Dear God…

“Dear God, Forgive me for thinking too highly of myself.

 

 

 

Dear God, Forgive me for thinking too low of myself.

 

 

Dear God, Forgive me for thinking of myself too much.”

Why Scripture is Important 4 of 4

Friends, if I have to tell you why scripture is the most important part of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, then I feel that we are in deeper trouble in our denomination than we realize.

However, I would like to say this, while scripture is the most important part of reason, tradition, and experience, we are not people of the BOOK but people of God. What do I mean by this?
I recently ran into someone who saw me reading the Bible and he stopped by to have a conversation.
He was glad to see such a “young person reading the Bible thoroughly. It’s good to see teenagers grounded in the word.”
First of all, I told him that I wasn’t a teenager and secondly, that I was a pastor. What I really wanted to say was “Don’t assume or you’ll look like an ass.” I already had a feeling that this conversation was something that I did not want to engage in.
He started to talk about his church and how he was a member for 20 some years. He reads the Bible, then he reads the Bible “to his wife, to further our relationship in Christ and to really take my role as the head of the household.” I was taken a back by this a bit, because for me, it sounded like he was belittling his wife a tad bit…
He then adamantly said “You and I need to read the Bible because that’s the only way that God speaks to us!” I asked him to elaborate on the only part. “We can pray sure. But when we pray, we talk to God. When we want to listen to God, we read the Bible.”
“Well, what about people that feel God is talking to them through other people? Or have an experience of God’s voice through the beauty and power of nature?” I asked.
“No. They don’t need to do all that as long as they read the Bible. Everything God wants them to know is in the Bible.”
Then, I felt a bit daring and asked “Well, that’s great that you read the Bible so much! Believe me, our denomination could use people a bit more Bible literate. But, what do you personally do after you read the Bible?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what is your reactions or actions after you read the Bible?”
“I go to church.”
“Do you engage in any other ministries outside of church and reading your bible?”
“I go to church faithfully every Sunday with my kids. And then when we go to our vacation home up in the lake a couple times out of the year, I make sure we all bring our own bible to have family bible time.”
“That’s amazing. But do you engage in anything to help outside of the church and your family in the name of God?”
“Sure, I do. I like to hand out Bibles to people. Especially homosexuals! If they read the Bible and God cuts to their heart, they’ll stop being homosexual.”
(Oops. I pressed too hard. Someone get me out of here…
“Well, what do you mean by that?”
“It’s a disgusting and immoral sin, homosexuality! We need to really teach them that that’s the wrong way to live and really open them up to the Bible and what the Bible says!”
“Now, with all due respect, I’m going to ask you this question… who cares? Why is it our job to change their ways?”
“Because God says so through the Bible!”
“Then why not let God deal with it?”
“We can’t let that happen! I don’t want my kids growing up in the presence of homosexuals!”
“Well, okay, I get you, but don’t you think that God and the Bible have bigger fish to fry than hetero-izing the homosexuals?”
“Like what?”
“Well, sir, what about poverty and caring for the poor? There maybe a few verses and chapters in the Bible about homosexuality, but there are over 2000 verses in the Bible about the poor and the need for Christians to take care of the poor and those in need. Particularly, the orphans, the widows, and if you look in Deuteronomy 24, God adds the “aliens” or the foreigners. Don’t you think that we as Christians should tackle the issue of homeless and end poverty, at least within our community, just like the early church did in Acts chapter 2 and 4?”
And I kid you not, as soon as I said that he said:
“You know, it was good talking to you. I wish I could stay longer, but I’m in a hurry. Hopefully I’ll run into you again.”
“Hey, thanks for your time. Blessings to you and your family.”

Maybe he really had to go. Or maybe he finally did what I was wanting to do: get out of the conversation.

But, I know a lot of Christians brothers and sisters who dive deep into the word, and bless them for that! But they remain in the book. They read and read and read and read and they believe and believe and believe, but they only stay within their bubble. They rarely engage people outside of their church and faith community. Often times, they’re more afraid of people that are different and non-Christians.
We are people of God not the people of the Bible.
We need to immerse, drench and surround ourselves in the Word and then GO into the world to live out God’s Word faithfully, boldly and loudly and in a way that honors and blesses God’s name (not our name and our agendas.)

This is why the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is important and helps us become the good seed that falls on the good soil. With scripture being the most important, we need to incorporate tradition, reason and experience in our faith journey (and even in our churches) so that we can remain fruitful and faithful so that we bless and honor God (and again, not us or our agendas.)

Why Tradition is Important 3 of 4

I think tradition gets a bad rap.
Tradition makes some people think of stiff and old… and especially when used to describe worship.
But the people who vouch for contemporary worship often forget to realize that they are creating traditions of their own and it will become a traditional worship to them… in a sense. Am I making sense…?

But tradition is important, because of our deep and rich history in the Church and Christian faith. Our liturgy and theology has been deeply influenced by the liturgical traditions and thinking from the early church, whether we are Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant. Tradition informs our identity as Christians and as the Church of Christ.

However, when we get embedded in tradition in such a way, that we are no longer open to new revelations of God, that’s when tradition has gone awry. The temple system in Jerusalem was so ingrained in their way of tradition that they were not open to the ways and words of God in Flesh.

A lot of times, churches don’t know why they do what they do, because they’ve done it for so long. There was a church who, when reciting the Lord’s Prayer, would turn around and look at the back of the church. The new pastor couldn’t figure out why this was so. After a few weeks of digging, she discovered that long ago, a banner with the Lord’s Prayer was hung in the back of the sanctuary, and the congregation would turn around to read the words. But now the Lord’s Prayer banner has been gone for a long time, but people continue to turn around and recite the Lord’s Prayer, and some of them don’t even know why they do so!

Tradition is important because it keeps us connected with the rich and deep history of our story. Tradition is a continuation of our story in God and as God’s children.
But when tradition takes over… when we do things and don’t know why we do them… when we are not open to the new revelations and visions God may give to us, we have abused tradition and we will start experiencing decline in our faith. We just end up with a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy type of faith and belief.

Why Reason is Important 2 of 4

Experiencing an encounter with God may lead us closer to God, but we need to be rational in our thinking and have sensible interpretation of the Bible.
When we take out reasoning from our spiritual journey, well, I feel we end up living in a bubble and separating ourselves from reality. Yes, there’s a sense that we are set apart, but how can we transform our community and the world when we are so set apart, we have nothing to do with society outside of the church’s membership roll?

I believe reason helps us to discern who God is and what God’s will for us is.

But then, there are those who rely on reason and reason alone.
I once had someone try to explain to me the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000. The pastor was telling me that it would be logically impossible to feed 5000 people with just 5 loaves and 2 fish. The real story wasn’t that Jesus took that little amount of food and fed everyone, but that the boy’s generosity in giving the disciples his lunch inspired the people to share their own lunch with those who did not have food.
I remember thinking to myself, then what’s the point of having miracles if we’re going to try to make them logical? Isn’t that the whole point of a miracle? That it goes beyond our way of knowing things?
If that’s the case, why not go the Thomas Jefferson route and rewrite the New Testament without the miracle (or “magic”) stories?

When Wesley had his Aldersgate experience, he did not have a strange warming of his head, but of his heart.
We cannot rely on reason alone because we may just well enough reason ourselves into thinking that God does not exist. We cannot rely on experience alone, because we need to be rational (yet still radical) people of faith.

Jesus said that we are to love God with all our hearts and our minds, not one or the other.

Why Experience is Important 1 of 4

Growing up, I was a huge 49ers fan. It was the first football team I ever saw on TV when I moved to America. Big fan of Jerry Rice, big fan of Cool Joe Montana, and eventually became a huge fan of Steve Young.
I can tell you the starting D of the 94-95 Super Bowl team, in which they destroyed the Chargers (though, I don’t know why things like that take up brain capacity).
But everyone retired. And I realized that I was more about the players than the team. When Jerry Rice left for Oakland and Steve Young retired, I wasn’t much a rabid fan as I was before. Garcia to Owens never really did it for me. (Although, that playoff game against the Giants one year, when they came back from like 30 points down was amazing).

It wasn’t until the year of 2004, Sean Taylor’s rookie season, when my then-girlfriend (now wife) bought me two amazing tickets to the Redskins vs Eagles Sunday night game (she apparently thought I was a big fan of TO. I just bought into the hype of McNabb to Owens). We were on the 45 yd line, 5 rows back. I got to see everything. The training staff, the coaches, the players walking back and forth. It was an amazing experience. And, unfortunately, this experience has led me to become a die-hard fan of the Redskins, and has brought nothing but stress and anxiety. (I mean, look at this season! and last season! we started 6-2 and ended 8-8. And of course, the death of my favorite Skin at the time Sean Taylor, who was amazing when I saw him play live)

But experience is important, because it’s the way we encounter God. Experience leads us into a deeper relationship with God. Without experience, God never becomes my God. Without experience, God will perhaps always remain the God of distance or the God of my friends or the God of my parents.
For many of us, it’s through experience that we begin to know God and it’s experience that pushes on our faith journey.

Experience alone, though, is dangerous.
What happens in the beginning of our faith is that we have this amazing experience and encounter with God. But that encounter slowly begins to fade, as we get older. Sometimes, we are too caught up in trying to recreate that one experience we had with God. We become desperate in wanting to feel the strange warming in our hearts, and get frustrated because we can’t ever seem to feel God anymore.
I knew a kid who stopped going to church because he was tired of “getting saved over and over again.”

Though experience is important in our faith life, we cannot rely on it alone.

Upcoming posts: why reason, tradition and scripture are important.

Buzz…

I attended a conference last year and sat in a workshop for church marketing.
Throughout the entire workshop, there was an uneasy feeling within me. It wasn’t the speaker. He was great. And throughout the conference, I attended his workshops the most.
But, I guess I just never felt comfortable with marketing and the church. Especially the way he was telling us how his church does it, and how their model can benefit our marketing. Maybe it made me feel uneasy because I’m not into business and marketing, or maybe because the whole talk of marketing made us, as a church, more business-like than I ever want to think.
He recommended, suggested, declared that 10% of the budget should be used for marketing and advertising. Billboards, ads, commercials, so forth. He said that we should try to network out to newspapers and reporters so that when some religious issue arises, the journalists knows who to contact for a Christian perspective. He told us to think of creative ways to advertise.
And the whole time I’m thinking to myself… 10% of the budget, just to get the word out? That 10% of the budget could be put to better use… like helping the poor.

There’s a church here in Costa Mesa that I’ve been trying to attend (never can find the time). But I have yet to see any advertisement from them. They don’t have ads, commercials, billboards or any other signage except for the one in front of the building they use (at least I haven’t seen any ads.)
But, I know of them. Because there’s just a buzz, a feeling from the people I run into. I first heard about this church through my wife’s workplace. The church donated bicycles to various places (including my wife’s shelter) for the kids. I’ve met members of the church at Starbucks and other coffee places and struck up conversations with them. They are genuinely excited about their church and their church’s mission and how their church is going about their mission. The person that did my taxes went to that church, and when he found out I was a pastor, we spent half an hour talking about church, and he couldn’t be more excited to share the type of ministries that his church does (he was lay-leader for a motorcycle ministry) and how they have spread the Gospel to people he thought would never respond to the name of Jesus. The members of the church are genuinely excited for their ministries and for Jesus.

10% of the budget? Maybe they do that. But you know, when the church acts right, acts like a church, I believe the Gospel becomes… irresistible. Or interesting to people around us. When we truly live out our mission, there’s something unique and grace just draws people to Christ. And it creates excitement for people who are involved in the mission of Christ and it excites people like me, who hear about people deeply involved in the mission of Jesus. At least that’s what I believe.
I don’t think money and marketing is necessary.
I think personal invitations, word of mouth and actions of faith will always be far more irresistible than something seen on a piece of paper, no matter how big of a size that paper may be.

Dear Mr. Dan Snyder

A lot of people are calling for your blood and blaming you for the state of the Redskins since you began your ownership. I am not one of those people. In fact, I know that you want to win and win badly. Otherwise, you wouldn’t show how deep your pockets are and spend as freely as you would on these players with these great names and reputation.
But something has to change, and I firmly believe it just has to begin with you.
Running your franchise, I feel, isn’t that much different from pastoring a local church.
The biggest problem is that you are the face of the organization. That can be good, but, I don’t think it’s healthy. When the pastor is the face of the church, I feel something is wrong. The pastor, in all that he or she does, should always point to God, and therefore, God should be the face of the church. People may go to church wanting to see the pastor, but they should leave the church seeing God.
You’re out there too much, Mr. Snyder. The only other NFL owners that do that is Jerry Jones and Al Davis. Not good examples to follow by.
It starts with you. You need to look yourself in the mirror and decide what you want this franchise to be. Come up with a statement like “Win with Integrity and Lose with courage.” We shouldn’t be scared of failure. The real fan base will not desert you if this losing will pay off. A church will never move forward in the right direction, if they never fail together.
You need to look at your staff and players, and really evaluate if they fit into the vision you have for the Redskins. If not, you need to let them go. Even if they are your star players or your closest allies. No favoritism. People will take advantage of that and others will resent you for it.
Once you have your team, you need to trust them and empower them. If you constantly meddle in their business, you’ll pull the rug right out underneath from them and they will know that they do not have the freedom to do anything.
If a committee in our church constantly needs to seek approval from the pastor, then that committee is doomed to fail, because the passion will be gone, the rug will be swept under from them. We as pastors can’t wade in every pool that exists in the church. It’s unhealthy. Not only that, people will stop trying, because they know that the pastor will come fix whatever they did wrong. The passion will be gone. I didn’t learn how to do my laundry until I was 23, because my mom kept doing it for me. Even when she insisted that I needed to learn, she always kept doing it for me, so I never bothered to learn, until I was on my own.
And when we pastors are involved way too much, people start saying “The pastor is my shepherd” instead of “The Lord is my shepherd” and the people then will eventually say “I shall not want” him or her.

You need to start setting the example. Get your team behind a vision of winning with integrity and losing with courage. If you need to make changes, make them wisely. Don’t go out there based on people’s past reputation of what they did and have accomplished. Get them on what their gifts and ability are and what they can do.

Attitude reflects leadership, and that leadership begins with you in your organization and us in our local churches.

Things That Happen at Starbucks V

This is confession time. (Do Catholic priest allow non Catholics to confess…?)

Anyway, I forget why I was in a crappy mood, but I was in. And I know it was over nothing big.  It’s funny how we all sweat the small stuff, and let it snow ball into this huge negativity.
Not only that, I was sitting next to an old couple who decided to stop reading their respective books and start arguing about how the husband made her garden and front yard ugly. I never seen elderly people use that kind of language ever. I was horrified, as well as entertained, but mostly, distracted, because they were right next to me. The mouth on the lady… geez.

Anyway, this lady came in very broken and very humble, with a sign asking for any cash at that moment. I guess she couldn’t speak English very well.
But, I didn’t have any cash (I usually don’t carry cash around with me anyhow…) but what I did was embarrassing. I buried my head into my book and never looked up.
No one else in the Starbucks helped her either.
This happened a week ago, and I still can’t completely let go of the guilt. It’s not guilt from not giving her money (I wouldn’t have anyhow, but maybe bought her a cup of coffee) but it’s the fact that I tried to ignore her that bothers me more than anything. And also that everyone else ignored her too. Which means, the one with the bible on his table (me) shouldn’t have been joining the others in their ignoring.

The worst of it all is that this just comes off the heels of me preaching about generosity and how our overflow may be another’s necessity.
I completely dropped the ball on this one.

The Comfort of Distance

It’s easy to care and be concerned for someone from a distance.
It’s seems like that’s what we do best in our Christian lives.
We love God from a distance, because when we know that we allow ourselves to come too close to God, we can’t help but leave changed and altered. Even, maybe with a limp (Gen 32:31).

It’s dangerous to be at a distance (well, I guess I can say that it’s dangerous to be up close with God too.)
But, this distance, I feel produces more of a trendy type of Christianity.
We tackle justice as a trend, as a fad. This one month, we’ll tackle this injustice by sending money over here. Now that we’re done with that, there’s this issue, let’s go send money over there.
Oh, how about this issue? Let’s collect money and send them that.
Please, don’t get me wrong, that’s not bad. We’re helping. We’re really helping this people… but from afar.
There’s not that much transformation that can happen when we try to love at a distance.
It keeps us safe and our hands cleaner than say being in the middle and midst of the injustice of poverty and started to get to know people by name.
Shane Claiborne wrote that it’s  easy to stand up in front of a podium and be a voice for the voiceless. But what we really need is more people to be involved and be the voice with the voiceless.

We are called to transform the community by making disciples. But, how much transformation can there be if we are not involved in the community?
Sending money is great, but it can only do so much…

Let’s get involved and our hands dirty and live dangerously close to God.
As Mother Teresa said, don’t do great things, but small things with great love.

Who John the Baptist Was Not

John Baptist was a man with a clear vision and a clear mission. He knew exactly what his life was calling.
But what I find it more interesting is how clear he was in who he was NOT.
Everyone, (well maybe a lot of people) asked him if was Christ. John could’ve said ‘yes’ and many would’ve believed. But John was clear that all he was a way to make the road to people and Jesus a bit more straight. He knew that he was unworthy to untie the sandals of the one to come. John was clear, very clear of who he was not.

Are we that clear in our ministry as minister?
Sometimes, it happens, we end up becoming the message instead of the mere messenger.
Sometimes, it may happen because we wanted to, or sometimes, we just get lost in the compliments and adoration that people give us. The consequences can be deadly, can’t it? (Acts 12:19b-25).
It’s a tough and fine line that we walk as preachers and leaders. It’s a real temptation to make things about us.
But like, John, we need to be clear in who we are not. We are not the message. Simply the messengers. (I guess this time “don’t kill the messenger” doesn’t really apply to us, does it?)
Bruce Stillman says this: You don’t lead to be loved, you lead to be truthful.

May we remember that this is never about us, or our ministries. May we never get so confused that our hands have done nothing, and it is God’s hands who has created the universe, not ours.
And may our egos never get in the way of the glory of God.