A few weeks ago the book And: The Gathered and Scattered Church showed up on my front step (that’s because I bought it of course).  This book was written by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay of Adullam Church in Denver, CO.  I was interested in this book for a few reasons.

First of all, we use the phrase “shaping and sending” in our congregation as a short description of what we are doing. I respect (from afar) what these guys are doing so I was hoping this book would be a bit of the struggles and successes they’ve had in trying to work this out in the context of their community.  I wasn’t disappointed.  I really, really appreciated hearing their story.  They didn’t approach the book as “here is how we did it and why we are some awesome.”  Rather, I felt like I was sitting in a coffee shop with them as we conversed with the pains, struggles and joys of seeking to live as a community that is gathered together around Jesus Christ and sent into our neighborhoods, work places, schools, homes, etc to be the presence of Jesus.

The second thing I was hoping for was a recapturing of the significance of the “gathered” aspect of church family life. I’ve become more and more convinced that the weekly gathering is and should an extremely significant part of a community’s life together. I understand the recent efforts to de-emphasize the Sunday morning experience.  But, I personally think that approach is an overreaction.  Yes, the Sunday morning experience has become an idol for many. But I don’t think we need to throw it.  We need to find harmony between the gathered and scattered nature of the church.  If all we do is gather: no good. If all we do is scatter: no good either.

All that being said, I felt like this book is a really, really helpful dialogue partner for churches seeking to find that rhythm between gathering and scattering, or as we say it at The Well, shaping and sending.

Non Disclaimer, discplaimer: This book was not sent to me to review and I don’t know the authors (though, one of my favorite couples in the world just moved to Denver and I sent them to Adullam and they said they loved it and it felt like The Well – that made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside!).  I just liked the book.  I think you’ll like it too.

This year I was part of a book project called ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs. You can get it off the Ecclesia Press Website or Amazon.

This is the description of the book: “In ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Burbs, fifty authors take on the task of sharing the good news for their city, together weaving a beautiful tapestry of the gospel in all its depth and complexity. These essays reveal how the gospel lives and breathes in neighborhoods around the world.”

EcclesiaPress just published a video about the book which includes some of the centent from the book as the content of the video. Here it is…

I am honored to have been able to contribute to a really exciting book project called ViralHope: Good News from the Urbs to the Suburbs. This is exciting for a few reasons, it is the first time I’ve been published so that’s pretty fun. But more importantly, its a a fantastic book and that goes well beyond my small contribution. Fifty pastors and practitioners each wrote short essays on the “good news” of the gospel. The assignment was to write something that would be publishable in the writers local newspaper. The entries are short and make for some very deep, light reading. The book was edited by JR Woodward and published by Ecclesia Press, the new publishing arm of our church network, The Ecclesia Network.

I wrote my entry in light of the suburbs of Philadelphia. I sense that most people living in suburbia live in very small worlds. While we have the more access to global information than anyone on the planet, I think we generally live in small worlds that revolve around us and our homes and our families. So, in my entry I tried to help us see that the good news was global in scale. My desire was for the reader to look beyond their own small world and see what God was doing on a global scale. Of course, this doesn’t mean that God is not for us personally. I just think we tend to get that part of the story and miss the wider implications of the gospel.

Below, you can find my entry. If you want to read the rest of the entries you’ll have to purchase a copy. (By the way, I can sell you a copy at a reduced price. I still have a bunch of copies to sell in my office – just let me know and I can get one to you).

Here is my entry:

Six months ago my six-year old son and I were playing with his matchbox cars. Without being provoked, he looked up and asked, “Daddy, why did Jesus have to die?” I was in the midst of trying to get my Porsche to out run his Jeep so I wasn’t completely ready for his question. But, I stopped myself before giving the answer. How did I want my son to understand the answer to this question? Why did Jesus have to die? What really happened at the cross? In essence, he was asking me this question, “Daddy, what’s the good news?” It’s questions everyone is asking.

Two years ago I found myself at the front of my church, standing in front of 300 people from my local community, the town of Feasterville, PA. More than three quarters of those present hadn’t been to my church before. For all I knew, most of them hadn’t been to church in years. So as a pastor, this would usually be something to be pretty excited about. But on that night, it was the last place I wanted to be. On that night, I was standing in front of the friends and family of a young man, barely 23 years old, who had just taken his own life. So there I stood as “pastor.” It was my job to bring comfort and a sense of hope to a devastating situation. I have no doubt that many of those people did not expect much from a pastor, but even those most skeptical seemed to be asking me this question, “Pastor, what is the good news?”

In the summer of 2008 I spent three weeks in the heart of Zambia. Zambia is a beautiful place and home to beautiful people. But life in Zambia can be gut-wrenchingly tragic. During my visit I met a mother of four who lived in a slum. . One of her children was already dead, two were almost starving to death, and her oldest daughter couldn’t go to school because she couldn’t afford to buy the proper uniform. My Zambian friend I was with predicted the daughter would be HIV positive before her 15th birthday. So, in the midst of this reality I could hear this mother asking me, “Dear friend, what is the good news?”

So what is the good news?

How do you answer this question for a five year old?

How do you answer this question for a room full of grieving friends and family?

How do you answer this question for a mother who is watching her family waste away in a slum in Zambia?

To state the obvious, in all three situations the answer needs to be news that is actually good news.

Through these and many other experiences I have found that the best way I can answer this question is to say that the good news is that Jesus came, died and rose again to fix the problems of the world.

I believe it’s important that we start there.

Far too often we Christians envision the “good news” too narrowly. The heart of the good news is the reality that God makes all things new. The Bible talks about a future day when there will be no more mourning, no more crying, no more death, no more pain. All the problems of the world will be fixed.

Lesslie Newbign writes the following, paraphrasing Revelation 21 and Isaiah 56,

“All nations and tribes and people shall be gathered together in one fellowship to worship God; all war and hatred shall cease; there shall be no more sorrow nor sighing, death itself shall be done away; even the wild creatures shall learn to live at peace – the wolf with the lamb and the bear with the ox; all the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of God; God himself shall dwell with them and be their God; all the glory and honor of the nations shall be gathered into God’s holy city, and nothing unclean or impure shall ever enter. It is in such words that the Bible describes to us the fulfillment of God’s saving purpose. All mankind shall live together in one holy family, as children of the Father, in new-created earth and heaven. This is salvation. Because we have received the first-fruits of it, we long for its completion. We know something of salvation now, because God has given us the earnest of it; we shall not know it fully until He has completed what He has begun.”

You see, the good news we Christians carry is global in scale. From this starting point it moves down into all other spheres of life.

We believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection came to bring peace and justice to our broken world.

We believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection came to bring peace and justice to our broken cities.

We believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection came to bring peace and justice to our broken neighborhoods.

We believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection came to bring peace and justice to our broken homes.

And, yes, we definitely believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection came to bring peace and justice to our broken lives.

All of our deepest longings are met in the words of Jesus himself, “I am making all things new…”

My hope is that you’ll realize the global scale of the good news and that Jesus longs to include you in His plan of Salvation. He longs to make you new just as much as He longs to have you be part of the work he is doing here on earth today.

The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I don’t want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”

From Mere Christianity in Book IV – Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity

David Bosch outlines five important characteristics of the church’s relationship to the world in his landmark book “Transforming Mission.”  This stuff is so fantastic (and I think important) that I am just going to copy what he wrote here.  Also, if you haven’t read this book. Get it and spend the next three years slowing reading through it. It’s that good.

1. The church cannot be viewed as the ground of mission, it cannot be considered the goal of mission either – certainly not the only goal. The church should continually be aware of its provisional character.
2. The church is not the kingdom of God. The church is “on earth the seed and the beginning of that kingdom” and “the sign and instrument of the reign of God that is to come. The church can be a credible sacrament of salvation for the world only with it displays to humanity a glimmer of God’s imminent reign – a kingdom of reconciliation, peace and new life. In the here and now, that reign comes whensoever Christ overcomes the power of evil.  This happens most visibly in the church but also happens in society, since Christ is Lord of the whole world as well.
3. The church’s missionary involvement suggest more than calling individuals into the church as a waiting room for the hereafter…there is a convergence between liberating individuals and peoples in history and proclaiming the final coming of God’s reign.  In this perspective, the church is the “people of God in world occurrence” (Barth) and the community for the world.
4. The church is to be viewed as the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, as a movement of the Spirit towards the world en route to the future. When we view the church as a community of the Holy Spirit we identify it preeminently as missionary community, since the Spirit is the go-between God.
5. If the church attempts to sever itself from involvement in the world and if its structures are such that they thwart any possibility of rendering a relevant service to the world, such structures have to be recognized as heretical. The church’s offices, orders, and institutions should be organized in such a manner that they serve society and do not separate the believer from the historical.  Its life and work are intimately bound up with God’s cosmic-historical plan for the salvation of the world.  We are called, therefore, to be “kingdom people” and not “church people.” Because of its integral relatedness to the world, the church may never function as a fearful border guard, but always as one who brings good tidings.

I think this stuff #5 on the church and its connection to history is extremely important.  Karl Barth in volume 4.3.2 in his Church Dogmatics spends a lot of time talking about the “gospel in world occurrence” and its really, really good stuff.  Heady, but good.  I think we tend to separate world history from the church and that’s a grave mistake.  We talk about salvation history, often in opposition to, world history.  I believe the scriptures are talking about salvation history as world history.  God is working in and through history to bring it to completion and it’s through Christ that God is accomplishing this.  I think far too often we accidental forget that God is not working alongside or in opposition to history, but in history.

Eugene Peterson’s latest book, Practice Resurrection is fantastic.  I don’t know how else to say it.  An excerpt,

“Church is the appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end.  Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, injection and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and partciate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word. Jesus Life…”

He goes on the point out that the church is far from the utopian dream that many of us have when it comes to church and says,

“Romantic crusader and consumer representations of the church get in the way of recognizing the church for what it actually is.  If we permit – or worse  promote – dreamy or deceptive distortions of teh Holy Spirit creation, we interfere with participation in the real thing.  The church we want becomes the enemy of the church we have.”

Eugene has an incredible and important prophetic voice for the church today.  Simply out, this book is worth getting and reading.

One of the great things about being at the Ecclesia Network last week was the challenging teaching from Dallas Willard.  He really pushed me on some of my thinking and caused me to think outside of my normal boxes.  This was refreshing!

One of the biggest critiques I have of many of the pastors conferences out there these days is that its just the same people saying the same things.  I guess this isn’t really mean to call out those who are on the speaking circuit.  I’m more critical of those who attend every conference on the circuit.

While I like to be critical of the speaking/conferences I realized again last week that my reading patterns can be accused of the same things. I can get into a rut where I am reading things that merely reinforce my already held beliefs rather than reading men and women who challenge me and stimulate me to think beyond my current framework.

So, I’m trying to read outside the normal “missional” context more.  With that in mind, I finally picked up Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.  I’ve been meaning to read this for a while now and, while I am only 30 pages in, I am so glad I did.

One of my favorite quotes so far…

“We are certainly not Christ; we are not called to redeem the world by our own deeds and sufferings, and we need not try to assume such an impossible burden. We are not lords, but instruments in the hands of the Lord of history; and we can share in other people’s sufferings only to a very limited degree. We are not Christ, but if we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the hour of danger comes, and by showing a real sympathy that springs, not from fear, but from the liberating and redeeming love of Christ for all who suffer.  Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. The Christian is called to sympathy and action, not in the first place by his own sufferings, but by the sufferings of his brethren, for whose sake Christ suffered.”  (14)

He also has some great stuff on trust and community,

“Nothing we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We often expect from others more than we are willing to do ourselves… The only profitable relationship to others – and especially to our weaker brethren – is one of love, and that means the will to hold fellowship with them” (10)

“When we trust, we have learned to put our very lives in the hands of others…we now know that only such confidence, which is always a venture, though a glad and positive venture, enables us really to live and work…trust will always be one of the greatest, rarest, and happiest blessings of our life in community, though it can emerge only on the dark background of a necessary mistrust. We have never learned to trust a scoundrel an inch, but we give ourselves to the trustworthy without reserve.” (12)

Good stuff! Love the Hoff!

Edwin Friedman spoke the following at the Baccalaureate address to Albert Einstein High School in 1964:

“The universal ingredient and force which permeates all of life – namely change – is changing for the faster, and this means that it will become more and more necessary for each of us to be more resilient and flexible, more spontaneous in dealing with the new and unforeseen, and it will become less and less easy to find security and stability by just adopting the traditional customs and ideas and attitudes of the past.” (From the book: What Are You Going to Do With Your Life?)

Sounds applicable to the church eh?

In his excellent book The Monkey and the Fish, Dave Gibbons asks three questions as he talks about the massive shift that is going on in our world. How are we to figure out how to navigation this rapidly changing world as followers of Jesus and as faith communities? Alan Roxburgh has referred to the kind of change we are in as “discontinuous change.” This phrase is defined by Webster as, “Non-incremental, sudden change that threatens existing or traditional authority or power structure, because it drastically alters the way things are currently done or have been done for years.”

In light of this, Dave Gibbons brings up three excellent questions that I think we would do well to spend a lot of time pondering the answers. In answering these questions, we begin to get an understanding of where and how God is calling us to love and serve others.

Where is Nazarath?

By this he inviting us to look for the broken places in our world. He writes,

“Who in your community is the outsider, the misjudged, the misunderstood. Maybe the one who seems weakest? Who are the strangers and the friendless? Focusing on them as a church may mean you won’t grow fast. And you may lose some people. But your church will be fulfilling the most beautiful expression of who God is.”

The fact is, far too often we want to serve and love those who are “cool” and “fun” to serve. We wouldn’t say this outright, but just take a look at our churches. What would it look like for us to intentionally step into the “Nazaraths” of our communities as Jesus did? This would have to be intentional because, frankly, its not going to happen unless we make a decision for it to happen. Our normal way of life will not lead us down this path automatically.

What is my pain?

It’s funny, I talk all the time about understanding our giftedness and talents as we talk about understanding and discovering God’s calling for us as individuals and as a church. I think this is legit because of the amount of time Paul spends talking about spiritual gifts in Romans and Corinthians as well as the leadership gifts in Eph. 4. But, Paul also talks about God’s power being made perfect in weakness and that God will use the weak of the world to shame the wise. By asking this question, we begin inviting God to use the broken parts of our lives to love and serve others. This is actually kind of counter-intuitive and that’s exactly why I think its so important. Gibbons writes,

“And I’ve realized again and again that my pain was a gift from God. As I’ve met people around the world and shared my pain with them, it is the pain that draws people in, far more so than my limited talents, skills and accomplishments. It disarms all the things that can be used to divide us – race, economics, culture, politics, nationalism, dogma, language.”

What is in my hand?

This last question helps us stop comparing ourselves to others and it allows us to stop saying, “if i/we only had…” Instead, Dave writes,

“instead of dangerously comparing myself with others, what is within my grasp relationally, historically, and resources-wise right now?”

The simple point is this, God will provide us all that we need to accomplish his purposes.

I encourage you, spend some time journaling (if you do that kind of thing) and praying (I hope you do that kind of thing!) around these three questions.  I think you’ll be surprised with where God takes you…

I read Lesslie Newbigin’s chapter on Leadership from his book The Gospel in a Pluralist Society once every few months. It’s that good. Here is an excellent excerpt:

“The task of ministry is to lead the congregation as a whole in a mission to the community as a whole, to claim its whole public life, as well as the personal lives of all its people, for God’s rule. It means equipping all the members of the congregation to understand and fulfill their several roles in this mission through their faithfulness in their daily work. It means training and equipping them to be active followers of Jesus in His assault on the principalities and powers which he has disarmed on his cross. And it means sustaining them in bearing the cost of that warfare…”

Here, he is trying to emphasize that gospel calls all of us to a new way of living and the task/calling of the minister is to keep the community focused on that very thing. He continues later in the chapter,

“[Jesus' call to repentance] involves, in fact, proving that the world’s idea of what is sin and righteousness is wrong. The conversion for which Jesus calls, and which the Spirit now effects in those who turn to him, is a radical new way of understanding: it involves at the same time a demand for total-self-surrender and the gift of utter security. It involves both calling and promise, demand and gift, at the same time. And it concerns the whole of life – the public life of the world, the nation, the factory, the society, and the personal life of each believer. There can be no muffling of the call to conversion, but equally there can be no limiting its range, no offer of “cheap grace” which promises security without commitment to that mission for which Jesus went to the cross. There bearer of this call has to be a community which is both committed to that mission and also enjoying and celebrating that security.

One of the things I have been constantly challenged with is the way that so many of us seem to all too easily accept the way of the world without even knowing it. The gospel critiques our individualized life-styles and calls us to repentance. The gospel critiques our consumerism. And calls us to repentance. The gospel critiques our selfish way of life. And calls us to repentance. The gospel critiques our ignoring the poor. And, it calls us to repentance.

Sometimes I get sick of how long of a way I still have to go, especially in the areas I just mentioned.

That’s why I love what Newbigin says in this section. Yes, the gospel critiques the way of life in our (and all) society. But, at the same time, it brings us security, safety and the comfort of an all-loving God who embraces us and calls us His children.

May we continue to be people who are both painfully aware of how the culture infects our way of life and may we be actively repenting and walking in the way of the Kingdom. At the same time, may we be a people who are wonderfully aware of the all encompassing love of God. In the words of Paul, may we all be able to comprehend how deep, how wide, how high is the love of God.