Friday

An Egyptian Delivered Us

As the book of Exodus begins, Israel is in captivity. They were the chosen people of God, descendants of Abraham, but they had become enslaved. They lived like slaves, they thought like slaves, their culture was a slave culture, they believed in their slavery.

Moses was the deliverer for the people of God. He knew it; he tried to fulfill it prematurely, and that’s why he was running for his life.

From Exodus 2: 15 When Pharaoh heard of this matter, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh and dwelt in the land of Midian; and he sat down by a well.  16 Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters. And they came and drew water, and they filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. 17 Then the shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock.  18 When they came to Reuel their father, he said, “How is it that you have come so soon today?”  19 And they said, “An Egyptian delivered us from the hand of the shepherds, and he also drew enough water for us and watered the flock.”

Moses was also the deliverer for Reuel’s daughters and his sheep.

It was interesting that Reuel’s daughter’s described Moses to their dad as “an Egyptian.” I’m sure Moses looked like an Egyptian, but he was in fact a Hebrew. You know the story: his parents hid him in the bushes at the edge of the Nile and the Egyptian princess – Pharaoh’s daughter – found him, had Moe’s own mom wet-nurse him (thank God for a quick thinking sister!), and after he was weaned, he was raised as Pharaoh’s grandson.

Some have suggested Mo was in line for the throne; that may be just an interesting theory, but it illustrates the reality: Moses may have been biologically a Hebrew, but culturally, he was an Egyptian. He dressed like an Egyptian, he spoke Egyptian, he knew the Egyptian culture and mannerisms, and when he confronted the bad-guys at the water troughs, he approached it from the point of view of his position for the past several decades: as a member of the Egyptian royal family.

No wonder the ladies thought he was an Egyptian.

The church in America is in captivity. Genetically, at our very core, our essence comes from the realm of heaven, but we’ve lived on earth for so long, that we’ve become earthly, natural, in every other way. We think in natural terms. We live among the natural world. Our culture and mannerisms are of this world. We believe in the world we live among.

If the church were actually free, we’d reflect the culture and values of our birth-culture, Heaven. We’d see the events and people of the natural world through the values and resources of heaven. Like it happened around Jesus, and later around some of the apostles, people would find themselves healed – whether in body or in soul – when we were around. We’d measure our resources by the balance in Heaven’s account, not in the bank’s account. Our lives would be characterized more by joy, peace, faith, hope, love, and less by business meetings, church services, project deadlines, job descriptions or stress.

God is raising up deliverers in our day. God has spoken it prophetically, but it doesn’t really require prophecy to see it: there have been only three times that a generation has been wiped out: the massacre that preceded Moses’ birth, the massacre that followed Jesus’ birth, and the massacre of aborted babies today: God is certainly up to something!

Here’s my point: I believe that many of the deliverers that God is raising up in our day will look like “Egyptians.” Egypt has often been used as an illustration of the ways of the world, and many deliverers will look very worldly. They’ll speak in worldly vocabulary and use colorful worldly metaphors. They’ll use worldly mannerisms – not church-cultured mannerisms. They’ll have worldly friends: business leaders, gang leaders, political leaders, artists, educators, barkeepers.

But they’ll be God’s people inside, under all that “worldlikeness.”

The first thing we might see in some of these leaders is that they’re standing up for believers in the secular arena. We’ve already seen some of that: when radical Hindu’s blamed Christians for a popular teacher’s death and started massacring Christians wholesale, there was an outcry, and some of it was from the secular world. The mainstream media didn’t touch the story as far as I can see, but the blogging community did, and many “secular” bloggers spoke out about the injustice.

Does the appearance of a secular person standing up for Christians mean that they’re a deliverer, that they’re even a believer? Certainly not in every case. I don’t believe we’re seeing God’s “Egyptian” delivers quite yet, but I expect that we will in the next several years.

Many men and women who find themselves in the position of defending God’s people against Egyptian slave-masters will shortly find God moving in their lives. They may have a dormant faith, from their childhood or youth, that God suddenly fans into flame. They may be “about to be” Christians, ready for harvest. Or they may be genuine followers of Christ who have been hidden away from the public eye for a long time, possibly even hiding away from the church for many years.

We are coming into a day where God is bringing deliverers out of hiding, men and women who will not look like church-goers, and who in fact, won’t be church-goers, but they will be deliverers sent by God. If we’re not careful, we’ll reject these young leaders because we don’t recognize the clothing, the mannerisms, the style of speech. If we do, we’ll be rejecting something powerful that God is doing among us.

Saturday

My Church is Better Than Your Church

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but we live in a competitive culture. Our kids are taught to compete in school through both their sports and grades. Our business model is fundamentally built on competition. We’re quick to identify with a pro sports franchise and declaim their all the reasons why our team is better than your team.
But our bent for competing is deeper than that. Have you noticed how often someone finds something that helps them. That’s well and good, but then they bend your ear on why their diet is the best, why their favorite restaurant is better than others, why their 12-step program is better than the other 12-step programs.
For example: I’ve watched with interest as two different movements have been growing in the church. On the one hand mega churches are growing in number, size and influence in this country. At the same time, the house church movement is also growing in size and influence. The two movements are almost opposites: one is composed of churches whose membership is counted in the thousands or tens of thousands; the other aims for church populations under two dozen.
Both groups have their proponents and their critics, but I’ve noticed that the most vocal critics of both groups are most often found in the opposite group: the biggest critics of large churches are proponents of house churches; the most vocal critics of house churches are leaders of large and organized churches.
Two observations occur to me:
1) We seem to be obsessed with the concept of “mine is better than yours!” and
2) We feel compelled to tell people we know why we feel this way, to convince them to agree with us.
These motivations are seldom exercised vindictively; the pastor who warns his youth group against the evils of that other denomination is usually sincere; misguided perhaps, but sincere. The elder who speaks out against that popular para-church ministry doesn’t see his words as “speaking evil” of his brothers and sisters in that ministry.
We’re awfully short-sighted. We see that this thing that I have, this group that I’m part of, is good, and we have difficulty imagining that that thing you have, that group that you’re part of, is also good. Heaven forbid that your group might be somehow “better” than my group!
The last I checked, it wasn’t “my church” or “my group.” Somebody pretty big and important said it was His church, and that He would build it. First, He is taking responsibility for both my church and yours, and second, His goal is building the church, not tearing it down.
I wonder what would happen if we took the perspective that God is working in both the house church movement and the mega churches. Would we somehow be betraying God if we acknowledged that both fundamentalist churches and Pentecostal churches were being built and led and loved by the same God that loves me. It’s possible that the One who sent His only son to die so I could live also loves that weird group who teaches strange things that I don’t understand.
One more step and we’re done. Any human being, and any human group, will be limited to human capacities: finite people cannot contain all of an infinite God (though theologically speaking, all of Him is available to each of us). One group has laid hold of one revelation of God and His kingdom, and another group has laid hold of other revelation.
I can limit myself and my experience of God to only that which my own group has figured out, or I can receive from other groups as well. Wouldn’t it be great if Pentecostal churches developed the passion for the Word that fundamental churches have, and liturgical churches developed an eagerness for personal evangelism that some evangelicals have, and combined that with an experience with the power of God that exists in the Healing Rooms movement. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find a group with the intimacy and accountability of a house church, but the resources and the influence of a mega church.
I think God is moving us that direction. I’m sure He’s moving me that direction: toward participation in The Church, not just “my church.” That’s the one He’s building, anyway.

Bad Things from God?

I have run into hundreds of Christians who maintain the view that if something happens in their life, it must be God’s will. They completely misquote Romans 8:28 as some sort of karma verse: if something happens, it must be God’s will for them; if an event occurs in their life, it must be God’s plan for them.

The verse says that God will cause the events in my life to work together for the ultimate goal of good, provided I love God and “are called according to His purpose.” It does not say that every single event is good (He seems to never comment on that), and the promise is completely void for those who don’t love God or aren’t walking in His calling. I’m bothered by the fact that the people most often abusing this verse are not God’s people. “Bad things happened in my life; it must be God’s fault, therefore I won’t love God.”

Grrrr.

This is such a blatant abuse of scripture that I find myself fairly angry when I hear people misrepresenting God’s word this way: exchanging what He said for what they think He should have said. And it bothers me when people assume that just because something happened (typically, something evil), it must have been God’s plan for them. Deliberately misrepresenting God’s heart is one of the best ways I know of to make a mess out of life.

Another thing that makes a mess out of people’s lives is their own poor choices. It seems that God was very serious when He gave us free will, though we often confuse the consequences of our free will – our choices – with God’s will. I know a man who committed several crimes and then blamed God that he was caught and put in jail, and a teenage mother that attributes her toddler to God’s will for her life rather than her night of passion with a classmate.

The funny thing is, God seems to take it all in stride. He accepts the blame for crud that happens. I have two primary examples.

1) The example of the life of Job.

The Book of Job is a long story about how Satan hit Job, but Job didn’t know it, and how Job responded. Job’s “friends” kept saying, “You must have sinned; this must be God!”, while Job, who was a righteous man, kept saying two things: a) to his friends: “No, I haven’t sinned; I’d know it!” and be) to God: “So God, why is this happening?”

Eventually (some 30 chapters later!) God answers Job, and instead of saying, “Relax, Job. The devil did this, not me,” (which would have been true, according to the first few chapters) God takes responsibility Himself for Job’s disasters, only answering Job with, “Look, son, I’m God and you’re not,” though He does restore Job’s fortunes. He also enters the record in the Bible for you and me to learn from. (Job appeared to learn his lesson: “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You.”)

2) Bible verses where He claims responsibility for troubles.

I’ve recently become amazed at the number of places where God takes responsibility for bad stuff happening. Here are a few:

Ezekiel 20:25: Therefore I also gave them up to statutes that were not good, and judgments by which they could not live;
Psalm 81:12: So I gave them over to their own stubborn heart, To walk in their own counsels.
Romans 1:28: …God gave them over to a debased mind,….

In all of these verse, God is taking responsibility. He’s saying, “I did this,” but if you look at the context, each example was where people were making stupid choices and were experiencing consequences of those actions. I’m not saying God did not intervene; I’m saying that whether He intervened or not, the motivating force was the people’s unwise exercise of their free will.

In Ezekiel, for example, a dozen verses before God gave the people judgments “by which they could not live,” He described those same judgments as “if a man does them, he shall live by them” (emphasis added). So it wasn’t God’s judgments that were out of the reach of man; it was not following His judgments that kept them separated from life.
But God took the blame.

In the Psalms illustration, God gave the people over to their own stubborn heart after He laments, “My people would not heed My voice,” and then He immediately cries that this was not His plan. “Oh, that My people would listen to Me, That Israel would walk in My ways!”
And Romans 1 is famous as a downward spiral because “although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were they thankful.”

In every case, people made lousy choices and then bad things happened. I don’t know if they blamed God for the consequences of their actions, but God was certainly willing to take the blame.

So while it irritates me that people blame God for foul things in their lives that come from the devil (in Job’s case) or from their (our) own stupid choices, God doesn’t seem to be too offended by it.

The first step to solving a problem, so the psychologists say, is to acknowledge we have a problem; the second step, apparently, is to identify it. If that’s the case, then I’m more likely to resolve trouble in my life accurately by correctly identifying the source of that trouble, particularly if the trouble comes from my choices. If I’m failing at my job because I’m reading when I should be working, then blaming God may not help solve the problem; putting away the book and doing the work may be a wiser course. Taking responsibility for our actions will be good for our well-being.

Some problems – like Job’s – aren’t from our poor choices, but from a demonic agenda, and these we may never understand.

I think we need to come to the same conclusion that Job did: He’s God and I’m not. There will be bad things that happen, and many of those I’ll never understand. But if I can know God, if I avoid building a wall of blame between Him and me, then whether I understand or not, I can – like Job – walk in the best available blessing.

Wednesday

The Church: a Flexible Body or a Building of Stones?

Leadership by Friendship

The Bible uses metaphors, illustrations, to teach about complex subjects (and sometimes about simple ones). One of the more complex subjects that the New Testament addresses is the question of “What is the church.” It’s also one of the most important.

Our problem with that question is that we deal with the church enough that we have a very rich functional definition of the church: we attend church on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights and we know what will happen there, who will be there: we know what the church does, and we use that for the working definition of what the church is.

Occasionally, we remember that the Church is more than our congregation, and we think of her in terms of “believers everywhere,” but this definition seldom impacts our life, how we relate with God and with other believers.

Let’s look past what we have experienced in church – what church has been to us – and instead, let’s examine what the Bible says about church – what it should be. Interestingly, Jesus said almost nothing about the church; in fact He only used the word in two places, and He never described her.

The real teaching in the NT about the Church is in the letters from the Apostles. Peter declares that we are “…as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house….” The concept is that you and I are each stones, or bricks, and together we’re built into a brick building, a suitable house for God, and presumably for us, the church, as well.

Paul uses a different metaphor for the church, that of a body: “If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand , I am not of the body,’ is it therefore not of the body? … But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. And if they were all one member, where would the body be?” So Paul’s metaphor is that the church is a body, like our human body, and each of us is a part: a hand, a foot, a big toe, an adrenal gland, etc.

So the two predominant metaphors for the church are a house made of living stones (who are people), and a body made of different parts (who are people). The two are similar in that they both teach that we together (not individually) make up the church. At the same time, the two images are substantially different:

A house built of stones is solid, immovable, inflexible, unchanging, while a body is flexible, always moving (only a dead body doesn’t move), growing, changing. The two are nearly opposites. What an amazing paradox: the church is unchanging and yet always changing; solid and immovable and yet always growing and moving.

But the church really is like that: there are some aspects that are solid, immovable, unchanging, and other characteristics that are flexible, growing, always changing. The mixed metaphors actually work! It’s one of those paradoxes that God is so fond of: opposite realities contained in the same truth! Both actually are true, and at the same time.

Here’s where the trouble comes: in the application of the two truths. Think about it: in what ways has the church historically been solid and immovable, and in what ways has she been flexible, growing and changing?

Haven’t we generally been solid and immovable in the structures of the church: the programs are consistent year after year, the church government remains unchanged (though different faces move in and out of the fixed positions), the services and special events are consistent week to week and year to year; the only thing that change are the names of the songs and the faces in the worship team.

The flexible and changing elements of the church have been the relationships, or at least the covenant relationships. We’ve seen a vast “sheep shuffle” in the body of Christ: people moving from church to church over the years, usually leaving a few broken or wounded relationships behind at every transition. The church leadership has (generally) welcomed the sheep who are shuffling in and either vilified those shuffling out or maintained a stern silence, while they hire a new youth pastor or children’s minister every two or three years, reinforcing the value for shuffling sheep.

And in the process of all of those changing relationships, each broken relationship leaves a measure of brokenness in our soul; it teaches us not to rely on friends and church leaders, it slowly poisons a little bit of hope with every accusation and every failed relationship.

Pardon my saying so, but I think we have this completely backwards.

What would happen if we turned this around? What if we decided to make the relationships permanent, unwavering, and allow the programs, the services, even the government, to be flexible? Wouldn’t that be different?

It would be revolutionary. Can you imagine a fellowship who says, “The friendship that we share is more important than the things we do.”? If the vision of the leaders change, then the things we do change. If someone has the vision for a conference, then several members of the team gather around him to support that vision, not because someone has decreed the vision, not because they have to, but because they love their friend and they trust him. If the vision for a core program changes, then we make changes; we probably ask God what He wants to do instead, or how He wants to do this now, but we trust our friends, the leaders.

There are several implications to this change:

· We will have to trust each other to hear God, to be led by the Holy Spirit. This is a radical departure from the traditional concept of the Senior Pastor (or Apostolic Leader) having all or the majority of the vision and everyone else supporting that one vision. We take seriously the concept of Jesus leading and building His church.
· We will have some meetings that are about nothing more than maintaining and enjoying the friendship we share.
· Our friendship will include the leaders of the community, and it will include friendship with God as well.
· Change will have to not be an enemy anymore. (Have you heard the joke: “How many church elders does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Change? Change????!”)
· Our ultimate values will have to change. Success will not be measured in attendance or budget, or even in the number of lives we impact, but by how well we obey God.

For example, traditionally, most churches have made certain strategic decisions about how they approach ministry, and they make certain staff decisions based on those strategic decisions. If the senior leaders have decided on emphasizing evangelism for example, or home group ministry, they’ll probably hire an outreach pastor or a director of home. But they’re generally hirelings, employees of the institution, not members of the family. Their acceptance as “staff members” is dependent on their continuing to fulfill that particular function for which they were originally hired, and to adapt to the changes in vision as it’s handed to them from the Senior Pastor.

But what if we started with the relationships and made that primary? What if the group of senior leaders (the “staff” or the “elders”) is committed first to their friendship together and with God? In that environment, we don’t start the home group ministry until God gives someone on the team a vision for it. There’s no hireling needed, no job description to post for applications: the vision has grown up internally, and we support, equip and resource the vision while it’s effective, and while the vision lasts.

But we’re not surprised if the vision changes after several years; that’s the part that is built on the metaphor of the body: flexible, changing, growing; it’s the relationships are solid, committed, unmovable, cast in stone. So every so often – maybe every year or three – we review the vision: not the decree from on high (from the Senior Pastor, or the Bylaws), but the vision that’s currently growing in the hearts of these friends? “Do you still have the vision for home groups? No? Well, what vision is growing now? And does someone else have that vision? You do? Good, good.”

There are a couple of assumptions in this:

· Jesus was serious when He announced His intent not to abdicate the senior leadership of the church: He really is building His church, it really is His, not the pastor’s, and He really will resource the church to carry out His vision – which may or may not be the same as the people’s vision.
· Our friendship with each other is committed to each others’ growth. It’s characterized by “encouraging one another, and all the more as [we] see the day approaching.” We are challenging each other to growth, provoking increase in our worship, our friendship, our passion for Jesus. There is no passivity in this.
· Because of these two values – the leadership of Christ, and the encouragement of each others’ growth – we can have confidence that if a particular church program is part of God’s plan for bringing life into the church, then He’ll provide for the program. Provision is moved off of our shoulders and onto His.

I’ve become convinced that one reason that this model of church leadership is not real popular is that it expects so much more of church leaders:

· We must be vulnerable with the other leaders in the church.
· We must be confident in our ability to hear God and in the ability of others around us to hear God.
· We must let go of our control over the organization, and trust God’s leadership. And He leads differently than we do.
· We must be able to embrace failure, even celebrate it as a family, if one of us makes a mistake. (Personally, I’m in favor of annual awards for the Best Idea that Didn’t Work and the Most Spectacular Failure.) If someone fails, our relationship is not threatened; we gather around him to restore him to the family.

This whole vision of leadership by friendship is close enough to some of our aspirations as leaders that we miss the revolutionary nature of it; we’re tempted to take one or two principles and add them to our pastor-led or committee-led structure of mostly stone. The biggest may be the temptation to build personal relationships among our staff and leave the “I’m in charge” foundation in place.

So what would happen if we used this kind of a model to lead our congregation? Would that be a fellowship that would make you interested in being part of a church again?

I'm indebted to Graham Cooke for sparking this idea in me.

Saturday

How Do You Relate to Scripture

I was asked recently why I celebrate holidays - like Christmas and Easter - that are neither illustrated nor commanded in Scripture; does that betray an underlying issue of a disregard for the Word? It made me think.


I do observe celebrations not found in Scripture, and that’s an interesting question. I have an odd worldview, and perhaps an odd view of how Scripture relates to my life, or maybe how I relate to it.

I came to the realization some years ago that if I limited my life to only those things found in Scripture, it would be nearly impossible to live today. I couldn’t use a computer, as computers are not found in Scripture, or a car, or even a refrigerator. I would be limiting myself from using anything made with steel, metal, plastic, computer chips, or anything transported by truck or by air. (Certainly this would have huge implications on my chosen career!)

This led me to the realization that for decades, I have looked at the Scriptures as a guide, not as a rulebook: that in NT times, the Scriptures are a tool to introduce me to a living relationship with a living God who has come to earth as man, that my relationship is with Him, not with His book.

I also realized that the Book has a series of prohibited activities and a number of things that it encourages or commands us (depending on where it’s found in the Book) us to do. I could limit myself to doing only those things that it commanded me to do (such as only celebrating holidays that it talks about), or I could limit myself to avoiding only those things (in deed, in attitude, and in principle) that Scripture instructs me to avoid (which would allow me innumerable celebrations of Him). The difference was huge, and the repercussions of that decision would completely affect my life.

It took me quite a while to come to the conclusion that the way I relate to my heavenly Father is far more about “Yes” than about “No”, and therefore, I should probably assume “Yes” unless He said “no” (in one way or another). I’ve chosen – quite consciously – to say “no” to the things the Scriptures say no to, and to say “yes” to most everything else, with Paul’s limitations in mind (“Not everything is profitable,” and “Don’t make others stumble if you can help it.”).

So I celebrate any chance I get. I was worshipping last night with a gathering of saints, quite contrary to the model in the Scriptures (we used an iPod and a stereo for our worship band). I celebrate Christmas, not as a fertility rite, but as a celebration of my Savior who was God born as man, even though His birth had nothing to do with trees or colored lights or reindeer or fat men in red suits or even (most likely) with winter. I’ll take any reason I can to celebrate Him, and if I can use it as an excuse to draw my unbelieving neighbors into that celebration, that’s even better. (They certainly don’t know how to worship Him “in Spirit and in truth.” Yet.)

But you know what: that’s my belief, my way of relating to a God that is so big that there is no conceivable way I could understand all of Him. I know believers who celebrate mass and go to confession, and believers who change water into wine by prayer for communion every week, believers who choose a lifestyle similar to Bible times, believers who attend a drive-in church outside a crystal cathedral, and believers whose primary fellowship is via the internet. Those are all different than my beliefs, or at least my practices, but they’re still my brothers and sisters. I’ve got a real big family, and even if some of us are kind of quirky, they’re my family and I love ‘em.