Today I learned that someone is considering leaving the church. It's OK because last week someone decided to join the church, so at least the ying-jang karma is balanced. [I'm kidding]But, it always hurts. A sense of failure always accompanies such choices, and I usually lose part of the day thinking about what I have done wrong. As such it is good, because it keeps me close to Christ in looking for the error of my ways, and it keeps me close to him when i need emotional support in the midst of my fears. Taking-the hits is always a part of being a pastor no matter what size the church. And most hits are imagined or unintended as such anyways.

But leaving a church is a hard thing. For everybody. For the friends close to them it gives them two questions. 1 is a great question, the other is not so great.

The great question is to look hard and ask "Is this the sort of Church that Jesus wants. Is this church on page with God. And finally is this the church that God wants me at no matter if I like it or not...is this the church where he wants me to serve others with my gifts at this time...or...is God launching me out to give my gifts and experiences to another body of believers." When we find that God wants to launch us out we should be able to find confirmations from accountability groups, small groups, and the church elders. And when this happens, it is bittersweet but it is missional and closure is possible for everyone. Paul was himself launched out, and this is normal and healthy...it is a good indication of church maturity.

The bad question is to look around and say "do I like this, am i offended, is this meeting my needs, do i enjoy this." The danger with this perspective has a lot of problems in it.

1. The church for a believer is a place to serve more than enjoy. When taking supplants the desire to serve either the believer is simply immature or is headed backwards in terms of maturity.
2. Finding faults and offenses in any church is easy, and when it is dabbled with it takes root as a habit. Judgment is like crack cocaine...you will always need more if it; it will always get mor expensive; and you will always delude yourself that it is ok...even holy in some twisted way.
3. Rationalizing the decisions means looking for more offences [instead of giving grace and forgiveness] and often leads people to gossip to buttress their self argument. This is how church splits happen. Yes, yes it always looks like God is all-over such things.
4. The decision rarely is made with confirmations from other mature believers and spiritual authorities. And it usually has some wound, anger, or offense on the front end of the decision.
5. The decision often lacks a clear direction from Christ, and isn't a launching towards a mission, but treats church as a disposable non-profit club of preference...where the preaching, worship, and programs are judged and evaluated as 'good-enough to stay' or not.
6. The removal of the tithe, relationships and spiritual gifts effects others and yet a sense of responsibility and ownership of that reality is often ignored. Or we figure out a way to rationalise it in a way to satisfy our conscience.
7. and finally it causes others to ask the same question...the same way.

The hallmarks of a great church are always found in the DNA of the membership and their relationship to Christ. Issues of character, loyalty, compassion, grace, commitment, deference, passion, hope, collaboration, etc. A great church has a core that has matured to the place where these values and attributes of Christ form the backbone of personal and public decisions. As a young church, it will take some time for us to get there. And that's ok.

As we grow-up as a church people will come and go. I actually look forward to launching people forward, hard though that will always be. But sometimes others will leave through side-doors and back-doors without deference or dialogue. That's fine unless it is you. You should desire to be more mature than that, more responsible, more communal. The fact that you are reading this may very well mean that someday God will corner you with it. [I know he has with me...more than once. Because believe it or not, some pastors make decisions the exact same way. And I'm just barely mature enough to understand how wrong this is]

This week in 1st Corinthians 3 Paul is talking about this some more. The church could have split into 4 camps...4 preferences...4 divisions. He warns them that this should never happen...that unity in Christ is FAR SUPERIOR to divisions of preference [or judgment]. And one of the reasons the world doesn't take us seriously is the fact that there are so many splits, so many denominations, so many perspectives firing rockets and missiles at each other. And yet Jesus says that the world will see us as true disciples of his if we love one another.

and loving one another is hard, hard work.

and it is my hard work tonight as i pray for them...even as it is my hard work to pray for the ones that have joined with us recently. and i pray for those that will read this, not knowing how it will effect them. I pray for myself...and you...and our church...and the other churches in God's kingdom.

may grace, and long-suffering love cover and saturate all of us as we look to Christ and ask him what to do. And as we listen for the answer may we all be mindful of the answers he has already given us in his word...knowing that he will never say anything fresh that doesn't align with that. And that knowing his word, is to know his will about many things if not everything.

and remember

Jesus isn't calling any of us to speculate, gossip, or judge...he has those quotas filled to overflowing. What he asks of us is to look inside ourselves, our motivations...our character...and to choose to love each other as he did [and does]. That is plenty of work for all of us. For love and self sacrifice are what we are called to walk in and work out[ward] with our lives. Just as He did.

amen.

As I study for each sermon each week I read a lot of translations and go back to the original greek to make sure I fully understand what is going on.

Then sometimes I will do the translation work myself to make sure I really understand it. Then...sometimes...I do a modern [or postmodern] paraphrase to help me GET it.

This is a paraphrase from this week's work on chpater 2 of 1st corinthians:

enjoy

When I was in 2nd life with you, my spiritual Sims family, I did not have an avatar with cool flash-media or a superior graphic interface as I downloaded to you the files about God. For I made a preparatory choice to delete everything while I was with you except Jesus Christ and the story of his being uninstalled. I came to you outdated, recently rebooted and with a shaky and unstable virus massively effecting my CPU stability. My files and my folders were not with nifty PowerPoint’s and eye-candy multi-media, but with a real-player demonstration of the Spirit's satellite uplink, so that your faith might not be upgraded with men’s bootlegged culture-coding, but with God's spiritual supernatural mainframe. We do, however, encode a file of help patches installed in those with a large hardrive and technorati skill, but not the lying spy-ware media files of our era or of the hackers of this age, who are outdated files, out-of-date and broken links. No, we speak of God's zipped files, an operating system that has been hidden but is now being launched and that God designed for our beta-version upgrading before creation itself. None of the cultural software makers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have deleted God. However, as it is written: "No operating system has installed, no hardrive has opened, no media file has been imagined, what God has as a platform for those who merge with him— but God has opened this file to us by his Ghost in our machine. The Spirit’s search mode investigates and knows all things, even the protected files of God. For what IT manager among men knows the Trojan horse and imbedded files of a man except the spyware spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the files of God except the Spirit of God. We have not downloaded the files of the world in fact we are blocking them and uninstalling them; but we are downloading the Spirit who is from God, that we may navigate what God has share-wared us. This is what we copy and paste, not in links downloaded to us by human mainframes or the matrix but in code uplinked by the Spirit, installing spiritual programs in spiritual code. The man without the Spirit deletes the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are spam to him, and he cannot open or unzip them, because they are spiritually uplinked with access codes he doesn’t have. But the spiritual man makes download-now? choices about all things, but he himself has a firewall that rejects man's reviews about soul matters they can’t open and don’t know how to read. "For who has googled the full operating system of God that he may rewrite his programs?" But we have the mind of Christ.

I have now spent 25 years serving, leading, and attending churches. That said, there have been more than a few times as a follower and leader that I wanted to give up on the whole thing.
I read a book once called “how to quit church without giving up on God.” I secretly hoped it was true. But it was just silly and selfish. In all fairness it was then that I read a book called “church, why bother?” by Phillip Yancey. And then I just looked up every verse in the New Testament that had the word church in it. Then I came to some conclusions.

The reason this is important is that about 85% of Americans believe in God, but we are drifting towards 40% being in church. It’s not that people don’t believe in God so much as people don’t believe in church.

Some reasons for church:

1. Jesus imagined and built it. It is his family on earth. He nurtures it, loves it, and died for it. It matters to him a lot. It is not disposable, if you follow him.
2. Church brings us the teaching, love, fellowship, mentors, etc that we need to grow healthy. I meet people all the time that “don’t do church anymore” and the vast majority are slowly falling away from God.
3. The spiritual gifts we have and give to others often make or break the lives around us. Some people are literally starving for love, mercy, and teaching. These gifts are what God uses us to knit us together and teach us to lean on each other.
4. Together we can do things we could never do alone. Acts of social justice; altruism in people’s lives; sending missionaries to other lands only happen in the context of a committed community.
5. No other place on earth will teach us the servanthood, selflessness, deference, humility, and longsuffering that church does. Church is a melting pot of VERY different people who are united by the love of Christ. These vast differences are the very things we need most to learn how to give the unconditional love we have received.
6. Tertullian “The blood of the martyrs are the seeds of the church.” Saints have died for what we take for granted, their legacy calls us to hope in the church. Each generation must rebuild her anew.
7. Most of the New Testament was written to churches NOT individuals. That means something.

sorry,

mostly because of two things. Both are good.

1. The church is getting healthy and there is a lot to do. When I first got here it felt like the church was on the verge of disintegrating. While you might think that would mean there was lots to do, actually there wasn't. People had to get to know me, and I had to start casting vision and push the community to start the process of finding thier identity in Christ. This simply takes time, but it is a limited amount of time. Now a lot of people are getting excited and confidence is rising as they are sensing what the spirit wants to do through them and us. So now I am spending a lot of time bringing things togther so that all the energy is focused and on the same page. It's a good sort of busy.

2. The church is way ahead of schedule in terms of turning around. I thought I would be spending 9-18 months helping them heal...but they / we are amazingly resilient. The leadership core of the church is hungry for vision and I am now probably behind them and am trying to catch up! So I am trying to spend more time in focused prayer about what phase 2 looks like.

So I will be getting back into the swing of the blog...but right now my kids have a snow day, and I have to show the little texans how to sled, poggie, and throw a good snowball. As I look out the window they are playing in the snow...I'd love to blog more...but the snow is calling out to me