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I saw this link on Steve’s blog. Take three minutes and listen to it. The power of kindness!
Archive for the 'Church' Category
An odd thing happened to me yesterday just as I got up to preach. I got so tickled I couldn’t speak. Could barely squeak out a few words.
Children of Highland have been telling the stories each week that I’m preaching on in this series called “Storybook Lives.” Some are brief; some verbose. Some serious; some more playful. All have been wonderful.
The six year old who told the story yesterday was energetic, creative, and breathless. And, without meaning to be, she was just really funny.
I’d watched the video a couple times, but for some reason it just sent me over the edge when I watched it in worship. And I couldn’t recover. I desperately looked for someone down front to come up and pray for me since I was afraid that if I prayed I’d be giggling and guffawing all the way through. It was hard to find someone capable of doing so. The laughter bug was infectuous. I glanced down at Bob A., one of my elders. No way. His shoulders were bouncing and tears were rolling down his face. I kept scanning and found Bob S., who came up shaking his head and said to me under his breath, “I’m not sure this is going to go any better.” But it did, as he asked God to pour through me the gift of preaching.
Someone told me this was the second time she’d see me incapable of even speaking. The first time was a few years ago when I took the jogging stroller that I’d pushed Megan in thousands of miles as an illustration. But the moment I touched it, I fell apart. It caught me by surprise. It was years after my daughter’s death and I had known what I was going to say. But when I touched the stroller in the context of worship, I had a meltdown.
There were tears again yesterday. But this time they were tears of laughter.
Ironically, our call to worship yesterday was Psalm 30: “Weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. . . . You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.”
At least for that one day, it was certainly true!
A couple recent pictures of Reese Kathryn Cope:
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I’ve written before about my appreciation for youth ministers. That appreciation continues to grow as I hear stories of youth leaders who are instilling a deep sense of justice and compassion in their teens. Someday we may look back and realize that there was a dramatic shift in our churches — a shift that focuses more on God’s work to restore the world (in all ways). And we may realize how much of that took place from the teaching and modeling of youth workers.
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Insightful words about the gospels from N. T. Wright:
“No historian, no reporter, nobody ever tells things ‘just like they happened.’ All stories about all events involve the story-teller in selection, collection, arrangement and hence ‘interpretation.’ That doesn’t mean the whole thing is a pack of lies. It just means there is no such thing as a point of view which is nobody’s point of view. Nobody is ever a fly on the wall. All storytelling is story-telling with a purpose. The Gospels are no exception. To read the Gospels, then, we must continually be alert both for the question ‘what is this telling us about Jesus?’ and for the question ‘what is the evangelist trying to say, through this tory about Jesus, to his own contemporaries?’”
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My name has finally been removed from the www.foracappella.org site. It took quite a while for someone to figure out that I didn’t endorse the statement there. Hmmmm. Hadn’t read my blog, I guess. Keep hoping they’ll take down the scandalous articles that indicate instrumental music is a matter of salvation and fellowship. I’ve read some comments indicating that no one should bother to say anything about it. But those comments are wrong. That teaching is heretical. It reduces the gospel and throws up barriers that shouldn’t exist. Neither singing a cappella nor with instruments is heretical. Teaching that one or the other is necessary for salvation and fellowship is heretical.
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I’m expecting a short World Series, aren’t you? It’s hard to imagine either the Rockies or the D’backs matching up well with the Indians or Red Sox.
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I’ve been concerned about the need for the recruiters of Christian colleges to give the same perspective to potential students that the leaders on campus are providing once the students get there.
E.g., if a Christian college has banned people from speaking on its campus, that’s fine. The administration certainly has a right to do that. But wouldn’t it be ironic if the admissions people wound up recruiting from the congregations where those ministers work? Are they making it clear that they would like the students to attend even though the ministers they’ve grown up with are aren’t welcome?
Or let’s suppose that the administration generally believes that something like instrumental music will condemn you. Wouldn’t it be dishonest if the recruiters went to students from instrumental churches and encouraged them to attend, leaving the impression with the students and their parents that they are brothers and sisters in Christ who are in full fellowship?
The point is that there needs to be a consistent message between the policy and practices of the administration and the impressions given by the admissions counselors.
I’ve just finished a quarter century of preaching. We moved to North Carolina in May of 1982 . . . to Arkansas in September of 1984 . . . and to Texas in August of 1991.
Most of those years I’ve been in pretty visible pulpits — the College Church in Searcy and Highland.
But there was a real joy in that first ministry, too. It was off the beaten path. I preached to 140 wonderful people on the coast of NC.
And today I’m thinking of the many faithful people who serve as ministers (preachers, youth ministers, campus ministers, children’s ministers, etc.) in places that most never hear about. Rarely are they invited to speak at lectureships. No one is going to them asking them to write a book.
And yet month after month, year after year, and (sometimes) decade after decade they continue to minister faithfully.
For many of them, there is no multiple staff to share responsibilities with. There is not much time away. But there is still great joy.
Large churches grab most of the headlines. But small churches — places of deep fellowship and vibrant mission — are just as vital.
This morning I’m giving thanks for the many faithful ministers (I know, I know — we’re all ministers — but you know what I mean) scattered in these important places.
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Luke Timothy Johnson takes on the diversity of the gospel testimonies about Jesus. What do we do once we recognize it?
One option is to pretend the diversity isn’t there, attempting to collapse all the voices into one harmonized gospel.
Another option is to see only the diversity so that you’re unable to read all the witnesses as reliable.
But there is another possibility:
“Or will [those who notice the diversity] recognize that each of the compositions — human interpretations of a person whose life, death, and resurrection far exceeded the normal categories of human experience — has genuine value as testimony to some particular facet of Jesus, but none of them alone (nor all of them together) adequately or comprehensively captures the living reality that is Jesus?
“I choose the last option. I approach these writings as thoroughly human in their composition — and therefore necessarily limited in the ways all human writings are limited — but also as inspired by the Holy Spirit of Jesus himself — and therefore able to speak truly within their limited perspective and comprehension. I assume that none of these writings tell us everything that we would like to know . . . but that each of them individually speaks truly as it is able and all of them taken together speak reliably concerning the person in whose name they were written. I make no apology for this decision, and I gladly recognize that it is a decision based upon a prior conviction of faith. But if I did not start from such a faith, it is difficult to understand why I would be seeking to learn Jesus in this personal fashion anyway.” (Living Jesus
A few more quotes from Barbara Brown Taylor:
“At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”
“Having tried as hard as I knew how to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I knew for sure that I could not do it. I was not even sure that I wanted to do it anymore, and I felt increasingly deceitful saying that I would. Feeding people was no longer feeding me. While I remained constitutionally incapable of walking past a hungry baby bird, it was the wild geese that were calling me. When I heard them coming, I hurried to the window, straining to see them through the branches of the tall pines overhead. Sometimes all I caught was a beating wing or an outstretched neck, but even that was enough to set me weeping again. No thoughts went with the tears. The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you.”
“After I left him in search of food [at a pool party], I wound up with a couple I had always thought I would enjoy but whom I never really got to know since they did not serve on any committees and were never, as far as I knew, in crisis. We sat down in adjacent rocking chairs with plates full of lobster and corn balanced on our laps, laughing so much that I spit food clear across the porch. I did not wonder why I had not sought them out earlier because I already knew the answer. By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.”
Some poignant words from Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
These words sink deep.
“The call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.”
“I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good.”
“On the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. ‘I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,’ she once said, ‘because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.’ Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something that God might be able to use.”
“As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.”
“As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”
“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.”
“Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. ‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy . . .’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God . . .’ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . .”
“The easiest thing was to tell [her friends who asked why she resigned from ministry] that I had always wanted to teach college, which was true, but behind the answer lay truths harder to confess. My quest to serve God in the church had exhausted my spiritual savings. My dedication to being good had cost me a fortune in being whole. My desire to do all things well had kept me from doing the one thing within my power to do, which was to discover what it meant to be fully human.”
“With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.”
“Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or white-water rafting, the point was to step outside their high-carb comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild. ‘Excuse me,’ a member of the audience said, ‘but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?’ ‘Well, of course not,’ the presenter said. ‘I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.’ ‘I wouldn’t either,’ the man in the audience said, ‘but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.’”
Yesterday someone told me that he was at an Abilene bus station this past week. There was a man there screaming obscenities, including the repeated use of God’s name. My friend figured there was nothing he could do.
Then he saw a member of our church who is mentally challenged. She walked over to the man who was screaming, hugged him hard, and then said, “God loves you so much. But it hurts his feelings when you talk about him like that.”
“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (1 Peter 3:15)
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” (Colossians 4:6)
In 1 Corinthians 11:17ff, Paul begins by the kind of evaluation you don’t really want to hear when speaking about your assemblies: they do more harm than good.
From the beginning of the letter (1:10), he’s made it clear that their divisions are a problem. But what’s even worse is that these divisions are made even worse when they come together.
Apparently, the wealthier members — the ones who would host the small house churches — would follow the practices they’d learned in Roman society. They’d gather in the small dining area for the kind of elegant meal they were used to and put everyone else in the living space where they could eat something simpler (maybe cheap wine, bread, and soup).
In Paul’s words, some were going hungry while others were getting drunk. In other words, the disparity was disgusting.
When they gathered for the meal — the meal of Jesus which was often combined with a common meal — they were to be one. Remembering that Jesus died, they should be announcing by their actions that everything is now different. The old divisions of this world collapse.
The table of Jesus is a place of reconciliation. It’s a place where we taste the future and announce that the reign of God is among us.
I’ve seen this before — haven’t you? (Go back and watch the communion scene at the end of “Places in the Heart”!)
Communion is a place where angry spouses can begin to release their anger; it’s where people who’ve disagreed over something (think, e.g., about all the things Christians have argued about just about communion itself!) can recognize a greater unity.
Could some of you take a moment to describe your most powerful experiences of communion — especially as a moment of reconciliation?
I grew up with a cool aunt. She was about eight years older than me, and I adored her.
We lived across the pasture from each other and often I made my way under the apple trees to see if she was in.
She always had time for a Monopoly game, and she never tried to hurry the game or rip me off with cutthroat trades. A couple times when I made a bad roll that would have wiped me out, she let me roll again.
She never got tired of sledding down the hill or of playing hide-and-seek.
She took my cousins and me to 007 movies — perhaps a little bit before we were old enough. I still owe her.
In the summer of 1968, just as I was turning twelve she and my grandmother took me to Chicago, playing tunes and preaching liberal politics the whole way. (Can you think of anything significant in Chicago in the summer of 1968?) Once we got there they took me to Wrigley Field to the Cubs-Cardinals game. And when they saw how much fun I had, they took me back the next day.
She decided that her name should be spelled Cathy instead of Kathy. That seemed bold and against-the-grain to me.
I was immersed as a child in her attention and love.
As I remember that attention and love, it makes me sad for all the children who don’t have cool uncles and aunts.
But it also opens up numerous possibilities for the church. I’ve seen how the church can provide spiritual uncles and aunts, grandmas and grandpas for children who need to be the focus of someone’s attention and love. I see it when a university student becomes involved in a Boys/Girls Club; when a high school student forms a friendship with someone much younger; when people who are retired volunteer to read at the elementary schools.
Anyone else have a cool aunt or uncle . . . or someone who, perhaps in the community of faith, became like an aunt or uncle?
“Can the West be re-evangelized? Only if we unlearn our default ethnocentric assumptions about “real” Christianity (our own) and unlearn our blindness to the ways Western Christianity is infected by cultural idolatry. It may be more blessed to give than to receive, but it is often harder to receive than to give. That reverses the polarity of patron and client and makes us uncomfortably aware that what Jesus said to the Laodicean church might apply to us in the West: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Rev. 3:17).”
Want to read more? You can find it here. This excellent piece by Christopher Wright would be an excellent discussion starter for any Bible class, small group, or leaders’ retreat. (Thanks, Jim, for telling me about it!)
Here’s another paragraph to whet your appetite:
“So another piece of unlearning we must do is breaking the habit of using the term mission field to refer to everywhere else in the world except our home country in the West. The language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality. Not only does it perpetuate a patronizing view of the rest of the world as always being on the receiving end of our missionary largesse, but it also fails to recognize the maturity of churches in many other lands.”
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And PLEASE, when you get a chance, read this book review of John Stackhouse’s new Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender
Here, again, is just a taste:
Stackhouse finds, in the church’s changing attitude toward slavery, a proper model for the church’s changing attitude toward women. He points out that while women and homosexuals are never linked in the restrictive passages of the New Testament, women and slaves are. Women and slaves in the early church, freed in Christ, were nevertheless encouraged to observe cultural norms to keep the gospel from disrepute.
But slaves have been freed from that particular cultural norm—or such is the overwhelming consensus today. “In the case of slavery,” Stackhouse writes, “Christians worldwide have come to agree that the social conservatism of the New Testament was a temporary matter.” This was not an agreement reached without struggle; Stackhouse points out that theologians of the 19th century “marshalled powerful, Bible-based arguments” on both sides of the issue. “[A] straightforward interpretation of the passages regarding slavery conveys no obvious condemnation of the institution,” he concludes, “and seems instead to encourage Christians in both roles, master and slave, to stay right where they are and simply behave properly. Yet there is no important Christian leader anywhere in the modern world today who defends slavery.”
Stackhouse argues that the abolition of slavery provides us with a model for the Holy Spirit’s slow, ongoing work in doing away with a sinful, oppressive cultural norm—a change that doesn’t at all undercut the authority of Scripture. Many evangelicals point to thousands of years of patriarchy as proof that patriarchy is an essential part of God’s creation. Yet slavery, which we have now rejected, was as universal as patriarchy, and the Christian church has rightfully rejected it.
Well said!