Who’s in Control?

I should probably begin this with a disclaimer, a warning: this is not politically correct, not religiously correct, and may be offensive to a lot of folks. It’s offensive to me. You probably don’t want to read this.

What? You’re still here? Well, you’ve been warned. Proceed at your own risk.

A few months ago, I posted something on the topic of “Trust, Don’t Lean,” a lesson for this season from Proverbs 3. I can’t get away from that topic.

I believe that this is a season for us to trust Father God instead of leaning on our own understanding. I also believe that this is a much subtler issue than I have realized before.

I hear so many of my brothers & sisters praying the way that was so very common for me, until I realized the rebellion that it represented in me.

My favorite way to pray for guidance from God was along the lines of “God, show me what to do, and I’ll do it!” It sounds good, right?

But what was really in my heart had a slightly different interpretation. The way I walked this out was more along the lines of “If you’ll show me what you want, then I’ll make a decision about whether I want to do that.”

The difference is subtle, and it’s huge. It’s every bit as big as the difference between Him leading me and me leading Him, because that’s what it is.

If I insist on knowing his instructions before I obey, or if I want to understand before following, then I’ve changed the authority in my life. If I have reserved the final approval for myself, my own authority, then I am the “lord” of my life, and God has become my counselor.

In less subtle language, it would sound like this: “Look, you give me all the advice you want to; I’ll decide whether I’m ‘feeling led’ to obey it or not.”

That sounds harsh stated bluntly like that, but this is the way many Western believers follow God: “You advise me, but I’m making the decisions!”

A few years back, there was a popular bumper sticker: “God is my co-pilot.” Then another one came out to rebut it, and it captures something of what I’m trying to say: “If God is your co-pilot, change seats!”

If I am asking God to tell me what to do, then I choose to obey what he’s saying, of necessity, this means that I am the king of my own life, and God is reduced to my advisor or assistant.

In the same way, if I need to understand what is happening before I walk forward into it, then I am choosing to be master of my life. If this happens when I’m facing a room full of unfamiliar people, there is great wisdom in this approach. But if I’m waiting to understand what God is up to, then I’m back to making him my Heavenly Concierge again.

I wouldn’t bring this up, except that I see it in so many Western Christians: “When I understand what God is doing, then I’ll trust him with my life.” I see many believers sitting on their hands, “waiting on God” to understand what he’s doing in their lives before moving forward in obedience.

“Is this the season, Lord, where you fulfill all my grandest dreams?” If they feel an answer in the affirmative, they risk hoping in those dreams; otherwise, they don’t go anywhere.

I would argue that if God says, “Step forward!” then it’s time to step out. It’s not time to ask what will be the results of my stepping forward? “Will my sister ‘get saved’ if I step forward, and you know that it would be really good if she did!”

There’s room for this argument: “But how can I obey if I don’t know what I’m going to obey?”

It seems to me that asking the question reveals the disease: the folks who have God in the Number Two seat tend to be the ones who ask that question.

How do we obey without understanding what it is that we need to obey? I keep having to ask, why do I need to understand before obeying? Here are some of the questions that this leads me to:

• What benefit does understanding provide to my ability to obey? I find that my understanding is limited by my capacity to understand, which is – as hard as this is to believe – noticeably less than God’s capacity to understand. He can see the relationship between my obedience and my sister’s salvation whether I can or not.
• When I ask for understanding, have I already chosen to obey and even begun to obey, or is my decision to obey going to come after I understand, if I understand?
• What do I do if God has a different plan for my life than I do? What if “success” in God’s mind is the thing that we call “failure”? Jonah will work as an example here. He wanted to live the comfortable and well-regarded life of a prophet in Israel. God had other plans: “Go to Nineveh!” Later, Jonah reveals his agenda. “You’re doing exactly what I didn’t want; that’s why I went the other way! Go ahead: kill me now!” (Paraphrased from Jonah 4:1-3.)

Here in the western church, we’re big on the concept of God as “Daddy” and our “best friend.” Those concepts are true, but we overlook the less comfortable concept of God as “King of Everything” (the technical term is “sovereign”) who has the inherent right to do any thing he darned well feels like with our lives. We are fortunate indeed that his plans for us are always (as in “100% of the time”) in our best interests, but his commands are no less commanding simply because they’re good for us.

I was whining about martyrs to God one evening long ago. He let me go on for a while, and then when I stopped my pity-party long enough to draw a breath, he interrupted: “Do I not have the right to spend the lives of my servants as I see fit?”

I realized that I had done what I’m writing about here: I had judged his plans by my tiny little brain, and because I couldn’t see the connection between “the blood of the martyrs” and any tangible benefits, I was judging his plans for ruling the world, for leading the Church as inferior to “the way I would do it.”

God the Father is indeed my Daddy and Jesus really is my Best Friend. But more than that, God really is omniscient: he really does know what will come of my obedience. He really is sovereign: he has the right to tell me “Go here” or “Do this” and he may give me an explanation or not as he sees fit. In fact, as my friend, he is very likely to explain things to me.

But for me to demand an explanation before I obey is not obedience. It’s rebellion of the highest order.

“Why Lord” is illegal until after we have declared “Yes Lord!” in both word and deed.

All Things

Let me tell you some stories.

First story: I was talking with a friend recently, and he told me an interesting story.

This friend is a musician. He lives & works in the California desert, but he had no air-conditioning in his office. Someone gave him one that didn’t work. He described to me how he was encouraged (someone had thought about his needs) and frustrated (so close, but it still doesn’t work!).

That’s when the story got interesting. He was thinking about the AC unit and since he’s pretty handy with fixing things, he was trying to get it to work, but without success. As he was grumbling about his lack of success, he heard the Holy Spirit whispering to him. “Try this” he said, and showed him a picture of some accessories for his monitors: these are components for a sound system. Oh, and he just happened to have that part in his pocket.

He applied it as the Holy Spirit suggested and it worked: impossibly and perfectly, and it has been running for several years now.

Together we chuckled: it appears that God is an expert in HVAC repair. That’s somewhat outside of the box that we had had Him in.

Second story: Another friend was out hunting one recent winter with a buddy. In addition to his hunting rifle, he carried a pistol, but this time he had brought a favorite: one that had been a gift from an important friend who had carried it as an officer in a recent war. During the creeping-through-the-undergrowth part of the hunt, the pistol fell unnoticed into the snow and was lost.

His hunting buddy, a good friend of mine, tells this story: frustrated by the loss of our friend’s pistol, he went back to the same hunting grounds, where he prayed. His prayer was well beyond anything he’d prayed before, but “What’s life without a little stretching?” he said.

“God, you know where that pistol is. Would you please show me?” Before he had a chance to entertain second thoughts about his unusual prayer, he felt a nudge: go this way. He spent a couple of hours wandering through the forest this way and that, following the little nudges that he felt, far from any trail or road. It was unusual enough that he had to work hard to quash both the doubts and the excitement that he felt rising.

Then the nudges went away. Stopped altogether.

“Father, would you please show me where the pistol is?” Nothing. Silence. He prayed several more times. Still nothing.

Frustrated and confused, he turned to head back to his truck, but his toe bumped something. He looked down, and there was the pistol. It was a little rusty from spending the winter under the snow, but only a very little as our friend had always kept it well oiled. As you might imagine, he was pretty happy about finding the gun, but even more excited about his adventure with God.

Third story: Corrie TenBoom tells the story of her father’s watch repair business:

There weren’t many repair problems he hadn’t encountered. But occasionally one would come along that baffled even him. And then I would hear him say: “Lord, you turn the wheels of the galaxies. You know what makes the planets spin and You know what makes this watch run….”

The answers to these prayers seemed often to come in the middle of the night: many mornings I would climb onto my stool to find the watch we had left in a hundred despairing pieces fitted together and ticking merrily.

The Hiding Place, p70

The other day, I stumbled across a verse that I’ve read a hundred times:

But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. John 14:26

In this verse, one of many places that He instructs us on the Holy Spirit, Jesus teaches that He’ll do two things: one is that he’ll remind us of what Jesus has said to us.

But the first thing Jesus says here is that the Holy Spirit will teach us all things. All things.

I’ve been thinking about that recently. The Holy Spirit teaches me all things. That sounds too good to be true.

I looked up “all things.” You’d never guess it, but it actually means “all things.” Strong’s concordance describes it as “all, any, every, the whole”; Vine describes it as “every; every kind or variety”; Kittel says it’s “an inclusion of all parts”; Thayer says, “any and every, of every kind”; Balz says it’s “all things/the All (in the broadest sense).” It sounds pretty conclusive to me.

We tend to think of the Holy Spirit teaching us about spiritual things, or at least about things that the Bible commands us to do: raise our children, love our neighbor, help the poor.

But apparently “all things” includes fixing air conditioners, finding lost firearms and repairing broken watches. That would probably extend to astrophysics, gardening, auto mechanics. I could tell you stories about how much He knows about fixing sound systems!

I propose that we let the Holy Spirit teach us, particularly that we let Him teach us about subjects that we don’t discuss in church. We’ll be far wiser people!

The Gathering

Have you heard about the time that the forest animals gathered together? “We must have unity!” they declared, and began their meeting. The Head Bear, the Raccoon Patriarch and the King of the Elk stood before the Gathering and called them to attention.

The Patriarch of the Raccoons spoke first. He told stories of how the Prince of the Entire Forest had walked among their trails generations ago, and how He promised to return someday. “The time is approaching!” declared the raccoon. “We must prepare for His return! We must be united together for His sake!”

“But how can we be united? We’re so different!” cried a skunk in the second row, and the convocation burst into excited squabbling. How indeed could a group this diverse become united? “Learn to eat nuts!” the squirrels chattered. “Build dams!” cried the beavers. “You must eat bugs” chirped the swallows, and the objections of the spiders and bees were missed in the clamor. The otters just wanted to go play in the river, and the owls were lobbying that the meeting should be postponed until midnight.

It was clear that it was easier to call for unity than it was to get all the animals to agree on how to become united. The discussion went on late into the afternoon until one of the younger coyotes, who had had very little for breakfast that morning, accidentally ate the Vice-Chairman of Ways and Means for the Mouse Kingdom. He was instantly ashamed, but the damage was done. The rodent species began to leave, the young coyote was barking his apology, and a grey squirrel, not being fluent in the coyote language, misunderstood his intent and chattered an alarm, and then there was pandemonium.

Dozens of animals were left dead on the meadow that night as the moon came up over the trees. There were a number of bloody trails where wounded creatures escaped to the undergrowth.

Hope may not have died that day, but it was seriously wounded. Species didn’t trust each other after that event, and there was bickering within the groups about whose fault it was. The King of the Elk had young bucks lining up to challenge his right to lead the herd that fall. There was no more mention of the Prince of the Entire Forest coming to walk among them anymore.

I have been privileged to know a number of prophets and apostles over my lifetime. When they have gathered, have been seasons when we have acted like these animals: “Be like me!” one would shout at the others. The intent was sincere: “I’ve discovered this truth! You need to know it too!” For decades, probably for generations, prophets have devoured each other, apostles have snapped at those who don’t see as they see, and teachers have tried to make entire congregations into their image. Those gifted with mercy have been angry with those who don’t grieve over the hurts of others, and intercessors have withdrawn to hide in their caves.

Let me give you an example: Do we rest in God, under the shadow of His wings, or are we to pick up the weapons of our warfare which are not carnal and become the violent ones who take the Kingdom by force?

We know that truth, but we overlook it sometimes. We know that the answer is “Both,” and if someone asks us as clearly as I just have, we can see that. But in the busyness of our daily lives, our focus narrows, and we only remember the lessons that we have learned recently. I think that there must be a rule somewhere: if I’m learning one lesson, then some of the people closest to me are learning the opposite lesson at the same time.

Recently, I was at a gathering of a couple hundred apostles and prophets, and I saw some things beginning that I’ve waited decades to see: I saw gifted leaders recognizing each other’s differences, acknowledging them as strengths, rather than considering them as weaknesses.

The call was still for unity, but – unlike the animals in the meadow, and unlike so many previous gatherings that I’ve seen – there was no value placed on uniformity.

In the past, at least in my experience, the call for unity is usually associated with a cry for some common ground: a common theology, a common lifestyle, a common expression of ministry.

I don’t know if those common ground goals have ever worked to produce unity. If they have, I have not heard about it. I was part of a denomination for several years that codified their theological “distinctives” into their confession of faith: you couldn’t receive their credentials if you didn’t agree with every detail of that doctrine. Our quarterly gatherings were morose and divided; our annual gatherings were full of sharp disagreement and biting criticism. The intention was good, but there was no unity.

I would like to propose a change: instead of building unity around uniformity, rather we build our unity around fathers, around relationships rather than doctrines or practices. (Of course, when I speak of “fathers,” I’m not speaking only of men, just as “the Bride of Christ” is not limited to only women.)

I fellowship with other believers regularly. One of the things we have in common is that we look to some of the same people as “fathers” to our own spiritual lives and in the life of our gathered community. We don’t have common theology, these people I fellowship with; in fact, we have some significant differences of opinion, which I find to be invigorating, challenging, encouraging, because I know that they love me regardless of my doctrinal differences with them.

I’m getting used to people encouraging me to be who God has created me to be, rather than to be like themselves. The prophets among us are learning to walk without the limp. Intercessors are coming out of their caves. Apostles are rising up to lead, though many of them are scratching their heads wondering what their gift is supposed to lead them into, but finally beginning to understand that it’s safe to ask those questions.

In our fellowship, we are not gathered around a common doctrine. We are united in our hunger for “more of God,” and we gather around a person, the one who comfortably fits in the role of “father” among us. Though many of those whom he fathers are older than his parents, we recognize his “fatherness” among us. Odd isn’t it?

As individuals, we gather around one father. As a fellowship, we relate to other fathers that we know and relate with. We are proud of the men and women who are “fathers” among us, but we’re not jealous of other fathers. If you gather around a different apostolic leader, then I’m delighted that you have such a man or woman to lead you!

In the natural – the biological realm – the only time someone will be jealous for another person’s father or mother is when their own has failed them. So it is in spiritual relationships, I’m not jealous for your fathers because my father is a good leader and a good friend among my house. It would be weird for me to long to be parented by people who neither birthed me nor know me as a son.

Unity is a wonderful thing, and I’m looking forward to us (at least in my region) growing more in unity as we gather around fathers rather than doctrines or practices, as we learn to celebrate our differences and focus on our own strengths and responsibilities rather than either conforming ourselves to others’ example, or working to bring them into conformity to our own patterns.

Are you a Cowboy or a Shepherd?

In Photoshop, there’s a filter that you can apply to a photo that converts it from a nice color photograph to a black and white drawing. I’m using that filter in this article. I know I’m unnaturally separating an issue with thousands of gradients into extremes, but I’m trying to make a point.

I have friends from New Zealand. They don’t understand our Westerns: the movies that are built around the Old West mean nothing to them. New Zealand doesn’t have cowboys; they have shepherds. And shepherds have as much in common with cowboys as sheep have with cattle: not much.

Nowadays, neither sheep nor cattle have much say in the matter: they’re both mechanically guided through the process of feeding, caring, milking or shearing: it’s all automated.

Back in the day when human beings were the shepherds or the cowboys, not robotic fences, and milking machines, in that day, you learned a lot from watching how the two related to their animals.

A shepherd, in the pre-automation world, knows his sheep, and his sheep know him. I’ve heard stories about how in early agrarian societies, when the shepherds would come to town, they’d put all the sheep in the same pen. When it came time to leave, the shepherd would come to the pen and call his sheep; they’d recognize his voice and distinguish it from the other shepherds’ voices, and follow the shepherd out of the mass of other shepherds’ sheep to follow him.

More than that, when the shepherd had called his sheep to himself, the shepherd directed his sheep by leading them, not driving them. He would go before them, and they would follow. It might be too much anthropomorphism to say that they followed out of love, but certainly they had enough experience with him to trust that when they’re with the shepherd, they’re safer and better fed than when they’re not with him.

When it comes time to bed down for the night, the sheep all lay down together, and the shepherd lays down among the sheep, in the midst of them. They keep him warm; if he has wounds, the lanolin in the sheep’s wool worked to protect and heal him. And there’s no question of knowing about what happens during the night, or about discerning when an enemy shows up to stalk the sheep: the shepherd is already there among the flock, and his presence there comforts his sheep and deters the enemies. It’s almost like he’s one of the sheep himself.

The cowboy accomplishes similar function – moving a group of animals from one place to another – but by an entirely different method. Think of the what we see in the cattle drive. There are a thousand misconceptions, but ultimately, the cowboy gets behind the cattle and drives them. He may crack the whip, or shout at them, or whatever, but the cowboy is behind the cattle, driving them away from himself, toward the goal. It’s helpful for the cowboy to know something of the ways that cows work, and he should have some understanding of the trail ahead, but ultimately it’s still a process of “Get behind and push.”

When they settle down for the night, the cowboys gather together by the chuck wagon, tell stories by the fire, and generally make their own community, apart from the animals they are caring for. They’re over here by the fire; the cattle are over there. If something happens during the night, they find out about it in the morning. If there’s enough trouble, they’ll get up, go to the herd, deal with the problem or the interloper, then return to their place by the fire.

American corporate business leadership is very often built on the metaphor of the cowboy. The corporate leader sits in his corner office and directs his managers who cause the people to do the work at hand. He studies his spreadsheet and trend reports, and issues orders to the cattle that do the actual work. When night comes, the managers gather in one place, and the blue-collar workers return home to another neighborhood. When was the last time that you saw the company owner having lunch with the junior mechanic? If it ever does happen, it’s either time for the mechanic’s review, or it’s such an uncommon occurrence that everyone talks about it.

There are a thousand allegorical issues we could look at, but ultimately a cowboy drives his herd and a shepherd leads his flock. A cowboy gets behind and pushes the animals; a shepherd is in front calling for his animals to follow him.

God likes shepherds. The agrarian society had both cattle and sheep; God could have drawn His analogy from either. But He didn’t. He portrays Himself as shepherd. (I can hear it now: “The Lord is my cowboy, I shall not be bored.”) He portrays the leaders of His people as shepherds, and calls His apostles to the shepherd model. It was to shepherds that He announced the birth of His Son. In fact, in the scriptures, the concept of shepherds is used more as a metaphor than it is literally. There isn’t even a word for cowboy in the Bible.

As leaders in the church, we are called to be shepherds. Using that metaphor, we are called to go ahead of the sheep, to know the sheep by name and to call them to ourselves, to devote live in their midst – not separated from them over by the campfire and cook trailer. We are called to draw our warmth from the sheep in the night, and discomfit ourselves for their wellbeing.

OK. That’s the theory. Now how are we doing as leaders of the Lord’s flock? Are we shepherds, or are we cowboys?

When I look at the church in America, I see an awful lot of corporate managers. I see senior cowboys who direct the associate cowboys who do the work of organizing the cattle into their stalls. They declare their vision, and drive the cattle to reach that goal. Then they gather in their staff meetings and cluster around the chuck wagon until the next service. When was the last time that you actually saw the senior pastor being warmed and comforted by the young sheep?

I’m becoming aware of a movement among the church in my nation that is resisting the cowboy mentality, and I see several expressions of it. I see a blossoming house-church movement. I am learning of a revolution growing, as if it were sheep rebelling against cowboys.

I am hearing of believers by the hundreds beginning to question “the way we’ve always done it” and looking for new and more meaningful ways to connect themselves to God. It almost looks as if the sheep were beginning to reject the cowboy leadership of God’s church and, if they can’t find a shepherd who knows their name, then they’ll shepherd themselves, thank you very much.

I hear cowboys bemoaning the sheep that leave them to seek a shepherd. Having been a pastor, and being a cowboy by nature, I feel for them, the frustration, the confusion. But I wonder if it’s really a problem?

Maybe the problem is that we have shepherds living as cowboys, that we have lost track of the gospel of the Kingdom. We have men and women who should be shepherds picking up their spurs and saddles and whips, becoming cowboys, and the church is dying. How then shall we speak life into this revolution? How shall we change the model within our sphere of influence?

I propose that we start by living as shepherds ourselves. We lead by example. We give ourselves for the sheep that know our voice. We live among the sheep, in relationship with them, comforting them, protecting them, and training them that good shepherds lead by example.

Prophets Today? Are They Real?

I had an interesting conversation online recently: we have many people in the church today who claim to be “prophets” but who are clearly motivated by greed or by a need for acceptance or respect. How can we trust that there are any real prophets today?

There are evangelists in the church and some of those seem to be motivated by, um... something less than God's heart. Yet we never question whether the office of the evangelist is now vacant. I know some evangelists who are very skilled in their gift, and others who have a legitimate gift, but have no training, no discipline and inferior motives; who have too few skills supporting their gift.

So too the prophet: some few indeed are motivated by personal gain, whether financial, social or emotional. Their failure does not invalidate the reality of others. NT prophets have a different role than OT ones: the Spirit is now on "all flesh" where in the OT, it was very rare, yet in these "all flesh" days, the ministry of the prophet is still needed. Agabus was one; Paul and Barnabas were too (AC 13). The instruction about prophets (eg 1 CO 12-14) and warnings about false prophets (eg 1 JN 4) indicate their presence in the NT community of faith.

I've known scores of legitimate prophets over the years, a very few who claimed to be prophets and were not, and quite a few folks who were legitimately called to prophetic ministry, but lack the discipline, the skills, the training to use the gift properly. Too many people with real & legitimate gifts prophesy not out of God's heart of love, but out of their own hurts, out of their religious culture, out of "the second heaven" (in contrast to 2 Corinthians 12) as if it were from God.

And of course, when a man or woman of God whom we know and trust says, "God said thus to me", then whether we understand or not, we much discern: either they are deceived, or they are intentionally deceiving you, or they are telling you the truth, though it may be outside of your own experience. I have had prophets tell me what I had prayed in my hidden place the night before: either they are hearing from God, or there's something demonic going on, but it absolutely cannot be explained away. The first man who did it to me, I knew to be a man of God, which eliminated the option of my blaming the devil.

If I am called to be a pastor, I must also acquire training and develop character. Likewise if I am called to be a teacher or an evangelist: I must acquire (and learn from!) training and develop character. In the same way, if I am called to be a prophet or apostle, I must acquire training and character, and personally, I believe these latter gifts require more of both training and character than the former ones simply because we have so many fewer examples of what a godly prophet or godly apostle is. We can always look to Billy Graham as an illustration of evangelist, Jack Hayford as a pastor, John Maxwell as a teacher. It’s harder to point to as visible, as clear an example of a prophet or apostle.

Lack of training or character does not invalidate the office, nor my call to it. It merely invalidates the results of my ministry.

Freedom within Limits

"Freedom within Limits" is a real thing.

Years ago, I worked with a daycare that had a field for their playground; the kids stayed in the middle of the field, or near the building. When we fenced in the field, their behavior changed: now they used the whole field.

The Bible treats us this way. In Galatians 5:13, Paul says "You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature ; rather, serve one another in love." That's freedom within limits: "Yes you're free, but you're also free from sin! In your freedom, don't choose sin."

The Pharisees of Jesus time set a model that is occasionally followed today: "Yes you're free, but you're also free from choosing! In your freedom, don't choose anything." As leaders, they choose to keep us safe from ever making a mistake, ever becoming exposed to anything unhealthy, or anything that could eventually become unhealthy.

And so they set up fences to protect us. Like this poor guy has.

The foundation on which he stands reads "Freedom" but he's fenced in so tight he's functionally immobilized.

The fence around the daycare's playground enclosed about half an acre: there was room where the kids could run all day, wear themselves out. It also enclosed the coolest playground in town: bridges, climbing things, tunnels, a fireman's pole, all custom-designed and hand-made with love. There was so much fun inside the fence that we never had trouble with the kids even wanting to leave. In fact, it was difficult - on sunny days - to bring them back inside after play time was over.

There must be fences around our lives. But the fences must be so big that we can run at full speed as long as we can and still not run into fences. There must be enough play stuff inside the fence - stuff like opportunities to heal the sick, disciple young believers, field trips to glorious meetings, treasure hunts on the streets - there must be enough of a playground that we don't ever want to get out of the fence.

That's the way life in the Kingdom should be!

The Lord’s Flock

The Lord’s Flock

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about God’s stray sheep for a while. It seems that there are a whole lot of Christians who haven’t darkened the door of a church in years: for one reason or another, they’ve lost faith in the church. It was in that context that I found myself drawn to this passage recently:

“But I [the Lord] will gather the remnant of My flock out of all countries where I have driven them, and bring them back to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. I will set up shepherds over them who will feed them; and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking,” says the LORD. –Jeremiah 23:3,4

As I meditated on the passage, I felt something of God’s heart for His people, particularly His lost sheep. I’m convinced that He is very tender towards His lost sheep, His children that have long since quit coming to church meetings. I’m beginning to understand something of what He feels for them, and that helps me understand why He’s so protective of them.

As you read the context for this verse, It’s clear that God is quite upset with the shepherds to whom He had entrusted His sheep, because they served their own needs and not the sheep’s needs. I recommend not making God mad at us. Personally, that does not appeal to me.

I’m beginning to hear some of His heartbeat for the sheep – the believers – who are separated from the gathered church. And because this is what I do, I experienced it in bullet points. Here are some key points from the verse above:

• God is going to gather the remnant of His flock from all the different places that they have gone; places like “hidden from church,” or “withdrawn into hopelessness,” “given up,” or “just filling the back pew.” The gathering will be His work; we don’t need to advertise for gathering; gathering is not our work, though we probably need to make room for the gathered sheep. [Note that these sheep are coming from wild places, so they’re likely to be unfamiliar to us, both by name and in their mannerisms.]

• The place He’s bringing them back to is their folds. I know too many churches that functionally belong to the pastor, and may others that belong to a board of directors. By contrast, the place God is bringing his sheep is to a place where they belong, a place they can call their own, a place where they have ownership and influence, where they fit in as full-fledged participants, not just as observers, not just as “nickels and numbers.” If we make room for them to sit down and for them to give their tithe but don’t make room for their vision, their passion, their calling, then we’ve completely missed the point of what God’s doing. Note: by definition, this will significantly change the nature of the gatherings.

• When they are gathered in, these “missing sheep” will become fruitful. They will increase. (It does not say that “we” will be fruitful; they will.) In other words, we must make room not just for our missing brothers and sisters, but for their gifts, for the people in their circle of influence, for their ministries. It’s almost a given that we won’t understand where they’re coming from – they’ve spent the last few years / decades in places you and I have probably never been; they ain’t gonna be as shiny and well-dressed as life-long churchgoers, and we’ll be tempted to think that we’re better than they. That would be stupid. We’ll be tempted to make them wait for a season, for us to decide if we approve of them and their ways of doing things, before we release them to minister. That would be a mistake.

• God will set up shepherds over them. In this, I hear a couple of warnings: I can imagine some men and women in pastoral positions setting themselves as “over” the returning sheep. That would be a mistake any time of course (pastors, like all 5-fold ministers, are to serve), but especially so with these sheep who have learned to survive in the wild. God promises to set up His own shepherds over them and I can’t imagine that He needs help with that. We can look to identify those He’s raising up, rather than installing our own people. Perhaps you and I will be among those set by God into those positions, but not unless we’re already shepherding the sheep He’s given us; not unless we’re doing it according to the goals and values that He has described in this passage and others like it.

• Note that the only responsibility mentioned for the shepherds is to tend the sheep. We (assuming that we’ll be involved) are not assigned to direct the sheep, to rush their development or their healing, nor to hinder their advancement. Our job is to feed them. Yes, there are some other responsibilities associated with being a shepherd, but the one that God points out is feeding. We tend to add other responsibilities that are more appropriate for cowboys than shepherds; God is not adding those. Maybe we shouldn’t either, eh?

• God gives a specific goal: “…and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking.” Whatever it is that we do with these old-timer newcomers, we need to make it so that they are not afraid, not discouraged, not re-evaluate their decision to re-join the gathered body of the Church. We’re going to need to get rid of those religious spirits we have gotten so used to.

• Let me add this personal note: As God brings many of these people back into the church, we will be tempted to see them as “lost sheep” and want to baby them, clean them up, dress them up and minister to their obvious bumps and scrapes. I believe that if we take that approach, then the best we can hope for is that they don’t kick us in the teeth as they run from us and our “help” for them.

A better image may be to look at ourselves as an army training for battle (an appropriate image for the church any day), and these returning believers as battle-tested warriors, returning from the front lines. We may know more about the theory of battle and the reasons why our weapons are better than the enemy’s. But these warriors have spent the last few decades practicing what we talk about.

Many of them will be like the stereotypical Platoon Sergeant who chews on the stub end of a cigar as he hunts the enemy in the jungle. If you’ve read Tom Clancy, think of the character John Clark. If you’re a comics fan, think of Nick Fury. If you like superheroes, think Wolverine: not so polished as we may like, but the right guy to have at your back in a dark alley full of bad guys.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to vacate our leadership positions in favor of these returning warriors. We must not blindly follow them any more than we would blindly follow anyone else. In this generation, ministry – including the ministry of leadership – flows from relationship. It’s unreasonable and irresponsible to place complete strangers into leadership and then instruct our people to follow them. We need to welcome them into friendship, into relationship. Some of them, like some of us, are more suited for leadership than others, and we discover that through relationship.

Revival: Future or Present?

For as long as I can remember – and that’s a long time – I’ve been looking forward to revival. I’ve heard the same stories that you have: a great outpouring in the last days, a great pouring out of God’s Spirit that draws people to Him by the millions and changes the face of the church and the world in a year or a month or a day.

We read about the Book of Acts, where 5000 people came to faith in a day, 3000 the next chapter, where signs and wonders seem to permeate the air and where the church met house-to-house. That’s what we’re longing for in our generation.

More than longing, many of us believe that such a revival – or greater – is coming to the Church before this is all over. There have been prophetic words from credible voices that God’s going to bring a harvest of a billion souls in a generation, that He’s going to “change the understanding and expression of Christianity in the earth in one.” Pretty heady stuff.

All that is well and good. We long for revival. We believe revival is coming. I have two problems with that. Both of them come from looking at revival as this great big thing that God does as a sovereign act of amazing power.

The first problem with our picture of revival is that we define revival as so big and so massive that we see it – consciously or subconsciously – as something that God does when He’s good and ready, and we stop taking personal responsibility for it.

I certainly can’t bring a million people to faith in a day, so we step back and most of us confine ourselves to wishing that He’d do His thing in our day.

(If we really believed that God was going to pour out that kind of harvest, wouldn’t we do something to help? Wouldn’t we do something to prepare? Sometimes I wonder if we expect God to do it so we don’t have to. )

At no point did God say, “You know that ‘Go ye into all the world’ thing? Nah… don’t bother. I’ll do it for you.” But we act often enough as though He did.

No, if God is going to bring a massive revival that turns the world upside down again, (and I believe He is), He’s going to do it mostly through His church. Us. You and me. He’s going to use us.

When Jesus walked the earth, He walked as a man, not as fully-powered-up God in a human disguise: as a man in right relationship with God. That’s what the incarnation is all about. And His walking the earth certainly changed things: people’s lives were turned upside down, the lame walked, the blind saw, the dead lived, thousands were fed, thousands more followed Him to hear Him talk about the Kingdom.

He did all of that as a man: flesh and blood like you and me. He taught. He healed. He resurrected people. At no point did he wake up in the morning to sudden success: thousands of adoring followers where none existed the night before. Father God did step in with the odd sovereign act, but that was exclusively limited to speaking: “This is my Son whom I love! Listen to Him!” (See Mark 1:11 & 9:7)

Jesus did the work. He did it empowered and directed by His Father, just as we need to do the work of revival empowered and directed by our Father. But it it’s our work to do; we must not just wait for God to do it for us, hoping that we wake up one day and suddenly there are the tens of thousands of people wanting to fill up our churches. Yeah, He could do that. No, that’s not how He does things.

The second problem with our picture of revival is that we limit it to only the great and spectacular, only the front-page news; worse, we limit it only to front-page news in America.

A wise man once told me: “If you want to see revival, go home. Close your door. Draw a circle on the floor and sit inside the circle. Then pray for revival to start in the circle. When you are revived, then revival has started.”

I am firmly committed that revival has already started. But because it doesn’t conform to our expectations, we say to ourselves, “That can’t be revival!”

First, if you and I are revived, then revival has begun. It’s already here! Now, I happen to believe it’s quite a bit bigger than that, but it’s true: we don’t have people pouring out into the streets asking how to meet God.

We have testimonies of God doing signs and wonders again. In America! We haven’t had that for generations! Other parts of the world are seeing millions won to Christ in a generation. Some African nations are now 80% or even 90% Christian, where the gospel was virtually unknown a century ago. South Korea is experiencing similar amazing growth.

I will agree, this is not enough. We want more. Jesus deserves more! The Moravian prayer has not yet been answered: “May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering.”

What we have is not enough, but it is revival. Our prayer needs to change from, “O Lord, please bring revival”, to “Please increase our revival!” Shepherding a revival is a different process than hoping and praying for one to start.

My goal of this article is this: we need to re-define ourselves. We are not waiting for revival; we are caretakers of revival. We have something of revival now, and it is our responsibility to nurture it, to shepherd it to carry it out. We must be empowered and directed by God, yes, but it’s our revival. What are we going to do with it?

Hope Does Not Disappoint

And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Romans 5:5

I’ve been reflecting on hope for a while. I’ve come to the conclusion that I haven’t understood the subject very well.

In our culture – and our churches are part of this – we make statements like, “Oh, I hope John’s operation goes well.” We use “hope” as a synonym for “wish”, and when we do, we reveal that our concept of hope is relatively powerless. Our actions and our unguarded words reveal that we consider hope to be little (if any) more than random chance.

Since I’m going to shoot that perspective down, I might as well do it directly: this thinking is heretical, it reveals lazy thinking, and it’s insulting to the God who loves me enough to die for me.

I’m certain that our insulting heresy is not (normally) an intentional choice; we believe poorly because we haven’t learned any better. We’ve let our secular culture do too much of our thinking for us instead of letting the Spirit of God teach us.

Hope Does Not Disappoint.

First of all, whatever hope really is, it is not about disappointment. It’s not about the longings of my heart (or yours) being disregarded, crushed or ignored.

Hope is built on the love of God, not the roll of the dice. Because the love of God has been poured out in my heart through the Holy Spirit, therefore hope does not disappoint. Two observations:

· This is a done deal: the love of God has already been poured out, the Holy Spirit has already been given. I am not waiting for God to do something, nor is He waiting for me to do something, for hope to become secure. It’s based on things that have actually happened.

· This is likely proportional: If I don’t know the love of God, then I am likely to have difficulty knowing the hope that does not disappoint. To the degree that my life is entwined with the Holy Spirit who was given to me, to that same degree I am able to know this powerful and reliable hope.

In fact, Biblical hope does not rely on chance and it does not rely on me. It relies on God. It doesn’t even rely on God’s power or his will: it relies on who He is. “God is love” (1 John 4:16) and it is His love – His very identity – that is the assurance that hope does not disappoint.

Hope Involves the Unseen

For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it. – Romans 8:24-25

Hope is all about promises that we have not yet received. If we have the thing promised, then hope is meaningless. But if we have a promise that we have not yet received, then that’s a good place to employ hope.

More specifically, if it’s been promised by God, then we can rely on it, we can be confident that although we don’t see it now – and we may not even see the first clue that it’s even possible – yet because I are recipients of God’s love poured out in my heart, I can have confidence that hope will not disappoint.

Hope is a Fight

What does the verse say? “…with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” The Greek word for perseverance involves fight, a determined persistence in the face of obstacles. There are some animals that when they bite, their jaw locks into place, and letting go is not an option for them until the fight is over. If you kill the animal, the jaw remains locked in place.

So we wait with perseverance. But we also wait eagerly.

I have a friend who has four kids, and on Christmas morning, he doesn’t let them leave their room until the parents give the call, “Merry Christmas Kids!” Before that moment, the parents are wrapping the last of the presents, tucking the last toy into a stocking, while the kids are nearly beside themselves with anticipation. When the call finally comes, there are four pajama-clad blurs down the hallway and woe be unto anyone or anything that stands in the way. That's how we wait.

If you have ever tried to persuade a child that Christmas has been cancelled this year (and I’ve tried), you’ll get an earful. If you persist (and it was a mistake), then you’ll get an idea of what “…with perseverance we wait eagerly” actually means. That's how we wait.

That’s what our hope is to be like. Even though it’s not here yet, nevertheless we cannot be persuaded that it is not coming, and we are excited beyond measure for the arrival of that for which we hope.

Hope Has an Object

We hold on to hope, not as an end in itself. We don’t hope in hope, we hope in God. We have Hope because it is God Himself that has given us hope as He has already given us His love and His Holy Spirit.

And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. Psalm 39:7

There is a weakness, a vulnerability, in the subject of hope, and that’s why the object of our hope is so important. Because we have confused “hope” with “wish”, it’s not impossible – not even difficult – to confuse our wishes with hope.

I know people who (generally unintentionally) use hope to attempt to manipulate God. Because they want a thing, therefore they build this expectation of epic proportions, and they tell themselves (and anyone else who will listen) that God is obligated to provide this thing for them because if He doesn’t, He’ll be letting them down. And using this argument, they wait for the perfect wife, the ideal husband, the perfect ministry to be dropped into their laps.

I am not saying that God has not made promises to these brothers and sisters. I’m saying that God promised salvation (sozo) and eternal life, and that we can and must hold onto those promises, knowing (not wishing) that while we may not see them in their fullness yet, nevertheless, we will inhabit that place, and our confidence those truths is as secure as the truth that God loves us, that God has given His Holy Spirit to us.

I live today knowing that I will inherit all that God has promised to me. I can bank on that, regardless of what my circumstances tell me. More than that, I will.

Visit Northwest Prophetic for a complete archive of regional prophetic words.

Watch Out! Your Mouth is Loaded!

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years. I’ve had to go slow about it, because the conclusion that I’m coming to is pretty much exactly the opposite of the things I used to believe and teach. I hate it when that happens, but I’m delighted to have my understanding corrected and my weaponry updated.

Here’s the conclusion I’m coming to: my words are powerful. They change worlds. So do yours. Our words have the power to change this world. In fact, I may go so far as to say, as a wise man has been teaching me, “nothing gets done without there first being a declaration about it.” My declaration. Your declaration. And certainly God’s declaration.

And here are some of the processes that have gone on to change my mind. I need to explain that until these things happened, I had a nice, tidy Calvinist theology: God is going to do what He’s going to do, and maybe my prayers can move Him and maybe they can’t, but if He doesn’t do it, it won’t get done!

1. My theology was corrected by a prophetic word. I had not had much exposure to the prophetic back in 1998 when a prophet declared to me, “But you see, when you don’t know that you have that anointing, you’re just praying, ‘Oh God, would you please….’ But when you begin to understand … you begin to say, ‘Move! In the Name of Jesus, you’re coming down!’” That came from a man I had never met before, instructing me to petition God less (OK, to whine at God less) and to declare the thing that that I would previously whined about. That messed me up, particularly as the prophet accurately nailed a couple of other things in my life: I couldn’t dismiss the word in good conscience.

2. I had a couple of experiences that my previous theology did not support. I’ve written about one of them here; I won’t repeat the details in this article, but I’ll just say that God used my application of that prophetic word (using declarative prayer rather than petition prayer) to get me the truck of my dreams. In the other experience, some friends asked me as their home-group leader to make a declaration over them, and we were all surprised at the power than was released that night. It changed their lives, and its effectiveness changed my life.

3. I’ve been meditating on what it means to be made in God’s image. One of the conclusions I’ve come to is that I get things done the way He got things done, beginning with “And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.” (In fact, I think this verse is describing the Big Bang, but that’s just conjecture.) When God needed to make something happen, he spoke it into being.

4. The NT says that I’m seated with Christ, and that He’s seated at the right hand of Father. Father’s sitting in a throne, of course, which means that Jesus is sitting on the next throne over, or Jesus is in the main throne, and Father’s on the other side: either way, if I’m seated with Christ, I’m seated in a throne. He did say, after all, that I am to reign with Him, and that I’m both king and priest. So I’m in the role of king, seated with my big brother Jesus on a throne, doing the work of reigning or ruling my portion of the Kingdom. So how does a king get his will accomplished? He makes decrees. He issues authoritative statements saying, “This is how it’s to be done.” And everybody obeys. Or if they don’t, the army goes and helps them obey.

5. As I’ve studied the prophetic gifts, I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t just communicate information from God to man. I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve told, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” with little-to-no effect. But that was one of the most powerful prophetic words I’ve ever spoken. “Uh, God says He loves you…” and this mountain of a man, well schooled in church teachings, broke down and wept like a baby, actually experiencing the affection of His heavenly Father for the first time in years. The true prophetic word carries information, yes, but it also carries the power of God to accomplish that word. When I was moved by God to make declaration about my dream truck, I got the dream truck (and I learned a big lesson!). If I had not spoken that declaration, I’d still be driving a wimpy Honda and whining my prayers.

The point is that in my shoddy Calvinist thinking that my prayers were at the best wishful thinking and at the worst, whining at God, I was horribly mistaken. I’m coming to the conclusion that

We know that our words have the power to seriously wound someone. A very foolish person once said, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” I’m coming to the opinion that if the Bible is really true, and if I’m going to live like it’s true (very big “ifs,” I agree), then it’s the other way around: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can really hurt me.” Our words have power in the realm of the soul: the mind, will, and emotions of ourselves and those around us.

Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” (I grew up Presbyterian. I still can’t get rid of the “thee’s” and “thou’s” in the Lord’s Prayer!) What shall we do to make that happen? Jesus taught us to forgive peoples’ sins (which we do by speaking). He did not teach us to pray for the sick, but to heal the sick, something far beyond the wishy-washy prayers I heard in Sunday school I think.

That’s enough background. Here’s where I’m going with all this: it’s time for us to wield the word of God as a tool, a weapon. It’s time for us to discern what his heart is on a matter, and to declare that (and yes, I realize that sometimes He’s asking, “Well, what do you think?”). It’s time for us to learn to not just petition God, but also to declare the will of God with authority from our position seated with the Son of God into the matter before us.

In my home group prayer times, we often put someone in the seat in the middle and pray and prophesy over them. I’m getting to the point where I’m insisting that we don’t stop with, “I hear God saying this about you.” Now my team is learning that if they don’t declare that promise over or into the person we’re praying for, that I’ll remind them.

So may I suggest that we pray a little less along the lines of “Oh Lord, would you please…” and a little more “In the name of Jesus, mountain, you get up and move!” Lets begin to rule in our roles as kings and priests.

Visit Northwest Prophetic for a complete archive of regional prophetic words, or to submit a prophetic word.

Cool blogs:
• The Pilgrimgram • Firefall Zine • Tall Skinny Kiwi • Darpa's Domain • Bill Johnson • The Internet Monk

Resources
• Be a Hero! • Bethel Redding • Graham Cooke • Church Soundguy • End Time Prophetic Vision

Ministries
• Northwest Equipping • Healing the Northwest • Mosaic Northwest • PacificMinistries • Revival Town • Rivers of Grace • Storehouse Ministries

Missions
• Youth With A Mission • Int'l House of Prayer KC • Int'l House of Prayer NW • Int'l House of Prayer WA • Disciple the Nations

The End of Times

There’s a lot of talk in recent years about The End Times. That’s not all that uncommon, I suppose. There was a bestselling series of books on the subject a few years back, and recently, yet another wave of talk on the subject has started.

It seems that such talk is probably normal. I’m told that every generation since Jesus walked the planet has thought that they might be the last generation. Even the 12 disciples (well, the 11; Judas had left by then) got caught up in a Last Days focus:

⁴ And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me; ⁵ for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” ⁶ Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” ⁷ And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. ⁸ But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” – Acts 1

So Jesus is saying, “Get ready for the Holy Spirit,” the boys’ first thought is “Is this the end times? How soon will the end be?” And like us, they’re asking with the assumption that their view of the end is right; they don’t ask, “Will the kingdom be restored to Israel?” but “Will you restore the kingdom to Israel now?” In their case, the assumption was about the restoration of the kingdom of Israel; in our days, it’s usually about “the rapture” that sucks us out of this planet to live in heaven with Jesus. (I can’t help but think that we might have missed it as badly as they did, but that’s another topic.)

What I really love is Jesus’ answer: “That’s not what this is about boys. This is about power; this is about you being my witnesses everywhere you go, both nearby and far away.”

In His answer, I hear something of a rebuke – or at least a correction – of their fascination with figuring out the end times.

Some time ago, I felt the Lord correct my own focus on eschatology through this verse. It’s like He was saying to me personally, “Don’t focus on understanding the end times. Focus instead on the Holy Spirit. I want you to have His power because you have a job to do. I want you to focus instead on being my witness in this world!”

In other words: leave off the emphasis on The End Times. I’m wasting my time focusing on that. The real emphasis needs to be on my work – our work – here on this planet, among these people in this region.

I recognize that this is clearly specific instruction for me; I wonder if there’s some wisdom for other saints in this correction as well. I’ve often felt that a focus on the end times, particularly a focus on “the rapture”, has led many of us to miss God’s heart.

It’s actually pretty difficult to pay a lot of attention on The End Times in our culture and not come away with a self-centered sense of “Jesus is going to rescue from all this!” (Mike Bickle and the iHop team seem to be doing a good job of avoiding that egotistical error.) Many of the brethren I know who focus on eschatology have turned some or all of their attention away from our work while we are in this world (the “be my witnesses” part) and have focused more on His presumed role of rescuing us from this world.

I keep remembering that Jesus said we need to pray this way: “…your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, pray that His kingdom would expand here on Earth, that there would be more of us homo sapiens who place ourselves under His kingship. That’s what our focus is supposed to be. (And of course, we’re not talking about a political kingdom, but the increase of His rule in individuals in our culture.)

That means that a fair bit of my prayers – and presumably my attention – is to be on seeing His kingdom expanding in my community. But if I’m focusing my attention on my belief that “Jesus is coming soon!” to swoop down and carry me away from my community, then how helpful can I actually be at expanding His kingdom here? I’m not saying the Rapture isn’t going to happen; I’m saying it shouldn’t be our focus.

Instead, I am proposing that we back off on looking for the end of this age, and that we put our efforts into fulfilling His purpose for us in this age; being empowered by the Holy Spirit and being His witnesses in this world, both near and far.

Spiritual Adolescents

I’m a dad. I rather like being a dad. I think I’m a pretty good dad, though I know I can do better, and I really want to.

So I watch dads. More specifically, I watch guys who have kids – which isn’t quite the same thing – and I watch for two things: First, what are they doing with their kids – especially what can I learn from them – and second, how well does it work?

The “how well does it work” part is the tough one. I watch the kids for that one. How do they react to him? Especially, how do they do in the long run? As they grow up, do they turn into responsible (even fun-loving) adults? Or do they stay children, but in adult-size bodies.

I watch that child-to-adult transition pretty closely. I don’t think we do that very well as a culture. I can’t tell you the number of kids that I’ve watched who follow a particular pattern: they show every sign of being ideal kids during their teenage years: they have responsible jobs, they are involved in responsible things like scouting or youth group or the like, and they seem to be enjoying life. They appear to be making the transition from dependence to independence really well. Except they’re not.

There comes a point in the lives of some of these “responsible kids” where they just seem to blow up. They may run away from home, or turn up pregnant, sprout lots of tattoos and piercing, or develop a drug or alcohol addiction. If it happens, the meltdown seems to come just about at the point where they were getting ready to make the jump from “adolescent” to “adult.” They make it to adulthood, but they lost traction and crashed going around that last curve.

That tells me that something’s gone haywire: somehow it took something violent to make that final transition into adulthood.

I’ve talked to some of those kids, after their crash, and there seems to be a trend: they were being “adult-like” but they were doing it for someone else, usually for their parents, sometimes for a teacher or youth pastor or scout leader. But they weren’t doing it for themselves. They were play-acting. And as the time came closer for them to become the person that they were play-acting, they couldn’t do it. They panicked; they spun out.

Watching as an outsider, particularly watching from the viewpoint of hindsight, I could see what they were talking about. I could see the pressure to perform. Dad boasts to his friends about his little princess because he’s so proud of her and it’s his way of telling her that he’s proud of her, but she hears it as another chain tying her to this make-believe role that nobody but she herself knows is make-believe. And it’s terrifying. She looks independent, but she’s not. She’s acting out a role that has every sign of successful independence, and people think that’s her, but it’s not. Not yet, anyway.

The reality is that we really aren’t very good at becoming adults. Think about your own life: what was the defining point when you could say, “Yesterday I was a kid; today I’m an adult!” Was that defining moment an accident or was it something intentional? Most of us have made the transition, but for the vast majority of us, it was by accident: we just stumbled into adulthood as we’re aiming for something else.

So there comes a time in every kid’s life where he or she needs to make the jump: not from “kid” to “adult” (so much of that happens biologically), but from “dependent” to “independent”. We never leave the extended family, but we’re no longer holding onto the apron strings.

Some tribal cultures have rite-of-passage rituals: they have this ceremony one night where the men take the adolescent boys out into the jungle or the desert or whatever, and in the morning, or the next weekend, those boys come back as full-fledged adult men. Everybody in the tribe knows it. There’s no question.

And I don’t think we ever teach kids how to do that. 

But I’m not an adolescent psychologist specializing in child development; I’m an observer and a leader in the Church, the body of Christ. And I think we have the same problem there.

Perhaps you’ve heard the statistics that most churches don’t ever talk about: the majority of kids in their youth group will never make the transition to adults in the church. The Southern Baptist study that shows that 70% of the kids never make it from youth group in the church to adulthood in the church. The guy who ran the study said, “Too many youth groups are holding tanks with pizza. There's no life transformation taking place.”

In other words, there is no successful mechanism (and in most churches, no mechanism whatsoever) to help “youth” become “adults.”

As a result, we have a lot of young people who don’t fit in the church anymore. Many have left the church altogether. But there are a substantial number of disenfranchised “young adults” – twenty something and thirty something individuals – in many churches who don’t fit into church:

· They’re too old to still be in the youth group; that would maintain their dependent status, as “junior members” of the church, which they’re not interested in.

· They don’t want to plug into a bunch of programs that were designed by old people and are still dominated by them. That’s just dependence in another guise: “This isn’t for people like you; it’s for older, more mature people. But you can come and watch if you want.”

· They don’t want to abandon the church altogether: they aren’t looking for rebellious independence. Well, OK: some of them are, but they aren’t the ones still hanging around the church wishing they could fit in. The goal isn’t rebellion; the goal isn’t rebellion, it’s independence. But sometimes they just have to go through the place of rebellion to reach it.

Most of us fit in this description one way or another: we want to be in relationship, but we don’t want to be “junior members” of that relationship.

The church is really good at setting up programs to fix what’s wrong with you, and for people who are in a place of immaturity or of real need, that’s wonderful. Sometimes it’s a real life-saver.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this: what needs to happen – what needs to change – in order to invite the next generation of believers to take their place beside us in the Great Cloud of Witnesses?

Here’s what I propose:

· We start by talking with this generation rather than at them. We spend as much time listening to them as we do talking to them. Talk to them as individuals.

· We resource their plans and hopes and wishes. We provide money, training, opportunity, whatever it takes to say “yes” to their ideas. Not all of their ideas; they have as many stupid ideas as you and I have, and you know that’s a big number. But we say “yes” as much as we can.

· We make church center around them and their generation, not the blue-haired folks that have been here since they were that age. We don’t turn everything around for them, but we turn some of it around. What part? I don’t know. Ask them.

· We mentor them. Instead of plugging them into a program (“a holding tank with pizza”), we invite them into real relationship, one-on-one, with the “franchised” adults: the ones who hold the power, who have positions of authority in the church. We help them with the frustrations and the confusion of the transition. We teach them things that their single-mom-working-two-jobs never had a chance to teach them.

· We play with them. In their arena. Sure, we’re going to be a little slower in the laser-tag or paintball games, but the fact that we’re there means a lot. We need to be with them; we don’t need to beat them. (Maybe it’s more important that we’re there for the beer and pizza party afterwards. Not sure.)

· Follow their leadership. Did you know that under all that youthful energy, there are some honest-to-goodness powerful leaders? No, they don’t have experience yet, and they never will until someone is willing to trust them with actual leadership. Make them home-group leaders, choir leaders, worship leaders in their own right, not only as an assistant to someone older.

· Invite them into positions of power with you. Involve them in planning – and not just for the “youth events.” Invite them to the board meetings. Put them on the decorating committee (now there’s power!). Put them on the ministry team. Let them lead the ministry team sometimes.

· Notice them: when they do well, point it out and celebrate. When they screw up, don’t pretend it didn’t happen: deal with the issue. Laugh about it if you can. Believe them when they repent and move on.