Pet Peeve #328

I'm making this t-shirt so that the next time I take my children out of the house alone again, the first words from anyone else we encounter will be something other than the obvious.

Wiley E. Coyote

So I'm going for a walk this morning at about 6:30 and I hear this incredibly freaky sound coming from the greenspace across from our neighborhood. It literally sounded like a pack of wolves howling. But...naw. So I go on with my walk and later on decide to walk some trails in the greenspace. I come to a place that is sort of a wide-open area used for water runoff. On the other side of the woods, about 300 yards away, I see four, from what I could tell, wolves walking in a straight line into the woods. What the!? Wolves in Abacoa?

So I called Busch Wildlife Sanctuary this morning to see if I was dreaming or should I be worried about going on nature walks with the kids. Turns out, there is a known pack of coyotes that lives in Abacoa. The woman at Busch Wildlife was jealous that I had actually heard them howl. The development has kind of squeezed down their territory, but they live pretty much undisturbed in the greenspace. Nice!

The other day...

I went to the park with the kids. We had three friends along with us from school and another mom. It was a beautiful day. The kids are in heaven when they are outside and it was as if I felt a shift happen. It was very subtle but clear as day. Hudson slid down the slide by himself. He has been trying for a week or so, but this day he conquered his fear and went for it. And with that he did not stop doing it over and over again for 2 hours until his body was so tired he could barley climb the stairs. Jackson and the 4 other boys were in their glory playing chase and Chloe was keeping up as if she was 4 herself. The boys lookout for her and push her on the swing and make room for her in their fort. Jackson tolerates it but all of the other boys are either the baby in the family or don't have a sister so the see Chloe as a treat. I think it is good for Jackson to have that perspective. I actually talked to the other mom for more than 3 half finished sentences and the kids played heartily without fighting. My heart wasn't in my throat at the thought of one of them falling off of something or the baby running out into the street. It was the most relaxing park trip I have ever had. I look forward to many, many more. This parenting things gets to be a whole lot of fun when your kids can actually do things other than cry and wake up in the middle of the night and they don't need you to physically carry them from point A to point B.

Staff and Stuff

Brant brings up an interesting question over at Camp Krusty:

"If all the paid pastor positions in all the churches in the U.S. were suddenly de-funded, would the Kingdom suffer?"

I would just comment on his blog, but I'm too lazy to sign up for the xanga thingy.  Anyway, today I spent the afternoon walking around an old Target building that is being renovated to house a satellite campus of the local megachurch.  Our company happens to be the mechanical engineers on the project and I needed to gather some more information with my co-worker Jack before we start designing a duct system.  But beforehand, Jack and I were quietly eating lunch and struck up a conversation about our common lack of motivation for this project.

Now Jack is a no-B.S. good ol' boy from Oklahoma.  He hasn't read any of the books a lot of the readers of this blog have read or even heard of the "emerging church".  He could care less about megachurches or The Purpose Driven Life (which he hadn’t even heard of).  He likes common sense answers to common sense questions.  So during lunch, Jack and I were discussing how a project like this gets off the ground, who pays for it, and what is involved in maintaining a mostly-volunteer organization to run things.  

The answer to those questions begins to point to an answer to Brant's question above.  Large churches get large and build large buildings by very well meaning people, godly people.  The energy level in a church embarking on a project like the one working on is incredible.  People get really, really excited about buildings for some reason.  When people get excited, they pull out their pocketbooks.  Money flows from all manner of sources and things get paid for.  Then, in a flurry of desperate activity, the building gets built and the church moves in.  Staff are hired and people are brought through a process to help recognize where they "fit in".  (That's when I brought up PDL and Warren's bases).  

All of this activity and excitement is wonderful to be a part of.  It is thrilling to feel like you are a part of a church that is "on the move."  But this is what begins to point to Brant's question and possibly why he is asking it.  All of the activity, the excitement, the buildings, the staff, the meetings, the programs...what of it really constitutes the essence of church?  If all of those staff people had to find other jobs for some reason or there was no building to go to, what would happen to all that energy and excitement?  Would ministry, specifically the ministry of God’s kingdom - where what he wants done is done - stop happening?  Well...I don't think so.

Now, I am not arguing that paid staff people are worthless.  I am not arguing that churches should do away with their staff and their buildings and everything else.  It just seems to me, and Jack agreed by the way, that maybe sometimes we get a little too wrapped up in that stuff to see what following Jesus is really all about.  

Isn't it interesting how many of the megachurch pioneers are now investing huge amounts of time and resources in issues like the AIDS crisis in Africa and third world debt relief.  I wonder if it has less to do with a theological shift and more to do with boredom.  So you can build a church of 20-gazillion people.  Who cares?  What about the places of pain in the world that no one else cares about?  All that energy and influence can go a long way in helping to bring God’s kingdom to those hurting places.

So no, the kingdom wouldn’t suffer the loss of paid staff positions or massive church buildings.  It grows – unrestricted - through simple and everyday people recognizing places of pain and joining God on his mission to fix the world.

I think Coach J said it best 20 or so millenia ago:

“Jesus sent his twelve harvest hands out with this charge: "Don't begin by traveling to some far-off place to convert unbelievers. And don't try to be dramatic by tackling some public enemy. Go to the lost, confused people right here in the neighborhood. Tell them that the kingdom is here. Bring health to the sick. Raise the dead. Touch the untouchables. Kick out the demons. You have been treated generously, so live generously. Don't think you have to put on a fund-raising campaign before you start. You don't need a lot of equipment. You are the equipment, and all you need to keep that going is three meals a day. Travel light.”

By the way, just for the heck of it, when I googled "Palm Beach Gardens church" tonight, our pee-wee group was the fourth church listed.  The other three range in size from 800 – 15,000.  We have about 30.  

We live in a new world, Dorothy.

Get your charisma on!

These are two guys I know and love. One I have known for almost 10 years, the other almost three. They are both very intelligent, thoughtful men who love Jesus, who know their bibles, and live this stuff out. They also got some Holy Spirit mojo going on:

Dreams and prophetic impressions

Becoming charismatic (again)

Hope

A few minutes ago I was at the Unholy Empire of *$s reading one of the workbooks from The Center for Parish Development called The Church and the Reign of God.  A wonderful piece of work.  Anyway, in one of the discussion questions, I came across this dynamite sentence:

“The mission of the church is to inspire hopes, to support hopes, to give back to people the capacity for dreaming.”

Put that in the context of God’s kingdom and his vision for the world and you get a seriously loaded sentence.  Recently I’ve had a few conversations about the subversive nature of hope.  Despair seems to be much in fashion these days.  Depending on your political leanings, economic outlook, or theological persuasion, it can make a lot of sense to welcome despair as a blanketing healing balm.  However, the community of Jesus is in its very nature a community of hope.  How do we reconcile the Story of God’s seemingly endless provision and rescue for the hopeless and lost (the kingdom which is already) with the experience of pain regarding the state of the world and honesty concerning suffering (the kingdom which is not yet)?  I believe the answer rests in a community of Jesus-followers who recognize that hope is one of the most contrarian tools they have.

Now I’m tipping my hand a bit on what the second part of my community post is going to be about.  But back to hope and how it relates to missional communities.  Many times over the past four years I have recognized that one of my primary roles and callings of our local faith community has been to create a place where dreaming (imagination) is possible.  Church as consumer product does not foster imagination; it contributes to the maintenance of a culture in pursuit of comfort and happiness.  A church with an imagination can be a pretty uncomfortable place.  So we have tried to forsake the comforts of ecclesiastic certainty by returning to our roots – becoming a community that tries to ask good questions and goes on a journey to discover answers in the context of real life.  We are forced to deal with each other’s doubts, fears, and hang-ups and love each other through the process.  And every once in a while (God willing), the hope of the kingdom is allowed to break through the despair and such a light fills the darkness that we catch a glimpse of the way humanity is supposed to be.

Later on in the workbook I was reading tonight, there was a quote from John Howard Yoder:

“The church is called to be now what the world is called to be ultimately.”

That’s a tall order, isn’t it?  Thankfully, we are not called to achieve this through our own efforts.  “Hope” that subverts status quo despair is not manufactured, it is given.  However, it is not given indiscriminately or devoid of context.  Kingdom hope springs from the soil of concrete communities of men and women who make room for the uncomfortable silence of waiting.  Will He really show up and make things right?  Can we imagine it?

Cool Resource

Way, way back in good ol' 2000 I read Missional Church for the first time. Since then, it's been a constant "what did they say about ____?" kind of resource. Some of the authors of that book are a part of The Center for Parish Development which has been around since 1968. On their site, you can purchase quite a few articles and workbooks (bible studies) aimed at helping a church transition into a more integrated and missional structure and worldview. T bought a few of these resources lately and we've been trading them back and forth.

We're finding out a few interesting things. First, we've discussed / tried to practice over the past four years a lot of what is contained in those documents. Not surprizing since Missional Church was a big influence on us early on. But it is helpful having your thinking on a subject confirmed by people a lot smarter and experienced than you. Next, we're finding that the workbooks in particular make great discussion material for our group. If you're anything like us, sometimes it's difficult to move from "Hey, I really dig this idea!" to "Here's what this idea means and why it matters to us." to "What should we do about it?" Thoughtful resources such as these make that movement towards action a little easier.

Anyway, we're excited about exploring some more of this stuff and I thought I'd pass it along.

Engineering at its Finest

This is the kind of stuff I would love to support if I had 5 million dollars to donate:

Low-cost lamps brighten the future of rural India

Community

Something I haven't blogged about in a long time. After living in West Palm for about 4-1/2 years and being with a small community of faith during that time, I find myself re-asking all the same old questions about community all over again. Yeah, I've read Bonhoeffer and gone through all the phases from idealism to disillusionment. I have friends - that is not the problem. I have people I love that I gather with on Sundays to worship and eat together - that is not the problem. I have neighbors that take out each other's trash and come out on our back alleyway to grill and watch the kids ride their bikes - that is not the problem. The problem is, does any of it constitute community? Or more specifically, is it the kind of community that is part and parcel with the kingdom of God?

I don't want to make this a post about theories on community. Rather, I want to offer some 'field observations' and see how they line up with earlier theories I've thought about. This will probably be a blog in two posts - the first dealing with barriers to community and the second dealing with opportunities.

First of all, it's fairly obvious that lack of proximity is a barrier to community, but I do not think it is the only barrier. In our area, the expensive housing market makes it difficult to choose to live together. For example, if a group of families decided to buy houses close to one another, they would be highly restricted location-wise by cost. If one family needed a four-bedroom house and the other a two-bedroom house, the four-bedroom family's options would be very limited (unless they were the rich family). Co-housing is also complicated. Scarcity and cost are issues along with the lack of a well-defined urban center. So we are left with a proximity that will always be just far enough to make natural, everyday contact a great challenge.

Another barrier to community is our faith community itself. It is still tempting to think of those people we worship with as the only ones we get real about our relationship with God. Oddly enough, it's often people outside the faith community we connect most deeply with - an old friend who lives in another state, a family member, a co-worker who attends another church. It is all too natural to shut off our transparency when we are apart from that group of people with whom we are so used to being transparent. We also still default to our segregated ways. We get spiritual at church with church people and act different with neighbors or co-workers. This is so natural in our culture, we do it without any thought.

A third barrier is our family responsibilities. My children are very needy right now. They require constant attention from sun-up to sun-down. We give tons of energy and focus to them and frankly, there's not much left over. What I do have left, I usually reserve for my wife first and then friends and family after that. So finding energy for broader relationships is a little like searching for change in the couch cushions. Sometimes you get lucky. Often you just get crumbs.

A final barrier is, well, just simply me. It's the plague of modernity - we want closeness without all the messiness of being close. It's far easier to manage our friendships and shield our isolation. I'm always a little tentative in asking questions about community because I know the answers might hit me right at the point of commitment. You know commitment? It's right where theory and ideas melt like wax before the awesome power of having to die to self. Yikes.

Well, I don't think I could write the second part of this post now even if I wanted to. I'd appreciate any thoughts from anyone who still reads this blog. If you'd like to email, try using my work address mike at rgdengineers dot com. I'm much more reliable on that account.