Here is the first simple question: (you have three choices) Assuming that the poor are central to who we are and what we are called to do, are we going to be a church of the poor, a church for the poor or a church with the poor?
Let me unpack that a little.
OF: If we are a church of the poor that means that the poor are our target. They are the focus of our ministry. Everything we do places the needs of the poor as the congregation as central. The middle class can of course come but we will not be creating ministries for them and most likely they will not feel as comfortable. The poor will. A church of the poor is a church that makes its ministry thrust creating a church that is full of poor people.
FOR: In this approach the key is to gather people (anyone really) who will serve the poor. The point of the community is to bless the poor so that everyone who comes needs to be committed to that goal. It is a church of missionaries to the poor. The church is committed to the poor so that the resources of the church go to equipping and empowering those people to go out and do that ministry. Middle class people could come as long as they were committed to being invested in some way, they have to be for the poor (maybe giving, time, service, leadership, advocacy, etc.). The people who make up the church might not themselves be poor since service to the poor is the defining quality.
WITH: The goal of this kind of church is to create a cross class congregation. To build a church that intentionally brings together the poor and the middle class for relationship, reconciliation and justice. A church like this would have programs for the middle class and the poor but neither would feel the full focus of the church. Rather the focus would feel like education of the middle class, service to the poor among us, and creating a place of worship that is both safe for the poor and makes sense to the middle class.
What do you think? If you had to pick one which one would it be and why?
Sunday, December 03, 2006
opening a thought forum
dearest underground. as the manila team has now been in the philippines for one month, it is time for us to begin the intellectual and ideological journey that we have all set out on. i am going to begin posting on this site some ideas and questions for you to reflect with on with us. this forum will help you to know what it is that we are wrestling with and also for you to contribute to the process. i fully expect God to use each of you to contribut to this process. blog comments do not have to be long (although they certainly can be) but it is meaningful when any of us speak our mind. we are stronger and God is more fully heard when we all share. so stay tuned for more and for what i hope will be some provactive questions.
Friday, February 24, 2006
welcoming new life
tonight as i sat and listened to our house church bible study wrestle with the image of fallen babylon in revelation 18 I had stop and write what I am feeling. I was listening from the kitchen to Jeffrey, who came to Christ 3 weeks calling everyone to a place of awe and depth with God. For three weeks he has devoured the word. learning everything he can about the Bible and he is alive with the implications. He is saying things that i know already. things that i would say. but they sound different coming from him. he is drawing conclusions that feel foggy and distant to me. Profoundly simple ideas that I once knew, really knew, perhaps in a way that you can only know when they seem like life or death. and now, those same concepts, I think I know, or rather i know i used to know.
it occurs to me that there is a kind of knowing that comes through practice and a kind of knowing that comes through remembering the practice. i know that i have sat in the presence of God, i know that i have sat amazed at his inscrutable choice to love me, know me, remain faithful to me, even die for me. i have known that single revelation allowed it to so constrained my heart that i could not find words, and that the words that i did find seemed so simple and inadequate. there is a kind of knowing that Jeffrey has. and i am aware, acutely aware that i need him. that we need him. that it is really Jeffery that is doing the disciple making tonight. and i am the one with the degrees and the experience, and the reputation but we have that stuff all wrong. i have it all wrong.
why do we invite non believers into our homes? into our lives? why is evangelism important? is it, for us, another feather to prominently place in our spiritual caps so that we can say that we are engaged in the most important ministry? it is you know. The most important ministry. but do we understand why? and why it is that God has chosen us, the oh so righteous, to be his method of delivery? why us? Perhaps it is because we are also in need. and the genius of God is to broker the relationship between the long since saved and the soon to be saved because in each his grace for the other waits to be opened like a gift.
surely we offer the words of life, the gospel, the name of Jesus and the story of his coming. our testimony to Jesus is life itself, for one who would hear and heed. but what about us? what is it we need? is it not an encounter with that same savior? is it not an awakening of that same reality? and we share it, we remember it. But more than that we also receive a gift. that gift is awe.
as we have aged we have forgotten. but the new born knows the wonder of life in a way that is more profound than the middle aged. Maturity itself works against our knowing this most important truth. that God is awesome, that his grace is amazing and that his son, our savior is the fairest of 10,000. and so we need the newly born to teach us what they know better than we. we need them to disciple us in what it means to be a disciple, called, amazed, changed, committed. we invite the lost into our lives so that they can find Jesus. and we need them to as much as they need us. Jeffrey has brought new life, new insight, into this home. he is welcome because Jesus is welcome. I am learning more from Jeffrey tonight in a few minutes than i can say. I plead with you, children of God, open your lives to the lost, keep a steady flow of new believers in and out of your home. we need them because we need Jesus.
it occurs to me that there is a kind of knowing that comes through practice and a kind of knowing that comes through remembering the practice. i know that i have sat in the presence of God, i know that i have sat amazed at his inscrutable choice to love me, know me, remain faithful to me, even die for me. i have known that single revelation allowed it to so constrained my heart that i could not find words, and that the words that i did find seemed so simple and inadequate. there is a kind of knowing that Jeffrey has. and i am aware, acutely aware that i need him. that we need him. that it is really Jeffery that is doing the disciple making tonight. and i am the one with the degrees and the experience, and the reputation but we have that stuff all wrong. i have it all wrong.
why do we invite non believers into our homes? into our lives? why is evangelism important? is it, for us, another feather to prominently place in our spiritual caps so that we can say that we are engaged in the most important ministry? it is you know. The most important ministry. but do we understand why? and why it is that God has chosen us, the oh so righteous, to be his method of delivery? why us? Perhaps it is because we are also in need. and the genius of God is to broker the relationship between the long since saved and the soon to be saved because in each his grace for the other waits to be opened like a gift.
surely we offer the words of life, the gospel, the name of Jesus and the story of his coming. our testimony to Jesus is life itself, for one who would hear and heed. but what about us? what is it we need? is it not an encounter with that same savior? is it not an awakening of that same reality? and we share it, we remember it. But more than that we also receive a gift. that gift is awe.
as we have aged we have forgotten. but the new born knows the wonder of life in a way that is more profound than the middle aged. Maturity itself works against our knowing this most important truth. that God is awesome, that his grace is amazing and that his son, our savior is the fairest of 10,000. and so we need the newly born to teach us what they know better than we. we need them to disciple us in what it means to be a disciple, called, amazed, changed, committed. we invite the lost into our lives so that they can find Jesus. and we need them to as much as they need us. Jeffrey has brought new life, new insight, into this home. he is welcome because Jesus is welcome. I am learning more from Jeffrey tonight in a few minutes than i can say. I plead with you, children of God, open your lives to the lost, keep a steady flow of new believers in and out of your home. we need them because we need Jesus.
Monday, February 13, 2006
this is the start of something big.
this is the beginning of something big. i know that because i know what it feels like to be a part of something that is going no where. i know because we were made to know these sorts of things we just rarely get a chance to realize that gift because we are too often tangled in the wiles of our own mediocrity and self centeredness. i for one am tired of only thinking about myself. i am really starting to bore me. i used to be so fascinated by my own seemingly endless neuroses and the fascinating contours of my many quirks. but who cares? i know no one else really does so maybe it is a kind of lucid sanity that i am only now realizing, agreeing with everyone else on planet earth that my intricacies are not that interesting. not to say that God does not care about those intricacies. i actually think he does, but when we are talking about me and God in the same sentence the questions of capacity is screaming to be addressed.
God can care about every hair on my head because he is infinitely capable. he delights to see the micro redemptions going on in me everyday. while at the same time God is not distracted by that, forgetting to care about the lost, or my kids, or rwanda or forgetting to have the sun come up one morning. i, on the other hand, being quite limited in my capacity, tend to be very distracted by my own whining heart. if i am wronged i can spend hours thinking about it, but in the end all that has really happened is i have forgotten my purpose (or perhaps never realized it in the first place).
this is the start of something big because this is big. it is bigger than the individuals who comprise it. they call that synergy. i call it liberation. how long will we live under the tyranny of our own self serving lifestyles. i am very interested in something that will lead my heart and the hearts of our community into the burning center of the heart of God. a place where like Daniel discovered you are not burned up or burned out but actually see God. that is the point i guess. we want to see God. really, we do. but what is so big about the new wine skin is that we want others to see him too, maybe even first.
this is the start of something big because we were made for big. we have to realize that to love the poor and to love the lost and really to love anyone at all ahead of ourselves is an invitation into the character of God. it is an invitation into wholeness. freud was wrong, it is not about your mother or your father (well at least not the one with the little “f”) it is not about what is wrong with you and it is not about analysis. it is about saying yes to the invitation to follow. it is a simple reality that becomes more and more obscured by spiritual aging. we do not mature in Christ because we do not follow him. we only age, stepping everyday closer to spiritual death. but when we follow, we grow, we mature we step away from the lure of selfish gain and are wooed to follow the love that gives itself for its enemy. we are drawn into the courts of royal servanthood in all its grit and splendor. we really don’t need psycho analysis we need psycho liberation and that comes in the shadow of the master.
when i follow him he leads me to a place of service, concern and even sacrifice for others. really anyone will do. but it is especially powerful when it is the poor who become the object of our focus because they are in the end the object of God’s focus and the fulcrum of his liberating initiative in the world. the margins are calling us because Jesus is already there. there are two worlds, the world inside our heads where we are the center even the creator, the diviner of reality. and then there is the everything else world where we are only a part, a beloved and significant part but just a player. in this world outside our heads God is the center, the creator the definition of all things. it is the bigger world. this is the start of something big because it is an invitation to follow Jesus into that big world where he is the Lord and king.
this is the start of something big because people do not usually cooperate on things. not really, not if there is nothing primary in it for them. and yet here we are open to that exact proposition. want to become of part of something that is not about you? we all say yes. and that is big. bigger than you know. it is the triumph of the cross in you, in us. it is the exertion of the power of God to extract us from the current of our culture and to make us into something new. it is big because it is God who is instigating our hearts to act, to join to cooperate. this is big because we already said yes. we are already something special. uncommon commitment is what i am asking for, because in the end it is worship that we are doing. because this is big. but he is bigger.
God can care about every hair on my head because he is infinitely capable. he delights to see the micro redemptions going on in me everyday. while at the same time God is not distracted by that, forgetting to care about the lost, or my kids, or rwanda or forgetting to have the sun come up one morning. i, on the other hand, being quite limited in my capacity, tend to be very distracted by my own whining heart. if i am wronged i can spend hours thinking about it, but in the end all that has really happened is i have forgotten my purpose (or perhaps never realized it in the first place).
this is the start of something big because this is big. it is bigger than the individuals who comprise it. they call that synergy. i call it liberation. how long will we live under the tyranny of our own self serving lifestyles. i am very interested in something that will lead my heart and the hearts of our community into the burning center of the heart of God. a place where like Daniel discovered you are not burned up or burned out but actually see God. that is the point i guess. we want to see God. really, we do. but what is so big about the new wine skin is that we want others to see him too, maybe even first.
this is the start of something big because we were made for big. we have to realize that to love the poor and to love the lost and really to love anyone at all ahead of ourselves is an invitation into the character of God. it is an invitation into wholeness. freud was wrong, it is not about your mother or your father (well at least not the one with the little “f”) it is not about what is wrong with you and it is not about analysis. it is about saying yes to the invitation to follow. it is a simple reality that becomes more and more obscured by spiritual aging. we do not mature in Christ because we do not follow him. we only age, stepping everyday closer to spiritual death. but when we follow, we grow, we mature we step away from the lure of selfish gain and are wooed to follow the love that gives itself for its enemy. we are drawn into the courts of royal servanthood in all its grit and splendor. we really don’t need psycho analysis we need psycho liberation and that comes in the shadow of the master.
when i follow him he leads me to a place of service, concern and even sacrifice for others. really anyone will do. but it is especially powerful when it is the poor who become the object of our focus because they are in the end the object of God’s focus and the fulcrum of his liberating initiative in the world. the margins are calling us because Jesus is already there. there are two worlds, the world inside our heads where we are the center even the creator, the diviner of reality. and then there is the everything else world where we are only a part, a beloved and significant part but just a player. in this world outside our heads God is the center, the creator the definition of all things. it is the bigger world. this is the start of something big because it is an invitation to follow Jesus into that big world where he is the Lord and king.
this is the start of something big because people do not usually cooperate on things. not really, not if there is nothing primary in it for them. and yet here we are open to that exact proposition. want to become of part of something that is not about you? we all say yes. and that is big. bigger than you know. it is the triumph of the cross in you, in us. it is the exertion of the power of God to extract us from the current of our culture and to make us into something new. it is big because it is God who is instigating our hearts to act, to join to cooperate. this is big because we already said yes. we are already something special. uncommon commitment is what i am asking for, because in the end it is worship that we are doing. because this is big. but he is bigger.
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