seventh day for rest. As my former teacher, Walter Brueggemann, once commented, we are not to read quickly past this seventh day as if it were a footnote. Here, God announces that there is something of infinitely more value than striving and producing. The remainder of the Bible speaks to this though Jesus states it succinctly for us, love God and love your neighbor. Simply, our primary business is to be in relationship with God and one another.

            Many in the church have forgotten this. God’s seventh day has become a footnote, in very small print, as our lives become marked by ever escalating frantic activity. Lives are increasingly formed by the six days of the Genesis story and the seventh day, if considered at all, is regarded as a luxury or worse, that place where the lazy dwell. Spiritual formation might be the pursuit of some but its pursuit is largely done from a place of exhaustion and is unmoored from a small faith community. Without “rest” we imagine ourselves as more than the God who “rested from all the work that He had done in creation” (Genesis 2:3 NRSV) and separated from a small group, the pursuit is not Christian. As Brad House observes, we are saved to be a community, not a church of individuals.

            If there is to be a recovery of a vibrant Christian church it will be with a recovery of a vibrant experience of Christ by those who comprise the membership of the church. That simply isn’t possible until the seventh day is lifted from a footnote at the bottom of our lives and returned to where God intends, as the capstone to all of our activity. In that seventh day, and I am speaking figuratively here, we pursue not greater output but greater attention to relationships, God and neighbor. Attention to neighbor is optimally and authentically realized through participation in a small group. By planting ourselves in the community of a small group and recovering this seventh day of God’s rhythm of creation, we will train our attention toward God and remain in touch with what really matters in the midst of the busyness and noise of the other six days.

Joy,

David G. Benner

            In my former church I often watched Kevin, an eight year old boy go around the church emptying trash cans into a large plastic trash bag. I looked forward to those evenings when he would come after school to the church to help his mother, our sexton, with her work. He was always pleasant, with a large beautiful smile that was occasionally punctuated with a near breathless excitement to share with me something he experienced that day in school. Kevin and I became friends and he would always brighten the day when he showed up with his mother.

            His mother,  a single mother of two young children, worked hard to provide for her family. The church provided her with ‘flex-time’ so that she could meet the needs of her elementary-aged children and complete her responsibilities for the church. This occasionally meant that she would have to pick her children up from school and bring them to church as she completed that day’s work. What fascinated me was that all she asked her children to do at the church was their school work. Yet, Kevin was compelled to help mom with her work in some way. The vacuum cleaner was larger than he was so that didn’t work. The soap dispensers in the bathrooms were out of his reach so that wasn’t a possibility. And there was no way she, being a responsible mother, would let Kevin near dangerous cleaning chemicals. What remained was emptying trash cans. 

            My fascination was Kevin’s unmistakable love for his mother. He adored her. And love, suggests David Benner, by its very nature, always reaches out. As Kevin “dwelt” in his mother’s love and his love for her, he could not help but to be caught up in his mother’s work. He participated in his mother’s work according to manner that he was equipped and had ability. He emptied trash cans and did so with sheer delight.

            Kevin is an inspiration to me. When I become weary by endless church committee meetings and have listened to innumerable people who always seem to know how to do my job better, Kevin reminds me that I am loved by God, and that I have been invited by that God to be “caught-up” in God’s work in the world. When I remember this, the spring in my step returns and once again I experience delight as a pastor, a pastor that serves our Lord in the manner in which I have been equipped and in which I have ability.

Joy,

Doug Hood

Klaus Issler

the character and the effects of Christian people…” 

DallasWillard

            Following Jesus is about change. Change in our thoughts, speech and behavior. In fact, that good church word “repentance” literally means to “turn around and go the other way.” It is to change direction. Jesus came to us to show us another way to live. Knowing with considerable clarity what Jesus taught has no value to Jesus – none. That is, none unless it is followed by change.

            The church is populated with people who “know” the Bible. The Pharisees mentioned in the pages of the New Testament “knew” the Bible. Perhaps no one knew the Bible better than the Pharisees. But notice something else. The Pharisees drove Jesus nuts. Certainly they “knew” the Bible but their hearts were unchanged. Consequently, Jesus’ only mention of them was always as an example of what not to be. Klaus Issler is right – God desires that we become Bible-hearted practitioners, not just Bible knowers.

            Bible “knowers” are easy to recognize in the church. They are the ones who are always offering “helpful” criticism to others. The words that come over their lips rarely “grace” anyone – rarely encourages or praises someone. Bible knowers not only know their Bible. They know how to “do” church better than anyone else. Fresh baked cookies for the fellowship hour, never store bought. The music should be softer in worship or the pastor shouldn’t be reading from such a worn copy of the Bible (this really happened!). It often surprises me just how many Pharisees there are in the Christian church. And I stand with Jesus – they drive me nuts!

            If the truth be told there is a little Pharisee in each of us. Each of us has had a moment here or there when we want to offer our opinion – to be “helpful” of course. But the best of us recognize those moments and cringe. We simply do not want to be that way. So we try to be different, to change. The difficulty is that every action, every thought and behavior and word spoken comes from the heart. Unless the heart is changed, willful determination to change will always fail.

            Heart change is the work of God. It is not our work. Yet we do have a responsibility. God’s empowering, formative “heart-work” in each of us is accomplished as we place ourselves in accommodating circumstances. Simply, God requires time with us in the silent places. Jesus demonstrated this for us time and time again. Regular time alone with God reading scripture and prayer and sitting in silence listening for God’s whispers in our hearts accommodates God’s work in us.

            It is well documented that sleep deprivation diminishes our mental clarity and physical health. We simply require sleep. Similarly, “God deprivation” diminishes us spiritually. Willpower alone can never carry the freight of living into the character of Christ. We will always be defeated. Fortunately, we are never asked in the Bible to live by our own strength. God changes hearts. But time alone with God regularly throughout the week is required. If we give this time to God, we will not be disappointed.

Joy,

Doug 

             

           

            

M. Robert Mulholland, Jr.

“One by one, they all began to make excuses.” 

Luke 14:18a

Clay, in its natural state, has little value. Yet, in a master’s hands, clay has nearly endless possibilities for both function and beauty. The difference is the master’s hand. God tells us in Jeremiah 18 that we are like clay. Each person has been created for useful service for God’s purposes. But until we have been molded and shaped by the hands of the Master we have little value in advancing God’s purposes here on earth. The Master I speak of, naturally, is God.

Spiritual formation is the process by which we participate in God’s molding and shaping us for God’s use. It is a shared activity: our willingness to place ourselves in God’s hands and God’s work in and upon us. Alone – apart from God – we cannot become all that God desires us to be. Without our willing participation in the shaping process, God will not create in us an instrument of useful service. Simply, spiritual formation is something we do with God.

            So how do we participate in the spiritual formation process? In my study of the scriptures, I have observed three patterns of active participation:

Through these three activities we consciously and willingly place our lives in the Master’s hands. What will come from all that activity is left to God. It is no different with clay. Soft, malleable clay in the hands of the master has no say what will become of it. The primary difference is that we know the Master – He is the One Who came to us in Jesus Christ and upon the cross gave His life for us. In such hands we have little worry about what will come of us. We have seen God’s intentions and it is good.

The tragedy is that many in the church are not experiencing transformation into useful instruments for God’s use. One by one, they all make excuses. The demands of marriage, raising children and advancing in a chosen career leave no time for genuine spiritual growth activity. No time for the study of scripture and prayer. No time for meeting weekly in a small group for spiritual nurture and growth. No time to share with other people about one’s personal journey of faith. Of course, if there is no time for intentional spiritual formation, there is no faith journey to speak of.