from Simon

Extravagant God

Excessive

Generous

lavish God …

why do you waste so much time on us?

You create rainbows that no one sees;

shower down intricate separate unique

stunning autumn leaves by the billions

and one at a time

that we greet not with applause

but with complaints of inconvenience.

You place whales beneath fathoms of ocean

singing their plaintive haunting songs

too deep for our ears to hear.

You create fantastic jungles within a square foot of grass

a universe in an atom

breathtaking places that have never been seen or appreciated

by a single human being.

Why are we so bored and dull?

Why do we appreciate water most in the desert

health only during sickness

our friend when he leaves

our love when she dies?

Should we pray for less

for you to ration Your grace

to waste no rainbow?

Forgive us.

You don’t paint rainbows just for us to see

nor make birdsong just for us to hear.

Rebuke our terrible pride

and chastise our deism

that imagines You created only once

long ago

and can’t perceive Genesis now

or Eden here

or what a new day means.

Help us to do two impossible things:

to take it ALL in

(every miraculous atom of it)

and to waste our time on a rose

a place

a time

a person.

Perhaps one will bring us all

full time to eternity

one blackbird to You.

Prodigal God, may we find

a millionth of the joy that clearly is yours

Amen

A few years ago when I first started installing reticulation I planned every job carefully, measured up, costed materials and stuck to the plan. It was a good way to begin as it kept me from making costly mistakes, but I don’t operate that way any more.

Now when I roll up to install a new system I simply make it up as I go, mapping out sprinkler location, the number of solenoids and working around any obstacles. Four years of practice has taken me to a place of automation and confidence in my own sense of ‘what will work’.

I have a feeling I am in a similar place with leadership these days. I remember when we started in youth ministry that I operated largely from a plan, with goals and strategies in place to get to where I wanted to get to. Its a good place to start and a relatively ‘safe’ way to ensure you don’t waste your time. But after 20 years, much like a working in a trade, you have a fair idea of what needs to be done when, what is important and what is inconsequential, issues to fight for and issues to let slide.

It was only today that I was reflecting on the difference in my approach to leadership within a local church and how it is now significantly more intuitive than planned. I think in a past life I would have described it as lazy and disorganised… because it can appear that way, only its not.

The things that once needed long periods of thought seem to come more naturally. The issues I once would have spent days pondering are now more easily resolved and the whole task feels much easier and natural than it once did. Its been said that the best athletes ‘make it look easy’ and while I wouldn’t want to compare myself with the best leaders I do think the same is true for leadership.

I have a hunch that good leaders ‘just know’ what to do and when and how to do it, while less apt leaders are still reading books on the subject and figuring out their plan. Even if a person is a ‘gifted’ leader I still believe there is a competence that comes with experience that simply isn’t there in a younger leader (yes there are a few freaky exceptions to this).

Anyway that’s nothing more than a bit of personal learning and reflection from my time in prayer and work today… Make of it what you will, but I have a feeling I am less likely to be spending days in strategic planning over the next 10 years and more likely to be applying the intuition gained from the previous 20 years to whatever may be the challenge at the time.

i’m still getting used to leading in a different way and occasionally feel the need to justify my existence with some hefty documentation and long meetings… but I think I’ll get over it…

If you follow the church calendar you’d know we are back in ‘ordinary time’, the days and weeks that don’t seem to have any special significance, as distinct from advent, easter etc. Ordinary time can seem quite… well… ‘ordinary’, but for the rest to be special we need to have the ‘ordinary’.

I was meeting with Ryan this morning, our youth pastor at QBC and reflecting that as a church we seem to be in ‘ordinary time’. Its a steady period where things are ticking along and there isn’t much to either get wildly excited about, nor to get madly depressed about. You could go looking for the next hill to climb (as I regularly do) or you could accept that we need these periods as part of our health.

I sense we need ‘ordinary time’ in between the highs and lows just to allow us to experience some regularity and some consistency. I used to detest the ‘ordinary’, but given most of life is extraordinarily ordinary I am learning to value it and the place it holds in both my own personal psyche and our collective psyche.

Its a time to walk steadily and enjoy all around that is good as we wait to hear from God and reflect on what comes next.

So I’ve been wondering how do we know who is a heretic… and who gets to make that call about another?

With the universalism debate taking place lately spurred by Rob Bell’s new book I have been reflecting on what has been disturbing me and I think its the stark way in which a ‘brother’ has suddenly become a ‘heretic’, when he happens to raise questions and possibly even come to the ‘wrong’ conclusions.

I have heard Bell specifically branded a heretic in various places and while I haven’t read the book (and am still in no hurry to) I am intrigued by the way we have handled this issue.

Not well… Not well at all.

Let’s assume Bell is completely totally wrong on the issue of Heaven/Hell. Does that then make him a heretic? Let’s allow that the view he holds may be heretical, but is the man then a ‘heretic’. That’s an enormous slur to hang on someone. If he is right about absolutely everything else but wrong on this is the label actually fair?

Even NT Wright when he speaks says ‘80% of what I say to you today will be true and accurate – 20% will not be true – the problem is that I am not sure which is which’. (I guess he gets the heretic label by certain folks too…)

Geez we’re a nice bunch aren’t we?…

I would tend to assume that by the definition used to make Bell a heretic, we are actually all heretics – we just don’t know what our heresies are – or maybe more importantly, others don’t know what our heresies are, otherwise they would be able to brand us and ‘out’ us.

I’m for truth and coherence in what we believe, but I think the casualty in this debacle has been love.

Love definitely didn’t win…

Next Sunday I’m speaking about what it looks like to live counter-culturally in this comfortable, affluent western world.

If there is anything that has imprinted on me deeply over the last 10 years it has been that the life of faith must look different to the life without faith, otherwise it has no teeth and no one has any reason to investigate it.

I mean, why would you want to follow Jesus if the only shift in your life was that you got busier on Sundays?… As if…

But if there was something compellingly attractive about the life of faith – even if it was a more difficult life in some ways – then maybe people might get inspired.

Its why we called our previous community ‘Upstream’ – derived from the image of a fish swimming against the flow. I think that experience has left a permanent mark on me so that I can’t just roll over and go with flow now.

This week as I was reading about New Monasticism and the various expressions it takes I came across these quotes in Tom Sine’s chapter of New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of the Church and they resonated deeply:

‘I am convinced that the only way we have any hope of authentically embodying something of the new world that is already here is by creating a spectrum of new countercultural communities that repudiate the reality of the empire’ (Tom Sine in New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of the Church p. 74)

‘The future of the church in western culture – and possibly even the western culture itself – depend on a fresh encounter with Jesus. An encounter with his example and teaching that inspires creative and counter-cultural living… that unmasks the powers and gives hope for a different world… and energises hopeful discipleship’ (Stuart Murray Williams in PostChristendom p. 317)

There needs to be hope. There needs to be real genuine hope that the kingdom of God can have a growing present reality or we will simply live in a perpetual state of religious frustration, or we will settle for a mutant form of faith that is little more than folk religion.

I also see the tension of this for those of us who live in middle-class dom. Its easy to beat yourself up and hang guilt trips on people when we begin to speak about counter-cultural living, but I’m convinced guilt is a very poor motivator and actually ends up undermining our best intentions as we don’t learn good healthy motivations for change.

So I’m thinking we need to start with a vision of God’s kingdom – of the earth as God dreamt it would be at creation – and work from there.

But I can see this being a very disturbing message because it will speak to the things we hold so dear and critique them. (See this old post on the Holy Trinity of Suburbia for more of that.)

Its a hard message to give because we are so deeply embedded in this system and not all of it is bad. But its soo soo easy just to go with the flow and soo soo hard to choose to live differently.

Rob Bell has to be one of the biggest names in the worldwide church at the moment. The guy has captured the imagination of an enormous slice of younger ‘new’ evangelicals who are looking for a more articulate way to describe and define their experience of faith.

Bell manages to make a radical following of Jesus sound appealing and desirable rather than just difficult. He is inspiring and captivating in his speaking as well as on occasions being intentionally provocative. This is part of his appeal. He makes you think. He doesn’t just say what everyone else is saying and in similar ways. He dares to ask dangerous questions and in doing so he makes himself vulnerable – very vulnerable to the theological daleks who simply want to exterminate anyone who asks questions, let alone arrives at different conclusions to them.

I’m interested in his latest book ‘Love Wins’, partly because of the theological content, but also because of the stir it has caused already among other Christian leaders – even though the book hasn’t been released. The various critiques of Bell that I have read are very unlikely to have come from a thorough reading of his book as it isn’t due for release on March 29th… so why such a stir?… and based on what?!

Is it really about ‘guarding the gospel’ or is it a fear based reaction to a powerful and influential leader who dares to ask a difficult question – a question that is obviously ‘live’ amongst theological thinkers today. Given the strength of the knee jerk I tend to think its not all from healthy motives.

That question is essentially ‘what becomes of people who die apart from Christ?’ Is it Hell for all for ever, or is there some possibility that God may offer a second chance?…

Its asking the question of whether there is some credence in the idea of universalism in its various garbs. Bell’s short promo video is beautifully provocative and asks some significant questions. I can only guess that this forms the basis for the critique so many have levelled at him. And yet all he does is pose questions… All he does is raise the same reasonable objections that we could expect from any thinking person…

Are we afraid Bell might arrive at non-orthodox conclusions? Are we afraid that he might even teach us something we didn’t know?…

I am grateful for Rob Bell and other provocateurs of his ilk who refuse to simply keep to safe topics and protect their reputation (and speaking schedule). I am firmly convinced we need to have the difficult theological questions raised among the masses and explored more thoroughly.

I don’t know where Rob Bell ends on this stuff…

Unless you’ve read the book you probably don’t either…

But I am curious at the ferocity of the evangelical fear response that refuses to allow someone to question, let alone offer a different perspective. I’m not so sure the response would be so vehement if the author were someone rather more in the suit and tie evangelical mode. Take John Stott for example who describes his view of hell as that of annihilation rather than eternal conscious torment and ask why he hasn’t been hung out to dry. (see Evangelical Essentials pp.318-320)

Seriously, I wonder how we learn if we don’t question.

I wonder how we mature in our theology if we don’t bump against ideas other than our own and really grapple with them – perhaps even admitting that we were wrong… I remember well growing up in a church where spiritual gifts of the ‘pentecostal’ kind were seen to be as coming from satanic origin. I was taught this by people who believed it with all integrity. But I am absolutely convinced that these good people were wrong on this issue.

I like the way NT Wright frames the intro to some of his talks – “80% of what I say to you today will be true and valuable – 20% will be wrong – I just don’t know which bits are which”.

If Wright reckons he’s just ‘80% right’, then chances are others of us are less correct than that and maybe need to take a deep breath before we condemn a brother or sister as a heretic for asking difficult questions.

Let’s read the book, hear Bell out and then see where it goes…

Maybe he’s right (in whatever he believes) but we won’t be able to see that if we already read him thru the lens of a heretic. Let’s give the bloke a fair go…

I liked these – from here

If there’s a phrase or idea that has really set us on our butt as the church it would have to be that of Sunday as ‘feeding time’.

If you’ve been around churches any length of time then I’m sure you will have heard people speak of ‘getting fed’ on Sundays. It’s so accepted now that it rarely gets questioned, but surely we need to keep challenging this idea that actually serves to undermine progress towards spiritual maturity.

Yes you heard me correctly.

If you had an adult child that came back home to ‘get fed’ (once a week) you would surely question what was going on in their minds. First they’d be completely malnourished… but secondly you’d have to look in the mirror and ask ‘what kind of lame job did I do as a parent?!’

Why didn’t I teach my kid to cook?… And why didn’t I teach my kid to take responsibility for their own nutrition?…

I know its not rocket science, but its a deeply ingrained way of thought – that we turn up on Sundays to ‘get fed’ usually by a ‘skilled chef’ who has done some serious preparation and for some (many?) that’s it for the week.

But what if we re-calibrated our understanding of Sunday so that rather than being the one time during the week when we stick our collective snouts in the trough, we saw it simply as the day we ‘eat together as a family’ with the other days being when we eat alone. Then perhaps we would foster better spiritual health in our communities.

Seriously – if the only time you get fed is on a Sunday morning then you’re in bad shape. If you’re a regular reader here (and I know there aren’t many left these days!) then you’d know I have been reflecting recently on the need for a bit more rigour and discipline in our spiritual formation and what’s interesting is that I think many people actually realise they are hungry – and they want it – but they aren’t sure where to start or mabe aren’t equipped to make it happen.

A couple of weeks back I put out the call to our blokes to commit to 6 months of ‘training ourselves to be godly’ i.e. practicing spiritual disciplines and engaging seriously as a community with scripture, prayer and the other more classical disciplines and within a week I had 7 men say ‘count me in’ which I think is absolutely sensational, but also a recognition that we need more than a Sunday roast once a week.

Of course if you know anything about ‘health’ then you’d know that good physical health involves a balance of calorie intake and calorie output. If all we do is get fed then watch out Biggest Loser… So part of the ‘training to be godly’ process is that of practicing service and making it every bit as natural as eating…

So let’s keep disassembling this bizarre nonsensical idea that we turn up on Sundays to get fed and let’s be more focused on teaching one another to cook so that we can actually feed ourselves.

Which idea do you reckon has more biblical currency?…