Passing on Grace

Easter has come and gone, and it was a blast to experience for me even though it was so hard to get everything done and prepared on time with school and baby. I can’t say everything went smoothly, but what happened was very meaningful, at least for me. We had a mock Ash Wednesday service (mock because it’s the right service on the wrong day), a Good Friday service, a baptismal service Sunday, and then Easter itself. Partway through the week, as I was meeting with the people about to be baptized and planning Sunday I really realized something.

I am not worthy of what I have been given. Not only has grace been given to me for forgiveness of sins, but even my position is grace. I was baptizing people who I had not led to Jesus. But I was still given the honor of ushering them into the faith. Somehow I have been allowed to give communion and pass out God’s grace to people who barely even know me. I watched people’s sins literally burned to ash and then placed that same ash on their foreheads, telling them that all that’s left of their past is the cross marking their lives. I don’t deserve that. I am not worthy of administering grace like that. But as I assure people of God’s grace in their lives I am experiencing it myself.

It is so powerful to administer the sacraments, to make the cross on someone’s forehead with their ashen sins, knowing they are seeking forgiveness and knowing that they take this sign as evidence that God forgives and as proof that they are Christian. It is amazing to be able to mark a believer as a Christian in a physical way and have them accept it. It is powerful to dip someone under, knowing that your arms are God’s arms to them as you bring them out of the water and into their new life. I am so humbled by what I am called to do, so thankful.

I have never before experienced so fully how amazing grace is, how awesome faith is, as I did this Holy Week. In a very real sense we experience grace most when we give it to others, and we can sense our own faith when we are sharing in the ancient symbols with others. I know this is usually a pastoral duty, but I really want to share this feeling with others. I want to create experiences where all Christians can take the grace we have all been given, and pass it on to another, while at the same thing receiving it from someone else as well.

When everyone was administering the ashes to another, and receiving them as well, I could see how each person was passing on the assurance of God’s forgiveness to another, and was bowing expectantly as another assures then that their sins are gone as well. I was very moved as I watched the ashes pass through the crowd. But that is such a rare experience for Christian laypeople. It is so rare for us to be able to assure each other of grace in practical, physical ways. None of us are worthy to do that, none of us. But someone has to, and it is one of the most powerful and humbling experiences any of us can ever have. That is what I want to do with all believers in my church, make grace real, make faith physical and universal. .

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Britain and the Death of Christianity

I am a student of history, and the more I study the more I realize that situations in the past can shine a very bright light on what is going on today, and even on what will happen in the future. Take Christianity in Britain for example.

The Roman Empire became Christian, and everyone who was Roman was assumed to be Christian. Fairly soon, it infiltrated the culture on every level. That included the culture of Britain. As the Roman Empire took over Britain, the people naturally assumed that being Christian and being Roman were the same thing.

When the Roman Empire was doing great, people in Britain flocked to the Christian banner, and Christianity reigned in southern England for several hundred years (200 CE at it was already there). It looked like it had really taken hold and would last. But as soon as the Roman Empire started to crumble, so did Christianity. The locals saw the two as identical and so as Roman culture crumbled, so did Christianity. Within a terribly small space of time Christianity was gone from almost all of Britain (post 400 CE with the legions leaving), and would remain missing for about hundreds of years. People had not accepted Christianity, they had accepted Roman culture, and without the Roman culture there was no reason for anyone to be a Christian. Some pockets remained, but the majority was gone.

I think we see the same thing happening in America today. American ideals have been founded on Puritan work practices and Christian ethical systems. It has been expected for 200 years that if you are American you are Christian. To be one is to be the other. Christian leaders have encouraged this by trying to bring about legislative change in the name of Christianity. We also celebrate secular holiday’s more than religious ones (how many times have you celebrated the fourth of July in church, and when was the last time you remembered Pentecost, or ascension Sunday?) and rely on people’s patriotism to bring them into church. We have made Christianity and American culture synonymous.

But now the culture is changing. It is no longer based on the same ethical, political, or economic system as it once was. Postmodernism has changed the very definition of truth in our culture. So what should be the Christian response? Some believers have been trying to reclaim the old culture in order to reclaim the prestige and the power that Christianity had in years past. But if we look at Britain I think we see that is a bad idea.

Christianity is more than a political idea. It is more than an ethical system, and it is more than any one country or culture. That includes America. We do not need to reclaim the lost “glory years” of American Christianity. What we need to do is to make sure that people know Christianity is not American and vice versa. Only if we can show that our God is real no matter what is going on in the world do we have a chance of surviving the cultural storms.

Unfortunately, many Christians are living like the Romans in Britain, and cannot see that there is a difference between their culture, their nation, and their faith. But the more we try and make those two different things the same the more likely it is that Christianity in America will go the way of Christianity in Britain so long ago, and die out as the culture and politics change. And that is not something I am willing to see happen.

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My Daughter and My Finger

Sorry about not posting now, but I became a father last week, a very odd, wonderful, tiring, frustrating, exhilarating feeling. Some of what my little girl does I was told to expect, and some of it completely catches me off guard. Her first day in the world I was holding her on my lap and just went to stroke her face. Instead of rubbing against my finger, or moving away, she rolled into it, grabbed my finger tip in her little mouth and started sucking like mad. I was so surprised I didn’t do anything for a little bit, I just sat there.

I knew babies breast fed, of course, but I had no idea how instinctive their latching and sucking instincts were. I was completely caught off guard. In a moment I got my bearings and tried to pull my finger out of her mouth. It was actually hard to do. She had such a grip on my finger that I was a little worried about hurting her to be honest. I couldn’t easily remove that finger, it really took a bit of effort. I thought that once she understood she wasn’t getting anything from my finger she would let go, but no luck. She didn’t care if she was getting anything from it, she just knew she needed to be sucking on something and was hoping that if she sucked on everything coming her way she would get something from it. I just sat and marveled at how naïve my daughter is. But then I started thinking about my job as pastor and realized that the Church often does the exact same thing. We grab at whatever fad is coming our way, whatever idea has the label “Christian” on it, and hope that it fills our needs.

But most of the time those things don’t really help at all. Or they help for a time, but they don’t feed us in the long haul. But do we get rid of them? Of course not. We just suck harder, trying to get some food from something that simply does not feed us. And so we are sometimes left with service ideas, songs, rituals, and entire ministries in the Church that do not feed us at all, but we’re like my little daughter, still sucking away at my finger, not even knowing if it gives us food or not.

Unlike my daughter, though, we should be able to know what feeds us and what doesn’t, at least after we try it for a while. We need to take a long look at what we do, both as individuals, and as churches, and think about what actually feeds us and what does nothing more than fill our mouths without giving us any spiritual food in return. I can pull out my finger from my baby daughter, but no one except us will stop part of the church that doesn’t feed us. We have to release the fingers in our lives and try and find where God is really giving us food, emphasize that, spend time with those things.

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Holy Days

Easter is almost upon us again, and I have no idea what we’re doing about it. Easter is the holiest day of the year, more holy than even Christmas to believers. It is the day when our salvation was made real, when our lord came back from the dead to guide us into true life. It is sacred. However, throughout my life I have rarely experienced the holy on Easter Sunday.

I want to change that. I want to find a way to make the holy relevant to my people, and find some way we can grasp how special Easter is. The problem is that I have no idea how to do that. When I went looking for ideas of Easter services, I found something very disturbing. Almost all of the ideas I found were about how to get people to show up at church. They were about mass mailings, signs, handouts, and gimmicks. Many of the ideas revolved around giving out gifts and promotions, raffles even and drawings, to bribe people into coming to church on Easter. Nearly every site I looked at talked about how to use giving gifts as an effective way of getting people to attend church and return. Most sites also included ways of making the service more “seeker sensitive,” removing all elements of the holy in an effort to get more people in the church.

I understand being sensitive to others, but Easter, our holiest day of the year, should be the one day where we are unapologetically Christian. It should be the day where we should that our roots are deep in history and our branches touch heaven itself. Easter should be the last day that we sell out on, not the first.

If there is something real about what we do, then this is the day we show it. Easter is holy. How can we convince anyone that there is anything sacred about our faith if we profane the holiest day of our year.

If we put getting more people in the pews at a greater priority than God we have a problem. We say God comes first, but quite often it is numbers that we worship. But if there is one day where we need to show that we are not just putting on a show but giving thanks to our God it is Easter.

The problem is I am not really sure how, because almost all I know is the show.

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Waiting for Birth

Right now I am anxiously awaiting the birth of my first child, a daughter. In fact, I have been waiting expectantly for weeks now. My wife was having preterm labor for months now, and when we finally got her off the anti-labor medication we naturally assumed the end would come soon. That was two and a half weeks ago. My wife has been having frequent and painful contractions ever since then, but no baby. After two weeks of pain, turmoil, waiting, and anxiety, we are both so ready for this baby to be born that we could, and periodically do, scream.

You’d think that as the time continues to draw closer to our daughter being born we would be getting more and more excited in anticipation. But with all of the pain and false starts we are just getting more and more jaded and frustrated and willing to give up one it all. We know that our daughter has to come sometime. There is a definite maximum date that she can stay unborn, but because we have been waiting so long and expecting so often we are getting frustrated instead of excited.

I think many Christians are like my wife and I right now, waiting for a new birth and getting frustrated because they don’t see if fully yet. We want to be changed, want to be reborn in the image of God, but the longer it takes, the more pain and hassle it causes, the more false starts we have, the harder it is to be excited for it. Our patience dies away and we are just annoyed that it hasn’t happened yet, or even lose faith that it will happen at all.

There are little changes in my wife that continually show us that change is coming, just coming slowly. And with our little one kicking away inside of her it is hard to forget that something is happening. That isn’t in question. What we so often have a problem with is the timing. We want it now, not later.

Don’t lose hope that change is coming. Look at your life and if you are walking with God you will be able to see little changes happening all throughout your life that points to a new life coming out in you. Little kicks and jabs that you never felt before, evidence that God is working in us. The problem is that we take our eyes off what is going on now and can only see what we want to happen in the future.

My daughter will be born. We are being changed. But what is happening in us now is what needs to happen before God can work the next step in our change. We cannot rush it anymore than my wife and I can encourage our daughter to come early. Instead, if we want to avoid being frustrated and giving up, we need to focus on the changes happening right now in our lives, and encourage those changes to continue and grow so that we can move on to the next step in our new birth with Christ. This step might not be as glorious as we want, and it might be more painful than we would like, but it is necessary, and it is changing us into Christ’s image.

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Counting the Numbers

When I first started training for the pastorate I thought it would be spending time with people every minute, glorious time of prayer with God, and lots of deep spiritual conversations with people until 2 in the morning. I never envisioned the paperwork. I never thought about the numbers I would have to deal with. As a pastor I have to report to my DS (a good man, which I am ever so grateful for) how many conversions, baptisms, church memberships, and sanctification experiences happened in our church. I also need to keep track of monthly finances (though only in the loosest of senses here, we have an awesome treasurer), monthly attendance, how many times I preach, how many visitations I made, and everything else I do.

Everything, from the number of people in bible studies to the amount of money we gave to missions is recorded and tabulated. And that’s just for the district. How the district thinks I am doing as a pastor and what they expect from the church are dependent on those numbers I give them. And then there are all the numbers that count online. I keep track of how many people view the wiki each day, what edits happen, who visits my facebook, who visits my myspace, how many people viewed my video, how our church is doing on goodsearch, and everything else you can imagine. There are more numbers running through my head any given day than I can count. And the fact that I am trying to count only reinforces how much numbers affect my life.

And here’s the thing, by the time I am done counting all of the numbers I need to, the first ones I counted have changed again and can be counted again. I can spend my entire day just keeping track of numbers without actually doing anything. But I’ll be quite busy. And because numbers are one way of knowing how different things are doing I could even justify an entire day spent counting as being necessary. But I wouldn’t actually get anything done, I would only be understanding what has already happened or what is happening. I would not be making a single thing happen.

In a more abstract sense I think a lot of us are in that place with our Christian walk. It’s really easy to learn about it, and we can spend our entire lives learning about what God did in the past, can do in the future, and is doing now, without doing a single thing ourselves. But the stories are so compelling, the numbers so important, surely aren’t we are justified if we don’t actually add to those numbers ourselves, but just marvel at them as they go by? Aren’t we allowed to learn about what God has been doing? Yes, of course, but at some point we have to take a break from learning and actually do. Do something worthy of someone else wanting to count it, and then encourage that person to act as well.

But why are numbers so important to begin with? What is the draw that keeps us watching for God and not acting with God? What is going on where I could spend several hours refreshing different web pages and feel justified in doing so?

I think there are two things that hold me back personally; and perhaps you as well. First, there is a deep but hidden insecurity that is seeking to try and justify my existence. I am constantly finding myself trying to discover if I was successful at something, if something worked, it people care about what I have been working on. And so I try and justify my existence with numbers instead of with my worth as a child of God. The second thing that prompts me to look and not act is that I am afraid. I am afraid I will fail, afraid I don’t know enough, afraid I will miss what God wants me to do. And so I don’t do anything, but try to learn more and more until the fear is gone.

But here is the truth. The fear will always be there. Every time we act it is scary, no matter how much we know. And every time we try to find ourselves in what we do and not in how God sees us we will always be insecure. No amount of training or numbers will fix that. I can have the best numbers in the world, and it won’t change who I am. I can have the most training anyone has ever had and it won’t mean I am unafraid of acting. Faith is when we step out and act anyway. Faith is when we trust that God’s vision of us is the right one and step away from the numbers, away from our fears and insecurities and act.

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Follow the King

Well I finally posted it I've been working on an animation for well over a year and while the audio isn't anywhere near done the video is completed. I've been delaying posting it because I was hoping to get the audio done but that doesn't look like it'll happen.

So here it is, a modern day parable in lego. It's the story of a king who hs to reclaim his people from a terror they don't even recognize. Check out the Youtube link on the left, or download the better quality version at the link at the top of this post. Hope you all like it, let me know what you think. Oh, and make sure to watch it all the way through, even after the credits.

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