All sunshine makes a desert...

I was listening to a sermon this morning from sixteen fifteen by Matthew Ellison from September 15, 2008 on "Giving Thanks in Everything". The sermon drives home the point that we are to give thanks in all things as 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 says "[16] Rejoice always, [17] pray without ceasing, [18] give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 ESV).

Lately I have been asking myself what it means to be a follower of Jesus, a true disciple. One of the themes that keeps coming back to me is the idea of suffering and perseverance. Not just suffering, but living in the fullness of God's joy and peace in the midst of suffering. We as Western Christians and the Western Church have had it relatively easy for so long, that we believe that the gospel somehow teaches that we have a right to an easy life and all of our desires. Because our perspective on suffering is somewhat limited we tend to forget that we are blessed so that we can bless others. What would it look like if we as the church lived in a gospel that was filled with grace, peace, joy, and love in the midst of suffering? If we are not seeing suffering in our lives, is it because we have chosen a path that is devoid of risk and that does nothing to challenge the kingdom of Satan or to push back against the darkness with the Light of Christ?

Oswald Chambers spends a lot of time talking to the idea of living waters and the river that flows out from our heart (John 7:37-38). We are not the source and we are not the termination of this river, yet it flows from our heart. We believe more easily that our faith is about a river that flows to us to bring its blessing on us. I think this is why it strikes me so poignantly that we should be giving thanks for our trials and giving thanks for our suffering. Our God is sovereign and we are not. When we admit that God is over all things, good and bad, and that he uses them for His good purposes we can step back from our trials, big or small, and give up our desire to be blessed by God as our primary purpose in our faith walk. When I admit that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about me being blessed, then I can turn my life more fully over to the work of the Holy Spirit to be used to bless the Nations and my neighbors.

There is a recent CNN article on "Almost Christian Youth" that shows that a whole generation sees faith as "moralistic therapeutic deism" and that God wants them to feel good and do good. This view has abandoned the message of the gospel that tells us to take up our crosses and follow Jesus and to die to ourselves each day. When these young people do come upon hardship in their lives, they abandon their faith as if it had promised a life filled with goodness and happiness all of our days and has reneged on those promises. Peter gives a clear call to the hard pressed and persecuted Christian Church in 1 Peter 1 to rejoice in their inheritance of salvation, imperishable and unfading even though they are grieved by various trials. Now the trials of our lives probably don't amount to being turned into a human torch or lion food to entertain the Romans as was the case during the time of Peter's writing, but many of us see trial of other kinds in our lives. Without trial in our lives, we risk the danger of a shallow character and that is where the Arabic Proverb "All sunshine makes a desert" comes in. Think about what you are wishing for in your heart when you say that you want money and possessions and an easy life. What would all sunshine look like in your own life? You may not see the blessing that God has worked in your life through the hardship you have seen, but He works His good will in and for His people.

My friend Brynn is in Uganda helping to make a film for the Village of Hope. She has posted some good thoughts on this subject lately. Pursue Justice is the latest. She is seeing that our comfort leads to risk aversion that ultimately robs us of a life marked by faith. I want to add that by not giving thanks for every circumstance that we face and through every challenge and blessing, we risk living a bland and fruitless life that dishonors the sacrifice of the holy and blameless Lamb of God. We are called to more than comfort and the American dream of the pursuit of happiness. We are called to sacrifice our self-love and self-worship so that God can be glorified and so that we can be made Holy in His strength.

The Roadmap

I have spent the last 6 months working on the "roadmap" for Short Term Mission. What does this mean? I have been putting together information into a document that can be used in development of vision and strategy for churches. Not sure how practical the document is yet. I think that it will take sitting down with a couple of churches and working through the process to try to bring it into the land of reality.

Boxes of Love

For those of you that are active in the world of blogging, you would probably point a loaded shun in my direction. I have had a couple people that I have talked to about ministry stuff mention that they have been on my "blog". Does anyone else feel their face getting red? It has been months since I have posted...
Back in the saddle.
Tonight I joined up with a couple of small groups from Epikos to deliver all of the cake boxes that were collected at Epikos and help to put together some of the boxes up to the point of dropping in the chickens. Here's Life Inner City Milwaukee organizes this food drive each year and supports local churches and organizations to help out families in need. This is the 4th year that Epikos has helped out with this event and we can staff a pretty mean assembly line.
We heard a story from Diane De La Santos (does that mean Diane of the Saints?), the executive director of City on a Hill about how they use the boxes that are delivered to them. 60 of the 500 boxes we helped to put together will go to the families of children who are involved programs at City on a Hill. She told us of a little girl that is part of the Kids Klub program and stays after to take part in a praise dance class. Last week she offered to take the girl home and found that the block that she lived on was blocked off by police because of a shoot out that happened with this girls house right in the center. Because she was involved in the programs, she wasn't in the home when the shooting was taking place in her street. Her family is one of the 60 that will receive food for Thanksgiving.
We get insulated even as we are living in this city from the dirt and grit of the street and when we can, we pretend that all is well in the world. This was an opportunity to serve in a single event by raising up loads of cake, but there is so much more that we are called to. How do we get closer and closer to the pulse of the people in the city? What can we do to understand how to better serve and love our neighbors? I want to encourage you to think beyond doing something good during the holidays because you have been blessed and start to understand that everything that we have is God's and that he wants more from us than church once a week and service once a year. How do we start to win back this city? How do we bring unity to the Church in Milwaukee to make this a Kingdom city? God desires that we be salt and light in the city. He loves the poor, the broken, the sick. Do we?

It's all about image

This post, although important, is more about getting a picture of me onto my blog. Comments still welcome...

Missions or Mission?

What does the word "missions" mean to you?

I suppose I sometimes get an image in my head of a group of the faithful missions minded people in a church planning a dinner to raise money or getting together a care package to send along with someone on a missions trip. There is a board or some kind of display that tells where my church has decided to support people in the world and I can make the effort to join with a trip that is going once a year. Maybe there is even a missions festival or a missions night to share more with people.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with any of these things, but I do think that it is not missions that God calls us to, but his mission. Somehow, we as the church have gotten confused about what God desires from us. He isn't looking for a commitment to a program. He isn't looking for us to put time aside in our lives to go to church and maybe to make a sacrifice and go somewhere on a work project instead of taking a vacation somewhere.
God wants everything from us. That means that my life at work and my life in my neighborhood and my life at school and my life when I am playing are all God's. He doesn't want me for two hours on Sunday, he wants me all week, every day.

Is the "s" really important? Of course the "s" isn't what this is about. The idea or image that we get of missions though, is important. If the word mission gives a clearer picture of our relational God with a plan and a purpose for our lives, we need to understand what God is doing and seek after that mission. Every person that proclaims Christ as the savior and follows him, must follow him and needs to be looking for understanding of the mission laid before us. The mission is laid out for every Christ follower in the Bible and we need to strive after a knowledge of God.

What is God's mission?
What does the Bible say to you about God's mission for you? for the Church?

Sitting Bull

I am sitting in a hotel room in Napoleon, Ohio on a Sunday evening. This is my first ever post in a blog. I came back to my room after dinner tonight and turned the TV on just to kill a little time, avoiding starting to do some work reviewing some training material that I will be working with this week. The movie that popped up when I flipped it on was HBO's movie Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. This is a story about the Sioux and Sitting Bull from the time of Little Bighorn to Wounded Knee. I don't think that the movie was incredibly accurate, but as a story that showed the breaking of the spirit of people and looking to force a way of life on them it spoke to me.

The story itself isn't the subject of my blog, but the idea of entering into a culture that isn't your own and assuming that your way of life is the best or only way of life really applies to what I have been learning about cross-cultural servanthood. I have read through the 1st 3 chapters of Duane Elmer's Cross-Cultural Servanthood and several members of our Epikos International Vision Team recently finished the SEND training at Elmbrook (I know, I am a little link happy).

Anyway, back to the topic on hand - cross-cultural servanthood. I was really struck as I watched how forcing the ways of the white man onto the Sioux tribe took them from being a free and proud people to a place of broken dependance. Now there were obviously issues of need physically and spiritually with the Sioux and other tribes before they began to be forced from their lands long before the time of Sitting Bull. The idea that white men were being somehow noble in bringing their "civility" to the savage indians brings me around to thinking about what it means when I enter another culture. I don't want to get into a long discussion about the history of Native Americans, as I am definitely not an expert. So I will leave further discussion of the history of the tribes to someone else.

What I do know, is that as a follower of Christ and as a student of missions, I need to learn from history and be aware of the present and struggle to understand my role in sharing Christ's love in a way that blesses when I am an outsider in another culture. Understanding a culture is a first step in sharing Christ. I don't share his love by forcing my culturally biased view of the world on anyone. This is not a simple process and the idea of being a servant goes far beyond labeling yourself as one. A servant doesn't define the role of what a servant does to serve. A servant attitude is understood from the served person's point of view.

As Elmer describes it, first you have to have an openness to people different from yourself and be willing to step outside your comfort zone with a desire to initiate and sustain relationships. As people experience that openness, it begins to develop into acceptance, both by you of them and them of you. Acceptance leads to trust as you accept people for who they are and you truely value them as people. As trust grows in a relationship, you begin to see the deeper stories of a person's life. You learn about who they are and what their life is all about. Understanding who they are and learning about their lives then begins to open the door for truely sharing yourself as a servant.

The idea of washing feet is often held out as the example of servanthood by Jesus. Is this relevant to us today though? Looking at the context of washing of feet gives us a reference. Think about walking around the dusty roads and streets all day long. Think about the last time that you spent a day wandering our relatively clean streets in a pair of flip flops and then think of the dirt on your feet. I would guess that your feet don't even compare with the dust and dirt that the disciples were dragging into the upper room. The lowest of the low servants would typically wash the feet of those who were entering into a home. In this case, the task wasn't performed as they entered the house, and Jesus seized the opportunity to serve the disciples in the most humble of tasks. Read more in John 13:5-20.

So what does it mean for us to take on the tasks of serving in our own culture? What does it mean to you to take on tasks of serving in another culture?