"Stand in the place where you live, now face north. Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before." -R.E.M.
"Take Back Halloween" 2008
"Take Back Halloween" started four years ago and it's generally gotten a little bigger and a little more extravagant each year. After some churches in the town we grew up in tried to steal Halloween from the fun and spooky time it used to be with their "Fall Festivals" and "Best Biblical Character Costume" competitions, my friend Josh Carnes and I decided the best thing we could do was reclaim it.
So the first year Carnes came down to Dallas and we've done the last two years in Chicago. This year we're doing a combination of Kansas City and Springfield. Basically we take 3-5 evenings in a row and go non-stop with haunted houses, horror movies, and candy. Lots and lots of candy. We typically eat at delicious restaurants, spend at least one night doing almost nothing, and this year we'll even be having spicy steaks (I can FINALLY get a grill where I live!).
Past guest appearances have been made my brother Caleb, Ashley Bergeron, Alyssa Meadows, and a host of other fine folks. My friends Dave and Anna have typically shown up when they can and my wife even gets in on the scary action. This year we'll be adding a couple of others to the festivities as well. It's one of my most relaxed and favorite times of the year.
To check out photos of our fun times from this year, take a look at our Halloween 2008 Photo Album, which will be updated nightly.
Sonseed Strikes Back!
I honestly didn’t know if it was for real or if it was a hoax. In fact, there are even several websites online that try to debunk the video and show that it’s fake.
Thanks to Bob Hyatt, however, we now know that this video is real! There really was a Sonseed band, they really released an album, and they really went on that horrible show and played that horrible song on it.
Want more? I knew you would! You can download the entire Sonseed album from my website at this link. It was an indie album that hasn’t been in production for about 20 years, so you can do it guilt-free.
Still want more? How about ringtones!!??? That’s right, this link will download a zip file with a Jesus Is My Friend ringtone both for regular phones and, most importantly, for the iPhone.
Merry Christmas to all of you. You can thank me later.
"Subscribe in iTunes" Button/Icon
One of the things I couldn’t find was a good looking “Subscribe in iTunes” button. I found some bad ones, some ugly ones; even an animated GIF that looked like it came straight from the 90s just to ugly up someone’s website.
Anyway...
All that to say, I decided to make one on my own. It goes well with our church website, and it’ll go well with the joshcrain.com site redesign that we’ll be launching next week. It may or may not work for your website, but I thought I’d go ahead and share with you the fruit of my labor. Feel free to use it to your heart’s content; you don’t even have to credit me for it.
Below is a really big version of it. Obviously, you wouldn’t have it be this big, but I’m all about giving you guys a high-res copy. To see what it looks like on the Milestone Church Podcast page, click here):
What's the Worst That Could Happen?
So a while back I wrote about the fact that I’d dropped some weight and began running on a regular basis. In March of this year my friend Josh Carnes and I completed a half-marathon (and my lovely wife Emily even participated in a 5k, her first run since high school).
The goal all along has been for us to run a marathon before Carnes turns 30 years old. Frankly, time is running out.
So we’ve signed up and paid our fees to enter the annual Disney World Marathon to take place this January 11, 2009. Given the fact that I’ve blown off running and working out since our half-marathon in March, I have exactly 16 weeks to prepare myself for this bad boy of 26.2 miles.
I figure that in the worst case scenario I’ll underprepare, suck up the race, and get consoled by Snow White and some dwarves. I’ve been through much worse in life, so no worries.
Website Update Coming Soon
As most of you know, as of June I’m now the lead pastor of Milestone Church in Springfield, Missouri. A few weeks ago I completed our church’s new website design. Though we’ll still be adding new content to that site regularly, I decided to try and make my personal site flow better with the one I designed for our church. So I’ll be changing the color scheme, streamlining the design, and actually making the front page useful instead of that static photo that’s been up for a year now.
In addition, I’m trying to add some content that probably won’t be interesting to more than a handful of you, but that I think is long overdue. There will be an “Essay” section that will contain some of my writing that’s a bit more involved than my blog articles. Issues such as social justice, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of ministry will be covered. Again, I don’t suspect that many will be that intrigued by this, but since I write about these things on occasion anyway I figured I might as well make it available.
I’m also excited to announce that we should have weekly podcasts beginning this coming Sunday. It’s taken a little while to get all of this underway, but our church finally ordered a quality digital recorder that will allow us to easily record and then distribute the messages from Sunday mornings. I’m excited about the timing because we’re starting a really interesting new series this week.
Finally, I’ll be removing the “Forum” from the website. We used to use it a lot before I added the comment system, but it has sat unused for about 6 months now. I just don’t see any use in having it continue to be a part of the website anymore.
That’s it for now, my friends. The last several months have been amazing for Emily and me, and I’m looking forward to continuing to interact with you guys and gals.
Be blessed and be a blessing,
The Southern Baptist Convention Hates Women
Fox News (yes, that Fox News) reported earlier this week that that all of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Christian Bookstores were pulling the latest issue of Gospel Today magazine from their shelves. And what scandalous article did they find offensive enough to merit this drastic move? What naughty photos did the find reprehensible enough to warrant such a draconian measure?
Gospel Today had the never to print an article about (-gasp!-) the existence of female pastors in American churches.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Armageddon approaches; it’s blood-curdling cries are nigh! Women! Women! They teachith from our pulpits!!! NoOoOoOoOoOoO!!!!
But seriously, folks, what is the deal here? I grew up in a Baptist church that had a very conservative view of women in leadership positions within the corporate body. Fair enough. I don’t agree with that view, but I understand their position biblically and I respect anyone who’s willing to give a lot of thought to the matter regardless of which side of the issue they land.
That being said, is it really necessary for the SBC to pull this issue of Gospel Today, a well-respected magazine with a 20 year history? Can the SBC not even allow their members to read about the reality of alternate viewpoints without fearing that they’ll be whisked away by these “liberal” notions?
This is exactly the kind of stuff that lead to me leaving the SBC. As much respect as I have for the work and the mission that God has allowed the SBC to accomplish and to participate in, their ever-narrowing worldview and protectionist mindset will eventually be their undoing if they don’t right this ship.
Ever since the ludicrous “conservative takeover” of the SBC that began in earnest in the late 1970s (see this article), the convention has become more and more strict about what it considers to be “orthodox.” I became quite disillusioned with them after the release of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, an update to a document that had stood unchanged since 1963. In the revised edition the SBC added statements that would disqualify open theists from participation in the convention, disqualify churches from autonomously calling female pastors to serve, and set down exact guidelines for how women were to submit to the authority of their husbands. Soon after its seminaries began forcing faculty and staff to be in complete agreement with this new creed before allowing them to teach.
Then in November of 2005 trustees of the International Mission Board, the missions arm of the SBC, voted to bar future missionaries from using a "private prayer language," or speaking in tongues in private. Previously, missionaries were discouraged from speaking in tongues publicly, but their private prayers were not monitored.
Now the same convention that decided it had the right to monitor the private prayers of its missionaries is removing Gospel Today from its shelves for reporting that there are actually women pastors in the world today.
“They basically treated it like pornography and put it behind the counter," said Teresa Hairston, the author of the evil article. "Unless a person goes into the store and asks for it, they won't see it displayed."
SBC: I sincerely have a lot of love for you guys. In many ways you raised me, nurtured my faith, and showed me the way of Jesus. But you’re shooting yourselves in the foot over and over, and it’s painful to watch. Stop trying to control the private thoughts and prayers of your members; it’s very “Chinese government” of you, and if you’ll notice, China’s not getting a lot of positive press lately. You’re stifling thought, development of theology, and discussion of important 21st century issues. You’re coming off as drastically out-of-touch and controlling to a new generation of Postmoderns who are desperate to see genuine authenticity over bludgeoning coercion.
In closing, I’d like to say how odd I find it that so many of the people who don’t believe a woman should speak from behind a pulpit have no problem with a woman leading an entire nation.
Ray Boltz Loves Jesus
As I grew older and I began to follow after the way of Jesus, the messages of Boltz’s songs began to come alive to me, too. Thank You, a song depicting a dream in which a Sunday School teacher sees the impact he made on earth after he arrives in heaven, became an inspiration. I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb became a declaration of a desire to follow after Christ regardless of what hardships and persecutions may result from it.
Boltz had a lot working against him in his quest to leave an impression on my generation: his mullet/mustache combo, his musical style, and even the quality of his voice would never be considered stylish, chic, or sophisticated by most postmoderns. But what probably left an impression on many of us, regardless of whether or not we cared for his musical style (I didn’t), was his authenticity and his ability to explain Christianity through stories (an art form that desperately needs to be reclaimed by the Christian church).
Last week in an interview with The Washington Blade, Boltz announced that he is a practicing homosexual. He has ended his marriage of over 30 years.
Jesus Is My Friend
I apologize in advance for what you’re about to see:
It’s almost as mind-numbingly bad as this song.
No Audio in Quicktime and OS X For Your AVI Files?
As someone who is constantly editing video and trying to find interesting clips for use in sermons, I wanted to give a little advice for those having trouble hearing audio in their AVI files in Quicktime. Sure, you could use VLC Player to play these files, but if you need to edit your videos files like I do, VLC just isn’t a good solution.
For years we’ve had to piece together different audio and video codecs from all over the web and insert them into the Quicktime home folder manually, making it very tedious and time consuming to make sure you have the codecs to play every given video you may need to play or edit.
That ends today. A fine open source community has recently released Perian, the “swiss-army knife for Quicktime.” It’s a single download and install that should beef up your Quicktime player enough for it to handle pretty much any format you throw at it: .mov, .avi, Divx, Flash, etc., etc.
It’s free and it works perfectly; I’ve been banging my head against the wall for a while trying to hear audio for a clip I’m showing in church tomorrow. I downloaded Perian and now the audio is crystal clear. Big sigh of relief!
You can download Perian at their website.
Pastoring Without a Handbook
I’ve been a senior pastor for 2 1/2 months now. There isn’t really a handbook for how to handle every situation you come across and I think it’s okay to be honest about something: there isn’t a great solution for every problem you’ll face. So sometimes you just prayerfully do the best you can.
Get comfortable with the fact that you won’t always know the perfect course of action to pursue in any given situation. Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s difficult to know all the repercussions of any single decision that you’ll be forced to make.
I say all this (vaguely, I realize) to encourage other pastors and church leaders. You will face some difficult decisions over time and you will face opposition from people both in your church and outside of it. The best advice I can give you is simply this: follow after Jesus Christ with all of your heart in everything you do and every decision you make. Filter everything through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you do that, if you honestly try to follow hard after Him in everything, then you can irreproachably sit back and let the chips fall where they may.
As a church leader, your integrity is everything. Don’t compromise it.
Even when it’s hard; even when it may cost you your job.
For the last 2 1/2 months I have faced challenges that are completely unique to my church. Without going into details, I’ll just say that there was a lot to do when I started here and a lot of very difficult decisions to make. I feel that we’re through the worst of it, however, and we’re now in a place where we can simply move forward and minister to our community and our world without the distractions of the past. This is more than a “positive” step forward; this is the beginning of a new era and a fresh start for our church.
In the last month we’ve gained a new name, a new facility, and a new website. We’ve left the problems of the past exactly where they belong: in the past. We’ve started fresh and I’m so excited to see what God has for us moving forward. It’s truly an exciting time.
Last week I spent countless hours (countless because I was half asleep for many of them) working on our new website, and I’m happy to announce that it’s now up and running. We’ll be adding new content to it over the coming weeks and months, but it’s now officially open to the public. Check out the new website if you’d like, and let me know what you think about it. You can view it at this link.
I’ll try and post a little more later this week about the series we’ve been doing and how it’s affecting our thought process going forward. In the meantime, I hope everyone had a happy Labor Day.
Be blessed and be a blessing.
Eat a Blizzard
I have a very personal interest in this as my younger brother was diagnosed with cancer before his second birthday and wasn’t supposed to live to see his third. Thanks to the grace of God and the work of the Children’s Miracle Network my brother Caleb is alive to this day and serving at a church in Durango, Colorado as worship pastor.
I realize that many of my readers are broke and can rarely donate extra money to good causes like this. That’s fine. But it’s hot outside and surely you can afford to purchase a Blizzard to cool off and give a little money to a very worthy cause.
Besides, Strawberry Cheesecake Blizzards are good for you. They have fruit in them!
Book Review: The Shack
For those who don’t want to read on, here’s my one line review: I can’t recommend The Shack highly enough. Buy it and read it.
It basically felt like I was reading my theology in narrative form (which is rare). I don’t want to give too much away, but The Shack centers on a man named Mackenzie who’s daughter is abducted and murdered by a serial pedophile killer. Young pulls zero punches in his portrayal of raw evil and the paralyzing affects it has on us. Mackenzie is an empty shell of the man he once was and what he calls the Great Sadness has almost completely enveloped him as a human being. It is in the depths of this deep pain that Mackenzie is invited by God to spend time together in the very shack where his daughter was murdered.
The vast majority of the novel covers the three days that Mackenzie is engaged in healing conversation with the Triune God: the Father (who appears as a large African American woman with a hearty laugh and a motherly sense about her), the Son (appearing as a 30-something middle eastern man), and the Holy Spirit (appearing as an Asian woman with a hilarious sense of humor).
The portrayal of the triune God in The Shack is both beautiful and scripturally faithful. As Mackenzie sits around the dinner table with the three persons of God, he is astounded at the love they have for one another and the peaceful and respectful conversation that is common. The love that is contained within God is put on full display in The Shack, at least insofar as a human author can portray an all-loving and all-powerful God.
As many of you know, rectifying God’s goodness with the evil in this world is an extreme passion of mine. I worked for years to understand a providential model of God that was both biblically faithful and philosophically satisfying. While Young doesn’t share every facet of my own beliefs, we are very close on most of our theodicy. For instance, here is an excerpt from a dialogue between God the Father and Mackenzie on page 185:
It is excerpts like this that lead me to give this book my highest possible recommendation. If you struggle with finding God in the middle of your pain, pick it up. If you don’t struggle with that, but you enjoy a fantastic novel that will inspire, pick it up. The Shack is phenomenal.Mack, just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.
Finally, I want to make a brief note. I’m a self-admitted softy, but I teared up many, many times while reading this book. It might be best to read in the privacy of your home and not in a public place. Unless, that is, you want people pointing and laughing at you. Of course, some of us don’t mind that.
Top 5 Embarrassing Songs I Work Out To
I was running a few days ago. A good friend and I have decided to run a marathon in January and the time has come for training to begin in earnest. As I was running a song began playing that I thoroughly enjoy running to, but that I’d be flat out embarrassed for anyone to know was on my iPod. I realized I had several songs like that on my iPod Running playlist.
So I’m now doing the only logical thing: posting five of them on the internet for the entire world to see (because they all read my blog).
In no particular order, here are the songs that I am embarrassed to run with but just can’t bring myself to remove from my iPod:
1. Crazy for This Girl, by Evan & Jaron
2. Don’t Cha, by The Pussycat Dolls
3. With You, by Jessica Simpson
4. Why Not, by Hilary Duff
5. Stars Are Blind, by Paris Hilton
I have to admit that it was difficult to come clean of the Paris Hilton song. Now I know what it must feel like to confess to murder.
Exhausted and Encouraged
After preaching at my church Sunday evening, Emily and I rushed home to pack up our clothes, drove to Kansas City, and jumped on an airplane to Panama City Beach, Florida. This may sound like the beginning of a vacation; it’s not.
We didn’t get to sleep at all before our 6:00 a.m. flight and then we didn’t arrive in PCB until 11:00. We drove straight from the airport to a youth camp where, since Monday, I have preached three different messages every day.
I’ve preached over 10 messages this week and I’m exhausted. But you know what else? I’m excited. The students that we’ve worked with this week have been fantastic and they give me a lot of hope.
Last week while I was preparing for all the messages I had to deliver this week, I began doing some in-depth research on the status of the Christian church in the United States. Between 3,500 and 4,000 churches are closing down every year. Eighty percent of all church are either in decline or have plateaued and are showing no signs of growth. Of the 20% that are growing, only 1 in 20 are growing because of conversions. The others are growing because people are leaving other churches to join their church.
The church has simply not done a good job of being relevant in today’s world. We just haven’t. While some of us are currently trying to rethink the way we do ministry in order to better reach a progressivly more postmodern mindset, many churches have decided to be content with doing the same thing and focusing more on their programming than the people.
What we desperately need to recapture is the biblical concept that Christianity is a way of life. Not something we do once a week on Sundays, not a list of rules that we live by, not even a “life style.”
The way of Jesus is life.
The reason I’ve been encouraged this week is because I saw the light come on in the heads of some students here. After pushing them all week to see their faith as a way of life and not just supplemental to it, I saw the fire in a few of their eyes.
They get it.
Statistically, many churched high school students will stop going once they begin college. Typically this is because they have never taken ownership of their faith and the waltzed through junior high and high school only attending their youth group because their parents made them or they had friends who attended.
But if these students can take hold of their faith now, if they can understand right here and right now that the Way of Jesus is their way of life...then the sky is the limit on how God can use them now and once they leave for college.
I’m exhausted...but I’m excited. It’s 4:00 a.m. and I can hear the waves lapping the shore. The very God who set their boundries in place is the one who has been working in the lives of these students this week. To Him be the glory, the honor, and the praise.
Church Marketing Stinks
There. I said it.
I've been listening to some local Christian radio stations over the last several days because I've come to an unsettling conclusion: if we want people to know that our church is around, we're going to have to do a little (I can't stress the word "little" enough) advertising. But there are a couple of major problems:
1. We're not really interested in "Christian radio" people. God bless them if they want to come, but we're pursuing the unchurched.
2. We simply cannot fall into the same kind of "bigger is better" church advertising campaigns that plague this city.
I want to speak a little on that second point. If you listen to the radio stations that local churches advertise on, you'll hear a pretty amazing tug-of-war: "Our children's ministry is the best," "Our youth group has the best facility," "Our music is the most contemporary," "Our preaching is the most encouraging," etc., etc.
Churches have taken marketing principles from the corporate world and just plugged them into the religious community. And you know what? In the past, it's worked.
But there's a problem...
If you build your church on consumerism, you'll have a building full of consumers. Whenever the next great church with the next great preacher or music leader or fireworks extravaganza comes along, your people will bolt. And even if that never happens, even if you're always the best show in town, it's difficult to turn consumers into Kingdom of God minded people because you encouraged them to have a "me-first" mindset from the very beginning.
So what's our big ad campaign? We're going to make a few posters; print out a few business cards. But our people are going to be the driving force behind everything that we do. If they don't love on their friends and family then our church won't grow. If they don't invite the people closest to them to plug into our small Christ community then our Christ community will remain small.
I'm excited to be part of this church and I see the fire in the eyes of many of our members. Because of that, I'm longing to see how God's going to use us.
In closing, here's a rough draft of a flier idea we've had. Kinda goes against every church in our city, but we like it. Let me know what you think:
What's in a Name?
I was wrong.
It's a nightmare. : )
For the last several weeks we've been asking for suggestions, ideas, and prayer. We've had a pretty good response and quite a few solid suggestions. But we're also facing some formidable challenges.
One thing I've noticed is that most of the churches around Springfield sound more like country clubs than communities on a mission: Timbercreek (our old name), James River, Scenic Drive Church (no, I'm not making that up), Ridgecrest Baptist, Glendale, Parkview, etc., etc. It's not that these are inherently bad names; they just seem more like places you'd go to play 18 holes than commune with Christ and live life with fellow believers.
And this has been part of our challenge: to come up with a name that actually symbolizes what we feel called to do. It's harder than you'd think.
We've thought of LOTS of great names. The problem is that it's very difficult to find an internet domain name for a church that's not already taken. Or to think of a church name that isn't already prominently known.1
Journey Church? Taken. The Way? Gone. The Gathering Place? Don't even think about it; that domain's been taken for years: .com, .net, .org...you name it, it's not there. The sad thing is that most of these sites don't even belong to churches; they've been bought up by squatters who are holding them ransom and trying to get churches like us to pay an exorbitant amount of money to buy them back.
And we could always add a hyphen or the word "Springfield" to the URL, but that seems confusing and overly long (ex: www.JourneySpringfield.com).
So we're still thinking, but we need to get this nailed down pretty soon. If you feel like you have any great ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments section.
1 We love names like Mars Hill, Mosaic, Imago Dei, etc. We're working toward that kind of mission-minded name, but every time we think we've landed on one we find that it's already being prominently used.
A New Day
In January of this year I began putting out resumes for a full-time senior pastor position. I'd been co-leading a church plant in Chicago for the past year and a half and, through a variety of different events, felt that God was leading me to a full time pastorate.
After spending countless hours scouring through thousands of churches with openings, Emily and I decided to send resumes out to a small handful that we felt would possibly be a good fit for us. I wasn't just looking for "a job," but I wanted to go wherever it was that God would lead me on this journey and find a church that I would fit in well with.
To make a very long story as short as possible, after lots of interviews, visits, and prayer, my wife and I finally landed at a new church. It was a grueling process, but now that we've come out on the other side we are extremely excited about where God has brought us.
We are in Springfield, Missouri. Our church is in a transition period right now: we're about to come up with a new name, location, meeting time, and website. In a lot of ways, we're planting a church with some resources and a committed body of believers already in place. The people in our church are wonderful brothers and sisters in Christ who have a heart for living out the Kingdom of God: right here, right now. Though I'm not a huge fan of labels because of the preconceived ideas that often accompany them, we would be considered an emerging church. Emily and I couldn't be more excited to join them on this journey and see what God has in store for us all.
I'll be continuing to use this blog for personal updates and occasional theological thoughts. But I'll also begin to share my thoughts on pastoring and some of the difficulties and challenges in being a Kingdom community. I want this blog to be a resource and a learning tool for young ministers and a progress report on the growth of a very young emerging church that's finding it's identity and working to become an earthly representation of our heavenly Father.
This week marks the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. Emily and I are excited to have you all joining us on the journey.
Update From the Road
We've been updating it regularly with stories from the road and I'd love to see your comments on it.
Have a great week and I'll catch you all soon!
Cheers from New York City,
Josh
The Launching Pad
Well, according to our Road Trip USA book, the first side stop we would want to make would be The Launching Pad, a nifty little hole-in-the-wall diner with a gigantic Space Man Wrestler Rocket Holder guy outside.
Inside the young woman who took our order was nice, but not very helpful in guiding us toward a dining decision:
"What's good?
"Everything!"
"Okay...well, what gets ordered the most?"
"Everything."
"Okay, we'll have that."
*blank stare...blinking...
"Okay, I'll take a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate shake."
To be fair, the food was pretty good...
Eddie Izzard
The guy is an absolute genius: a rock star among his fellow comics. The show started with bright lights and loud music; Eddie walked on stage and bowed to either side of the audience amidst what had to be some of the loudest applause I'd ever heard.
From there he said he wanted to talk "about everything that has ever happened." And he did.
He talked about hamsters, badgers, and giraffes. He mimed dinosaurs going to church, Noah's wife trying to keep the ark clean, and Latin-speaking people trying to conjugate their language quickly enough to warn each other of danger. He made mince meat of a few hecklers, he showed us how the stone age began, and he explained why there are very few movies about farmers ("farming is so dull...'Earl, you killed by cabbage! I'm gonna poison your asparagus'").
I've been a fan for a long time, and getting to see him in person was an awesome treat and one more thing I can check off my "bucket list."
Patrick the Crazy Guy
As we boarded the Metra train to ride into Chicago and see Eddie Izzard perform, what appeared to be a kindly middle-aged man looked at my wife and said...
"HELLO, LOVE!!!"
To which my wife politely responded, "...well, hello."
And then he sang for us. A whole song. Loudly.
His voice must have been really bad when he first started practicing.
The Lumpy Places
So there's this book, and it has several wonderful conversations contained within its pages. One conversation goes something like this:
The last couple of months have been absolutely dizzying. After an enormous amount of prayer, counsel, and discussion, Emily and I have decided to accept an offer to come as lead pastor of a church that is not in the Chicago area. We're extremely excited about the opportunity and I'll have a lot more details to share with all of you in the coming days.“Where will you go?”
“America.”
“We’re in America right now, Don.”
“Yeah, I know. But there are other parts to America. I’d like to see the other parts. I was looking at a map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were other places that were more green with big lumpy mountains. I'd like to go to those places.”
“Do you think God is out there somewhere? Out there in the lumpy places?”
“I think God is everywhere.”
“Then why do you have to leave?”
“Because I can’t be here anymore. I don’t feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete…..Something got crossed in the wires……Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?”
The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away.
In the meantime, I'm headed to the "lumpy places." Me, my beautiful wife, and my friend Josh Carnes have decided to take an amazing road trip to finish off this chapter of our lives and help us prepare for the next. We'll be driving through Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., Ocean City, Atlantic City, Trenton, New York, Boston, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, and a host of other places. We'll be seeing baseball bat factories, Hershey chocolate plants, Dinosaur World, the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls, and a host of other stuff.
And we're leaving tomorrow. But wait, there's more...
We'll be blogging, photographing, podcasting, and filming the lumpy places. You can check out our trip website at www.LumpyPlaces.com.
I may be posting updates on both sites, and thanks to some cellular wizardry we'll be able to publish new entries from the comfort of the official Lumpy Places Jeep (which, sadly, just received $1,200 worth of repairs...sigh). Check in often for tales of amazement and wonder (as well as embarrassing snapshots and humiliating videos).
How I Fell In Love With the Church Again, Part 1
But when I got older, she turned on me. Her warm smile disappeared and the light in her eyes grew dim as she pushed me away time and time again. She stabbed me in the back, she rejected me for petty differences, and she withheld the love and the comfort that she had lavished on me as a child.
Lady Lou, Lady Lou, all I want to do
Is Just sit and be held by you
Lady Lou, Lady Lou, no matter what I do
You turn away, you walk away from me
So I try and I fail, 'cause I don't know, I can't tell
What you want, my dear Lady Lou
But I'm starting to know, 'cause it's starting to show
You're not the dear I thought you to be
Lady Lou was the most hurtful person in my life because it's brutally painful to have someone you love turn against you.
Lady Lou was my metaphor for the church.
Through my employment on three different church staffs I saw how ugly the church can be. I witnessed the political maneuvering and the backbiting. I observed people who were more willing to shout charges of heresy than to sit down with their perceived enemies to discuss their differences. I saw pastors turn on staff, congregants turn on one another, and cliques fighting other cliques over the most ridiculously shallow things you can imagine.
I saw others targeted and I was targeted myself. And throughout all of this, I began to grow more calloused toward the church. The church that I revered, loved, and had committed to serve for the rest of my life seemed as if it were trying to push me away. "Unwanted." That's how I felt. There are deep scars from all of this conflict.
For the last two years I have struggled through all of these issues. At times I've thought about it too much, to the point that it was unhealthy. And then God began to pierce through my calloused heart and heal me from the inside out.
I'll write more about that journey in Part 2.
What Did Christ's Death Accomplish? Conclusion
In my view, the incarnation simply cannot be divorced from the atonement in any way, whether in truth or in theory. The incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ must be taken together as the holistic way in which God defeated sin, death and the devil and freed us from the shackles we had willingly placed on ourselves. Christus Victor, as I have presented it here, is the only model of atonement that takes such a balanced and holistic approach to the relationship of the atonement and the incarnation. And, when taken seriously, it goes the farthest in detailing the Christ-like example that is best displayed when we, like him, choose to come against the demonic strongholds in this world with radical Kingdom of God love.
Far from a pure cerebral working-out of the work of Christ, Christus Victor invites us to join in the work that Jesus began on the cross. When we come against social injustice, evil, disease and poverty, we come against the very things that Christ battled. When we put our God-given love on display for the world to see, both receiving and reflecting the love that He has poured out on us, we are doing the very work of Jesus Christ.
In John 14 Jesus said, "Very truly I tell you, all who have faith in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son."
"Greater things." Greater things than Christ did, we will do. How is that possible? Because through His death and resurrection He has defeated the powers and the principalities. Through His death He has made it possible for "the love you have for me [to] be in them and that I myself may be in them" (John 17). Through His death He has gathered a people for Himself that numbers in the millions. He is leading them to push forward and to come under other people in love and in self-sacrifice.
"Greater things." It's not Jesus' hope for the church: it's His prophecy. And though we often mess up and we don't always look like we're supposed to, like radical Kingdom of God citizens, God is using us to change His world and show others the path to Jesus Christ.
We are joining the work He started over 2,000 years ago in order that He may use us to accomplish "Greater things."
Full bibliography for the entire Six-Part series may be downloaded here in PDF format.
New Site Stuff and a Prayer Request
We've also added a "Tag Cloud" to the bottom of the sidebar, so clicking on any of the tags down there will take you to a page that contains all the entries that have been marked with that particular tag. I think this is going to be a great feature going forward.
Finally, there's a "What I'm Doing" section on the side that's updated via Twitter. I can't imagine that any of you are so hard up for something to do that you'll be checking in on me at all times, but my friend tells me it's all the rage. Gotta keep up with the kiddos, ya know. On the other hand, it's pretty cool because I can update it easily from my iPhone whenever the fancy strikes me.
I'm out of town all weekend while I preach at a church in Missouri, but I'll be back Monday. If you're reading this before the weekend, please be in prayer for Emily and me. We've got a lot of big decisions coming up and we're seeking God's direction on it. I'll write a lot more specifics on that in the days to come, but right now we're trying to keep a bit of a lid on it.
Enjoy the weekend! Eat, drink, love, and enjoy the beauties of God's magnificent creation!
Stephen Colbert vs. Rain
Colbert was miffed because Rain beat him out of the top spot in Time Magazine's online poll of the "100 Most Influential People." After weeks of taunting Rain, the two battled it out in what can only be called an epic struggle.
Self-confession: I used to be a Late Show With David Letterman junkie, but Colbert has won my late-night heart this year. The guy is sheer comic genius!
Some Days I'm Embarrassed to Be a Pastor
That being said, there are days when other pastors kindly make me want to tell people I'm a plumber when asked my vocation. Apparently Roger Byrd of Jonesville, South Carolina thought this sign would be a nice, non-racial, non-political way of reminding people "what possibly could happen if we were to get someone in there that does not believe in Jesus Christ."
When a local news organization asked Byrd if he believes that Barack Obama is Muslim, Byrd replied, "I don't know. See it asks a question: Are they brothers? In other words, is he Muslim ? I don't know. He says he's not. I hope he's not. But I don't know. And it's just something to try to stir people's minds."
Good think that Byrd says the message, "wasn't meant to be racial or political."
You know, except that's all it was.
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