How do you best connect with God

Here is the link to the Spiritual Pathways Assessment.

The Relationship Between Music and Worship

Worship is much more than singing. So often we associate music with worship, and, therefore, if we don't sing, or if we don't connect with God through music like some people do, we feel a little inferior. Are we missing something? My hope for this Sunday evening is that we leave understanding a little more about what worship truly is.

Saying all that...today I read this post about singing. I agree with the author that there is something about a community gathering to sing praises and adoration to God, our Creator and Father, and to Jesus, our Savior and King. It's a good read.

Church & Culture Pt. 5

"How is Christianity to be distinctive in a culture where everyone assumes themselves to be Christian?"

This is a very important question for us. I wasn't faced with this question near as much in the bay area as I have been here. I'm discovering that even in our neighborhood, this question has to be asked.

The following are excerpts from a post I read this morning that deals with this question.

This was the context in which I grew up. To put it charitably, most folks in my home town thought of themselves as Christians. Some evidently were by their profession and their lives. Some, no doubt, were not. But, most people didn't condemn themselves or think so poorly of themselves to self-identify as "practical atheist" or "unbeliever." Even the poolhall hustlers and the alcoholics claimed they knew God, "always said their prayers," and the "God knows their heart."

Many assumed the label "Christian" because they were certainly not practitioners of any other religion. They were not, for example, muslims. In fact, until I returned home during my sophomore year in college as a professing muslim, very few people had ever seen a muslim. No, everyone at least believed in some way, and that made most everyone "Christian" since that was either a family or community legacy bequeathed to all. Nominalism.

The more I think about the situation, the clearer it is to me that in trying to reflect genuine Christian distinctiveness in a nominal Christian culture definitions are critical. The root problem might be described as a failure to define "Christian" and Christianity in terms that bring into sharper contrast regenerate and unregenerate life, in terms that stress spiritual conversion, faith, grace, love and hope over and against moralism, patriotism, and spiritual relativism.

Insights on Worship

Greg Laurie writes on worship in today's Harvest Devotional:

A number of words in the Bible are translated "worship." The one used the most often means "to bow down and do homage." Another biblical word for worship means "to kiss toward." Put the two words together, and you will have a good idea of what real worship is. We worship God because He is worthy. In doing so, we bow down and pay homage to Him. That speaks of reverence and respect for God. But we also "kiss toward" Him, which speaks of tenderness and intimacy.

Worship

I have been studying on the topic of worship for this Sunday evening. This morning Mandy came into my office and told me that I needed to see what Adam was doing. As I walked into the kitchen I heard our Hillsong United CD playing. Adam, dressed in only a diaper, was walking around his room waving a Memphis Grizzlies Flag. It reminded me of the story of David dancing before the Lord (2 Samuel 6). What a great picture of worship!

Things Break

By Tobin Marsh

This side of the resurrection
In the brokenness, defeat and sorrow
Is where lie all the deep lessons of my life.

Nothing wants to be broken,
And yet everything must be broken.
To never break is to lie stagnant and eventually die.

Things break.

I break now and again.
Picking up the pieces can be an act
Of profound faith.

Source: Servant Stories

Church & Culture Pt. 4

I'm learning more and more about the church's role in shaping culture. Mark Batterson, a pastor in Washington, DC, has a good post on this subject. He gives four ways that the church engages culture.

1. Ignore it
   The more we ignore culture the more irrelevant we’ll become. And if the church ignores the culture, the culture will ignore the church.
2. Imitate it
   We can imitate culture, but imitation is a form of suicide. Originality is sacrificed on the altar of cultural conformity. If we don’t shape the culture, the culture will shape us.
3. Condemn it
   We’ve got to stop pointing the finger and start offering better alternatives. If the church condemns the culture, the culture will condemn the church.
4. Create it
   We can compete for culture by creating culture. In the immortal words of the Italian artist and poet, Michelangelo: criticize by creating. At the end of the day, the culture will treat the church the way the church treats the culture.

We've all seen these first three ways of engagement, and have come away wanting something more, something different. You can read his entire post here.

Jim Collins on the Best Advice He Ever Received

I read this article last week, and have been thinking about it ever since. Jim Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great, shares about a conversation he had with Peter Drucker shortly after Built to Last came out. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

“The huge thing he said to me was, ‘Do you want to build ideas to last, or do you want to build an organization to last?’

“I said I wanted to build ideas to last.

“He said, ‘Then you must not build an organization.’

“His point was, the moment you have an organization, you have a beast to feed–this army of people. If you ever start developing ideas to feed the beast rather than having ideas that the beast feeds, your influence will go down, even if your commercial success goes up. Because there’s a huge difference between teaching an idea and selling an idea. In the end, what are you in a battle for? You’re battling to influence the thinking of powerful, discerning people. If you ever abuse that trust, you can lose them. So the moment that arrow changes direction, you’re dead.

“He said something else important: ‘The real discipline comes in saying no to the wrong opportunities.’ Growth is easy. Saying no is hard.

Alcohol & the Bible

Last night our church had a great discussion on what the Bible has to say about alcohol. For those of you who want to read more, I'm posting links to some of the papers and articles I've read over the past few weeks.

Alcohol, Abstention & Redemption

Alcohol, Acts 29, & the SBC

Beer and the Bible

Christianity & Alcohol (wikipedia)

Christians & Alcohol - Four Myths (pdf link)

Good Wine and Glad Hearts

Link to Southern Seminary's audio on this (along with some commentary)

SBC Resolution on Alcohol

The Bible and Intoxicating Beverages

Wine in the Bible

What Does the Bible Say about Alcohol - A Systematic Study

New friends

This weekend we got to spend a little time with Lindsay's church planting friends from Vancouver, Kyle and Anna Martin. Here's a link to the new church they've started.

Easter Egg Hunt

Our first annual Easter Egg Hunt turned out to be a success, despite having to move it to our house because of the cold weather. We had around 30 people, including some new neighbors who we had not met yet. We had the actual hunt outside, but everything else was inside. We had games, food, lots of eggs, and even a surprise visit from the Easter Bunny!

Not a Chance Event

By John Howard Yoder

The cross of Christ was not an inexplicable or chance event, which happened to strike him, like illness or accident. To accept the cross as his destiny, to move toward it and even to provoke it, when he could well have done otherwise, was Jesus' constantly reiterated free choice; and he warns his disciples lest their embarking on the same path be less conscious of its costs.

Source: The Politics of Jesus

More on Global Warming

Here are some recent links on the issue of the church's role in global warming...

Jerry Falwell's sermon, "The Myth of Global Warming"

James Dobson calls for Richard Cizik to resign as vice-president of the National Association of Evangelicals


I read this and shudder. There's a part of me that just wants to ignore these guys and hope they go away. On the other hand, though, I do believe that this is an issue that the church needs to be informed on.

If you're interested, you can read an earlier post on Cizik from a Fast Company article.

The role of prayer in our church

This past Sunday night Jason taught from 2 Corinthians 3 & 4. It seemed to me that the crux of the passage, and the evening, came with verse 4 of chapter 4: “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” I think that God wanted us to camp out on that verse for a little while. Do we believe this verse? If so, what do we do?

First and foremost, it heightens our awareness that we are totally and completely dependent on God for salvation. Verse 14 of chapter 3 says that only Christ can remove the veil. There was a sudden realization within our group that we don't really pray, or at least we don't pray as we should. How desperate are we to see the veil lifted so that our friends can see "the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ?" The good news is that God wants this desire to grow in us. I thank God for reminding us of this.

The second thing I came away with was that though darkness is all around us, God has created us to be light in the darkness: "For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ". A room can be completely dark, but one small light can penetrate this darkness. This again is God's grace. We may not be much, but we are light. We may not be many, but we are light.

In Matthew 5:14-16, Jesus said, "You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."


If you want to read more on this passage, here is a great sermon by John Piper called "What Makes the Good News Good?"

Marks of a Missional Church

This guy is a prof at Fuller Seminary. This appeared in his blog over a year ago, but I just now stumbled upon it this morning (at about 4:30 - I couldn't sleep!)

1. What are the marks of churches (people) who live missionally?
They no longer see the church service as the primary connecting point with those outside the community. Connecting with those outside happens within the culture, by insiders to that culture who express the gospel through how they live.

If that question and response got you thinking, check out the rest of the post.

The Guts and the Gutters

By Edwina Gateley

We cannot know the God of the guts and the gutters unless we have traveled deep enough within ourselves to touch and experience our own guts - where God lives, and unless we have reached out far enough beyond ourselves to smell and sit in the gutters - where God squats.

Source: I Hear a Seed Growing

The Ballad of Big Mike

This week a few of us have been talking about the state of public schools here in Memphis. Yesterday I started reading (listening to, actually) a book by Michael Lewis called The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game. It's about a kid from Memphis who goes from living in Hurt Village (what is now a part of Uptown) to attending Briarcrest Christian School and playing football. He's now a sophomore at Mississippi State University, and will no doubt be a top pick in two years.

I think this book is going to shed some light on the whole private school/public school debate, at least for me. The NY Times published an excerpt of the book. Click on the title of this post for the link.

Where's Amazing Grace?

(This post is by Lindsay Cade. It was originally posted on the Project Mustard Seed site).

Recently, a church minister was found to be human. Consequently, he was fired. Well, that's not entirely true. He quit before they could hang his dirty laundry out to dry in the town square. The head pastor gave some hope to the situation by saying that the church would pay the minister through May. This would give him some time to find another job. Last wednesday, the church voted to stop paying him.

You see, the church ran out of grace. They were taken aback a few months ago when they found out the financial secretary had stole about a quarter of a million dollars from the church. The church, after months of investigation, decided to let the secretary pay back the amount over the same period of time she had been stealing it. They showed her grace by never going to court with this crime.

So where's the amazing grace? It was used up over the last few months.

You ask why I mention this? Because I'm the daughter of the minister I just told about. These are the things I think of when I hear the word "church"--Scandal, lack of grace, witch hunts, gossip and a standard that I could never meet even though I sold my life to it.

My story is just one of the many you'll find in Cooper-Young. Most people are recovering from church. Some have given up completely.

Growing up, I committed myself to meeting the standard that religion puts on us. I felt pressure to uphold the image of a leader--stronger than most and godly, good, christian. It wasn't until about two years ago that I gave up trying to uphold some type of image. The truth is I'm human. I'm just like you. Some days I win battles. Some days I lose them all in shame. My songs speak of wanting to be free. I'm not beyond the law that God gave us to follow, but I am somehow forgiven by grace.

So before we all go any further, I just want to say that I'm a mess. Get up in my business if you have to. Don't let me pretend to be more than I am. That's what community is to me. That's what church maybe should be.

I might go back to harlotry with that scar deep inside of me.
I've got something that's in me and I want to be free.
There's not a place where you can escape.
There's not a person who will fill the space.
Running, Screaming, Crying out in emptiness,
Don't leave me.
Don't leave me.
Don't leave me
All alone.
Run with him into the sea.
The water's deep but so is he.
Look to him for all you need.
Breathe in deep.
You'll never find until you seek.
He waits for you patiently.
Run to him recklessly.
I want to be free!

A Gospel that Produces Holiness

By Theodore Jennings, Jr.

If the gospel is about transformation, how is it that two thousand years of proclamation have had so little effect? How is it that the gospel of Jesus Christ, so far from producing radical change, has instead become a cloak for avarice and arrogance, for a willful deafness to the cry of the poor and of the earth itself? … It is only possible to speak of the gospel as a source for a remedy of the planetary crisis that we face if we are talking about a gospel that makes possible, indeed requires and in fact produces, a radical and visible transformation in all dimensions of life. Only a gospel that produces holiness, scriptural holiness, can transform the economy of death - or rather, abolish it and give in its place something that can really be “good news to the poor.”

Source: Good News to the Poor

A great example of the outward journey

The cover story of today's Commercial Appeal is on Brinkley Heights Baptist Church, a church that is reaching their community by starting with children. After a three-year old girl named Jessica was killed in 2002, Pastor Tim Cox decided that he had to give his life to fighting for these children. In 2004 the Brinkley Heights Urban Academy was opened. They now have 55 students, ages three through the second grade. My mother has been teaching music at the academy for the last two years.

Here's the entire article.