I know that a number of readers of this blog are fairly new to following blogs, so here’s some useful info for you. The easiest way to follow blogs (and many other websites these days) is not by visiting each site.

Many sites, and almost all blogs, produce something called an RSS feed. You can use an RSS reader to automatically give you updates when any of those sites are updated. Rather than visiting each site, you can go to your news reader, and it will consolidate the new posts of all of your subscribed feeds in one place.

There are some feed readers that you can download and install on your computer. My feed reader of choice, however, is a website called Bloglines. Because it is a website, I can follow all of the blogs I read by visiting Bloglines from any computer. Once you sign up for an account, you can add a bookmark to your favorites to easily subscribe to any site with an RSS feed.

Go sign up and give it a try…and don’t say I never offered anything useful here…

Bonus info!!!

1. Some blogs will include a Subscribe with Bloglines button on their site which makes it really easy to subscribe. Here’s one for this site…
   
   
   
2. If you have a blog, Bloglines also makes it really easy to maintain the blogroll — the list of blogs you read — on your site. (This is probably my favorite feature of Bloglines.) Any time you subscribe to a new feed, Bloglines can automatically update the blogroll on your blog as well. Instructions are here .

I’ve often heard over the past few years that pastors were operating too much like corporate CEOs. While I have shared some of those concerns, I’ve also seen a lack of reasonable models being offered instead. It seemed that those who were opposed to CEP’s (chief operating pastors) were ready to chuck leadership altogether, or they just wanted something to gripe about without offering thoughts on a better alternative.

I do believe that God raises up leaders to serve as pastors/shepherds over the flock. Paul’s conversation with the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:28-32 reveals how important this role is. Leaders aren’t something we can simply discard because our society dislikes authority. I’ve long searched for a resource that might describe what a non-CEO kind of leadership might look like, but nothing quite seemed to make sense. (Summoned to Lead by Leonard Sweet was an attempt at this, but it didn’t do anything for me.) I think, at last, I may have found a worthwhile book on the subject…

I picked up Inspire!, by Lance Secretan with marginal interest at a used bookstore. I’ve read plenty of leadership books, and this one didn’t seem to be anything special. It had been a recomendation on Tim Sanders‘ mailing list and I liked his book, so I decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did. I’m not far into it yet, but so far this book has had some good stuff to say. (Perhaps I’ll post some specific thoughts from it later.) If you are trying to define what leadership can look like in a new models of church, perhaps this book can help you on the way.

I’ve become mildly fascinated with St Patrick’s work among the Celts, which I alluded to on St Patrick’s Day. That, along with a general favoring of history, led me to read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. I found the following paragraph about Patrick’s ministry among the Celts especially fascinating:

None of this would be surprising if we assume that there were characteristic aspects of Irish culture that Patrick had taken to hear and on which he chose to build his new Christianity. These aspects would have included Irish courage which he admired greatly, but even more would he have been impressed by the natural mysticism of the Irish, which already told them that the world was holy–all the world, not just parts of it. It was on this sturdy insight that Patrick choreographed the sacred dance of Irish sacramental life, a sacramentality not limited to the symbolic actions of the church’s liturgy but open to the whole created universe. All the world was holy, and so was all the body.

Cahill argues that Patrick was the first missionary to actually take the gospel beyond the edges of the Roman empire. Usually, a group of people was conquered by the Romans before the Gospel made it’s way to them, both before and after Constantine. In effect, people became Roman before they became Christian, and over time, the difference between the two became more and more blurry. This led Patrick to help shape a form of Christianity among the Irish that was different from, and even controversial among, those in the Roman church.

Zach and I were talking earlier today about how our nature is to fear and think less of those who are different from us. As a result, we often want people to be like us before we will share in life with them. I think this had a lot to do with the fact that early Christianity struggled to take the gospel beyond the edges of the empire. Once they were Romanized, it seemed safer to approach them.

Patrick had a love for the Irish even though they were very different. In a way that was extraordinarily unique for his time and ours, he was able to strip away his own culture from the gospel. He was able to see how he could insert the gospel into another culture.

As North America becomes more and more post-Christian, those of us who are here need to learn lessons from Patrick. We need to strip away and step out of our somewhat ridiculous Christian sub-culture. We need to understand what is going on around us so that we can point to the beauty in it. Only when we understand a culture can we truly insert the gospel in that culture and redeem it.

The soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love. Therefore, it can never find rest or happiness in other things. It must lose itself in love. By its very nature it must seek God, who is love.
                          -Mechthild von Magdeburg, thirteenth century mystic and visionary

Macey turns three tomorrow. Due to schedules, she already had her birthday party. One of the presents we gave her was the NIrV Read With Me Bible.

As moral, upright Christian citizens should, we’ve been reading a few stories to her every day. So far, here’s some of the highlights, or perhaps lowlights, she has seen:

• a couple of naked people frolicking in a garden who disobeyed by doing the one thing God had asked them not to do
• a young man who killed his brother in a jealous rage
• an old man who tied his son down on top of an altar and raised his knife to kill him as a sacrifice
• a younger brother who deceived his own dad to steal his older brother’s blessing
• a father who deceived a young man into marrying his older, uglier daughter rather than the younger prettier one he hoped for
• a man who had two wives and loved one of them a whole lot more than the other
• a father who loved his youngest son the most and showed favoritism by giving him a dandy jacket

Sherri and I have pretty much cringed or chuckled everytime we have storytime. Is this really the best thing to expose our precious little girl to? Should we wait until she is 14, 16, 18, or perhaps even 25, and ready to deal with these ugly stories? Or, do we hope that in all the ugliness, a greater beauty will be exposed? Even though explanations don’t fully make sense to her yet, do we hope that the truth of who she is, and what she was created for, will begin to connect with her soul through these stories?

Still wondering, but we’ll keep reading.

Some final thoughts from The Shaping of Things to Come… (Previous posts, are here , here, and here.) There are lots of good thoughts on the form of leadership in the missional context that are too intensive to develop here, but here’s a couple highlights:

• Pg 188 - “And it’s one of the core tasks of leadership to help the community to dream again. It is a disturbing trait of the more gung-ho Christian leader today to believe that he (usually male) is the sole visionary and the people are mere receivers of the vision and must adhere to it because of the position of the leader in the organization. While many of us reject this approach to leadership, a watered-down version of this kind of thinking exists in many so-called leadership development programs. They teach that all is well when graduates of those programs simply (super)impose their vision on a community without first listening very deeply to the longings and dreams of the local people in the community.”
• Pg 188 - “Considered philosophically, all that a great visionary leader does is awaken and harness the dreams and visions of the members of a given community give them deeper coherence by means of a grand vision that ties together all the ‘little visions’ of the members of the group.”
• Pg 192 - “People will not change unless they believe they really have to. So many leaders come in with a great sense of what the solution might be, but they encounter resistance because they have failed to communicate the problem. What can a leader do to promote paradigm shift?”
• Pg 192 - “One of the great weapons in the revolutionary leader’s arsenal is to cultivate a sense of holy dissatisfaction–to provoke a basic discontent with what is and so awaken a desire to move toward what could be.”
• Pg 209 - “Our Christology informs our missiology, which in turn determines our ecclesiology. If we get this the wrong way around and allow our notions of the church to qualify our sense of purpose and mission, we can never be disciples of Jesus, and will never be an authentic missional church.”

Final words…get this book (and read it).

I have added a Scripture index of all the Scriptures I have reference in entries on the site. The link is available near the top of the right hand column, and I will keep it updated. Feel free to use it to steal, ponder, or critique my thoughts on these passages.

I had a really good conversation tonight with a really good friend. He is in the midst of trying to figure out how ministry fits into his life right now. He still has a thirst for God, but is worn out. He’s a little troubled by it all.

Life has seasons. We all go through them. Sometimes we can’t believe how high we are soaring. Sometimes we really don’t want to wake up tomorrow. Sometimes we just want to sit and dwell on the beauty of God.

I often remind myself and others of three back-to-back episodes from the life of Elijah…

In the first, Elijah is taking on the enemy (1 Kings 18:16-46). He faces hundreds of prophets of Baal before a crowd of people He literally taunts them and proves entirely confident that God will back him. Imagine his thrill when he calls fire down from heaven and God honors his faithfulness. Imagine how close to God he felt to see Him work through him in that way.

In the second, Elijah is running like a scared little girl (1 Kings 19:1-8). He fears for his life after the last episode, and he literally wants to die. He is exhausted. An angel appears to him and provides the food and encouragement he needs to go on.

The final episode is the ultimate mountaintop experience (1 Kings 19:9-18). God tells him to stand on a mountain top, and Elijah hears the voice of God in the sound of complete silence.

Here’s the beautiful thing — these are three drastically different stories, but one truth is evident in all of them. At no time is he any closer to, or further from God in any of them. He soars. He crashes. He quiets. And God is right there beside him through all three.

I reflect on these stores often for my own sake. I need to. They massage my soul.

More thoughts from The Shaping of Things to Come. (For my previous posts, see here and here.) There is some rich thinking here, so I won’t soil it with my own comments this time.

• Pg 68 - “So-called ‘good teaching’ is not occurring in a church that has no heart for its community, since the purpose of teaching is to equip Christians for service.”
• Pg 80 - “We are advocating that all church planters take the considerable time required to untangle what we do because it is commanded by Christ, what we do because it was taught by the apostles or modeled by the early church, and what are relatively recent church traditions. Hold fast to the core but experiment like wild with the expression. The missional-incarnational church is entirely open to innovation, experimentation, and creativity. It doesn’t, by its very nature, see itself as the opening of a new franchise of the church, like a McDonald’s, where every burger tastes the same no matter which culture it is sold in. As an incarnational community it is concerned about reflecting local flavors, spices, and textures and developing an ambiance and a communal spirit that is sensitive and hospitable to local culture. As a missional community, it is careful not to abandon the truth of the gospel nor to water down its implications. This is called the process of critical contextualization, and it will be important to turn our attention to that process now.”
• Pg 116 - “We believe than an alternative, missional approach to being and doing church is best supported by an alternative approach to Christian spirituality. Too much Christendom spirituality has been concerned with retreat and reflection. While we acknowledge the value of a rich interior life, as well as the value of solitude in interiority, we believe that retreat and reflection should be embraced as part of a broader spirituality that values engagement and action.”
• Pg 121 - “One of the unique aspects of the Hebrew Bible is that is describes the first (and possibly the only) religious system that posits history as the primary source of revelation of God and God’s will for the world. And while at first this might not take your breath away, it is nonetheless a very important aspect of the Hebraic worldview, one that opens up many possibilities in engaging life and doing mission.”
• Pg 125 - “It is unredeemed or undirected pleasure that destroys life and wastes human effort. Missionaries and leaders do well to learn that people are motivated by their deepest pleasures, and if we can connect these to God, we will have established a vital bridge into the lives of ordinary people.”
• Pg 135 - “The recovery of a messianic spirituality that hallows the everyday is essential to the missional church because it is in the everyday that the missional church exists. It we are an incarnational community, the church must recover the ability to see God in the so-called ordinary world of action.”
• Pg 144 - “This is because the missional church realizes that it is finding God (or is God finding us?) in those places previously perceived as “outside” of God because they were outside of the local faith community’s mission program. Actually there is no such thing as seeking God, for there is nothing in which he cannot be found. It’s all in the “seeing” and the perceiving. Having broadened our concept of God’s involvement in the world and our part in it, Christians can then be free to engage missionally in any and every place. The whole world becomes an arena for the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.”
• Pg 145 - “If God’s people in this time are willing to be courageous enough to reconceive themselves as incarnational communities gathered for the purpose of changing the world (missional action), we believe they will have a significantly more profound impact that the current, passive, come-to-us and sit-in-the-pew mode of most churches.”

Still more to come….

Here’s an interesting article on something new that MTV is doing called “Spiritual Windows.”

Jason Clark has started a conversation on the future of preaching that I think is interesting. I’ve already commented and will continue to follow along with the thoughts there.

Today we celebrate St. Patrick’s day. I don’t have a whole lot of green in my closet, but perhaps that’s not the best way to honor who St. Patrick was anyway.

St. Patrick’s story is worth knowing. The Roman church had no success in reaching the “barbaric” Celt tribes, and they had pretty much given up. There were far too focused on trying to make the Celts into Romans first, and the Celts wanted nothing of it.

St. Patrick was not a Celt, and had actually been enslaved by the Celts. After his enslavement, he went back to them to minister to them. However, he used far different methods, and brought the gospel to the Celts in their terms. He incorporated elements of their culture into the message to help them understand. He created communities of Christ followers right on the edge of Celt villages that began to show them a different way of life. (For more info on St. Patrick and his ministry, read The Celtic Way of Evangelism, by George Hunter.)

Perhaps the best way for us to honor St. Patrick is to continue the work he did. Find one way today or this weekend to bring the gospel into our culture. Find one way to share with someone besides simply inviting them to church. Understand where people are, what they care about, and intersect the gospel with that — maybe that even starts with sharing a green beer with someone today.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on what you can do or have done. Comment here on the blog, or on your own blog if you have one. Let’s truly honor the work that St. Patrick did.

For those of you who live in the United States, SaveDarfur.org has set up a page that will allow you to automatically send an email to the president and your congressional representatives regarding your concern for the situation in Sudan. All you have to do is fill in your information. It’s quick and easy, and very worthwhile. Perhaps it will be the best two minutes you spend today.

Google is experimenting with a new version of their homepage called GoogleX. It has an OS X feel, and gives access to more search features than the normal Google homepage, while still maintain it’s beautiful simplicity. Pretty much everything Google developes these days is on the mark as far as I’m concerned.

Update: I noticed a few minutes ago that Google has already taken this down for some reason. Slashdot mentioned it tonight as well.

I have to confess I was a bit hesitant to include False Intimacy on my current reading list, lest visitors to this site think I am in over my head with sexual addiction. But I did decide to list it, and I want to share some thoughts from it as well.

I did read this book for personal reasons, but for professional as well. I’m taking some time during this break to brush up in areas to pursue wholeness. I’ve heard of many who have fallen in church planting, and I’m trying to explore areas where I may be exposed so I can understand them better. I also chose to read this for professional reasons, as I think every pastor should. The problem of sexual sin and addiction is out of control in our culture and snowballing. Pastors, and all Christians, need to understand what is going on rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.

Sexual addiction comes from taking the easy way out. We experience pain and frustration in our relationships, and so we would rather chose an alternative where we have more control, or at least we think we do. I’m a big fan of technology, but I wonder if the technology of our culture is providing us too many opportuntities to take the easy way out.

• The obvious example is the easy access of pornography and the easy stimulation it provides instead of the work that goes into maintain a genuine relationship. But what about…?
• Cheat codes in video games allow us to take the easy out rather than patiently struggle through something we are having difficulty with.
• We share our deep thoughts in blogs, where, more often than not, our readers are those who agree with us and voice support. Thus, we share our thoughts in a safe environment. (How many of you have I talked to who have told me you hesitate to comment here because you don’t know if you have anything to say or that you might look foolish? Even that falls in this.)

Life is hard. Sometimes it is downright difficult and may seem unbearable. Often people turn to Christianity in hopes of finding the easier way, and all too often Christianity has simply been presented as Your Best Life Now.

I’m all for teaching that following Jesus leads to life to the fullest. I believe that with everything in me, and teach it often. But sometimes that comes through longsuffering, patience and endurance. We have to teach this easy-out culture to face the reality of their life and tell themselves the truth. There are no cheat codes. The last chapter of the book spoke to this, and I will close with a paragraph from it:

We can’t prevent the problems of sexual addiction within the church if we don’t change our message from “how to feel better now” to the unpopular biblical theme that the sufferings we experience “are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). We must emphasize the message of patience, endurance, perseverance and hope rather than the message of immediate healing for the wounds of life. We must teach spiritual groaning rather than tacitly encouraging spiritual murmuring when God doesn’t seem to be meeting our needs today.