Key Issues - Part 3 (Ownership)

I have never been a part of any kind of team that achieved something great together without having everyone on the team pulling hard in the same direction.

Some of First Lutheran's staff and volunteer leaders made a trip yesterday to visit Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines. Hope is now the largest ELCA church in America (and growing), and we took some time to dialog with their leaders about their direction and practices of ministry.

I think the meetings were mutually useful conversations with both sides sharing and teaching and learning from each other, but the biggest single take-away lesson for me came from seeing the broad-based (unanimous even?) ownership of their mission. It seemed like everybody at Hope knows and embraces the truth that they are a "great commission, great commandment church." They exist to love their neighbors and reach the lost, and they are not interested in agendas, divisions, priorities, or practices that do not help move them toward obedience to that calling.

I feel both convicted and challenged about the critical importance of this issue for the future of First Lutheran. In order to move forward, we must move forward together. For all of you who are reading this blog and are connected with First Lutheran, let me reiterate my invitation to you to be part of this process. Please be a part of our listening groups later this summer. Please offer your feedback right here on this blog. Please pray and listen for God's leading.

God's call for First Lutheran is a call for all of us, and we'll never get where God is leading if we don't go there together.

Key Issues - Part 2 (Passion)

First, some Biblical words, retranslated and out of context:
I wish you were either hot or cold. Lukewarm makes me vomit.

I think I've said this in a couple different contexts already, but if any of us find ourselves responding to any part of this discernment process with some form of "OK, that's nice," then it's definitely time for a check-up.

I know I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit and into the content of the next post on "ownership," but I remember wrestling through some vision issues a few years ago and being struck by the strong difference between ownership and agreement. I think the difference is passion.

The kind of things we're talking about in terms of our vision for ministry and our long range plan is heart-level, gut-level stuff. How does the God of heaven and earth plan to use our lives for the salvation of His broken world? If we can answer that question with cool detachment, then we haven't wrestled with it hard enough it yet.

What I really hope is that our whole congregation will grab hold of our clarified vision and say, "Yes, count me in. I want a piece of the action. I want to pour out my life for God's call, and I won't settle for anything less." But I'd rather hear someone say, "No way! Count me out! I'll never climb that hill with you," than hear someone say, "OK, that's nice. I guess I can accept that."

Key Issues - Part 1 (Urgency)

I had the chance yesterday to listen to some leaders from another church talk about a strategic planning process that they went through a few years ago. It was great to hear about God's leading in their community, and it really encouraged me about the importance of what we're doing. From their comments I took away four things that struck me as really critical in this work of discernment and planning that God has given us: urgency, passion, ownership, and alignment. Over the course of the next few days, I want to comment each of these. Today I'll start with "urgency."

Over the course of the coming years, First Lutheran is going to spend millions of dollars and burn through thousands and thousands of volunteer and staff hours. It is imperative that we know why. There's too much at stake to be unclear about this. We are using up far too many resources to be uncertain about what we want those resources to accomplish and exactly how we think we can use those resources to accomplish that purpose. It is urgent that we define our vision and form a clear plan to pursue it.

It is also urgent because the need is so great. Our immediate community is full of broken lives and broken hearts that can be restored by God's grace in Christ. Once we get clear on the way that God is leading us in particular to serve this community and bear witness to His Gospel, we can follow that leading with passion and be a conduit of His grace and healing to our broken world.

First Lutheran is already a place where lots of really good Christian ministry is happening (which has been true for a long, long time), and I am chomping at the bit to see us harness the resources and potential of this great community to accomplish even more in the Kingdom of God.

A Manly Church?

I had a great conversation today with Larry Szyman, the lead pastor at Faith Community Church in Hudson, Wisconsin. Like us, they're also going through a process of trying to clarify their identity and purpose as a congregation. God bless your work, Larry.

Among other things, we talked about the strange but persistent perception that church is a place more for women than for men - and this in spite of the church's long legacy of predominantly male leadership. (Not that churchmen have always been the most masculine types, I suppose.)

It's lamentable that our churches have so often presented Christianity as a religion with little appeal to the typical masculine spirit. As David Murrow described in Why Men Hate Going to Church, we've unintetionality created a church culture where strength, risk, and adventure are marginalized and we talk a lot of relationships and intimacy. Of course, neither relationships nor intimacy are bad things for men or women, but I don't know a lot of guys who realize that they need relationships and intimacy. Most of us hear stuff like that and want to run in the opposite direction.

But the main reason I find this so frustrating is that the character and call of Jesus is 180 degrees away from the soft, passive religion that we have sometimes created around Him. I think it's high time that we start reflecting the spirit of Jesus better in our churches, but not just so that men will be less turned off by what they perceive to be a feminine culture. The last thing I'd want is to try to force Jesus into some gender stereotype, whether masculine or feminine. That would just be losing the battle in the opposite direction.

But the strength and conviction that Jesus demonstrated when he flew right into the teeth of those who opposed Him is a strength that we all need to see when His Gospel calls us to turn around (repent) and lead lives that will probably be opposed by forces in our own culture. And if the church is going to stand up and make a difference in Jesus' name in this world, then we're also going to have to depend on the leadership of people of both genders who are ready to take courageous risks for the Kingdom of God.

A Good Start

The research and leadership team began meeting this past Sunday night to begin helping First Lutheran Church discern its calling and set its long term direction. It's a great group of people, and we are off to a great start. I'm really excited to see where God is going to lead us together.

We handled two main topics for the night. The first and most important thing we did was to build a strong foundation of weakness. It sounds funny now that I say it like that, but I'm not kidding. We prayed together and acknowledged the importance of being dependent on God instead of producing some kind of self-driven strength, which is a real temptation for many of us, perhaps all of us. As part of our conversation, we were responding to readings from Jim Cymbala's book Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire. The human brokenness evidenced in that book is more obvious than it is in most of our community, but that doesn't make it any more real, and if First Lutheran is going to be place of grace and healing that looks anything like a community centered on Jesus, then we may as well drop the charade and get on our (literal and metaphorical) knees before God.

Second, we took some time to look objectively and empirically at our church and region. We reviewed internal membership data and worship attendance data, and we reviewed census and survey data for the zip codes around FLC. At FLC, we have started to see some signs of numerical growth in the last 4-6 months, particularly in contemporary worship and in new member classes. From an external perspective, nobody was surprised to learn that our area is relatively affluent, well educated, and white with a higher than average majority of white collar workers and two-income families. We saw that only 1/3 of people in our area report being strongly involved with their faith, and only 13% list "finding a good church" as something that they are concerned with.

If people were looking for a church, there was a (to me) surprisingly even split among people who would prefer to worship in a traditional/formal environment and those would would prefer to worship in a contemporary/informal environment. And then another, equal number said they had no preference! People also expressed a fairly high value for bible study, theological discussion, and prayer groups, and they preferred worship services that are both emotionally inspiring and intellectually stimulating.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this process.

(If you want to keep up with just the posts on this blog that are specifically about First Lutheran's process of discerning its call, just click on the "discernment" label at the bottom of any of these related posts.)

Shades of Grey

A couple years ago I got hooked on watching Grey's Anatomy. I'm always a sucker for interesting characters, which they were in the first season... But I also got really interested in the story of Derek (Sorry, I just can't call him McDreamy!) and Addison trying to put their marriage back together after each of them had done their level best to destroy it. Their spirit of "it's worth fighting for" really grabbed me.

Like many bad habits, this one has lasted even without the substance that gave birth to it, and now we watch Grey's Anatomy online thanks to abc.com's full episode viewer. That means I'm usually running a few episodes behind and watch several at a time. Well, I recently watched the 5/9 episode (or was it 5/2?) and got a splash of cold water from my conscience.

When the gay boyfriend of a male soldier in the hospital for an experimental treatment sat in bed with the soldier-patient and kissed him before surgery, I have to admit that I had a negative, phsyical reaction. What bothers me about this is that I don't have the same reaction to every other damaging, sub-Biblical kind of sexuality in this show - and let's be honest, they are myriad. Why am I, without thinking about it, more comfortable with heterosexual extramarital sex than with homosexual sex? Probably because I am shaped more by Americal cultural expectations than by Biblical teaching. To make matters worse, I've even taught publicly about the hypocrisy of Christians who condemn homosexuality but tolerate adultery and premarital sex. Now I stand guilty of the same hypocrisy.

I've had more than enough friends feel the relational risk and pain that comes from using sex outside its marital context. You'd think I would be sensitized to this.

I still plan to watch the next episode, but I'll be watching through newly re-opened eyes. I wonder what the usual relationships will look like.

Go blue!

A fascinating diagram is available from the New York Times, displaying the component parts of the Consumer Price Index. If you want to see how gasoline is getting more expensive and computers are getting cheaper and see the trends on everything else from bananas to women's shoes and garbage collection, this is an interesting way to display the information. Looks like a good time to be buying TVs, computers, and video equipment.

Wonderfully Human - Part 2

Daniel at Sibboleth has continued with parts two and three of his thoughts on Biblical humanity, which seem, imho, to be right on.

I am reminded of Rodney Stark's book The Rise of Christianity (Harper Collins, 1996), and his often provocative explanations of "how the obscure marginal Jesus movement became the dominant religious force in the western world in a few centuries." The haunting (second) last line of the book touches directly on this conversation about the nature of humanity and, in my view anyway, suggests a high degree of Biblical, missional faithfulness among the early Christians: "Finally, what Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity (215)." And just a page earlier, Stark explained "Christianity brought a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death."

I think the reason that I've found myself so moved by Stark's account of early Christianity is the compelling hope that he(probably unintentionally) offers for 21st century Christianity in an increasingly pagan world. If the early Christians inhabited the Biblical story of God's restoration of his human creation and lived out that story in their communal life, and if that Biblically shaped life effectively offered life in Christ to a dying world, I can't help but wonder what would happen if Christians today developed a sense and a taste for that same Biblical vision and mission.

(For a transcript of a short interview with Rodney Stark that nicely summarizes some of his views, click here.)

Wonderfully Human

My buddy Daniel Kirk at sibboleth posted some of his initial reactions to the unfortunate idea of being "only human," as if one's humanity were, from a Biblical perspective, something to be regretted. He touches on what I think is a very important theme in the whole Biblical narrative. God is not working to negate humanity. Indeed, according to the very sobering introduction to the story of the Great Flood in Genesis 6, he contemplated that once and decided against it. Instead, God is working to restore humanity to his original creative intentions, and he's doing it in Jesus.

That seems to me to be the idea at work in Romans 5, where Paul describes Jesus as a second Adam, and in Romans 8, where Paul takes the next step to say that God intends for those who are in Christ to be "conformed to the image of His Son." Having once created human beings in his own image and having seen them damage that image in sinful rebellion, God now works through the Messiah (the only perfect human being) to restore all who are in Him to full humanity in his image.

Holy Adoption

Our niece Isabella was baptized last week (April 26), and Amy and I got to be her sponsors/godparents, which is a huge privilege in itself. But during the baptism, it struck me that there is something especially wonderful about the baptism of an adopted child. Her parents Dave and Kari have already adopted her into the full privileges of their family, the complete equal of their biological son. She is a "co-heir with Krister" in her new family family. Now, in baptism, she's being joined to Jesus, adopted into the family of God, a "co-heir with Christ" as Romans 8 says it.
It never really made sense to me that some people have thought of adopted children as second class citizens in their own family - after all, they are probably chosen into a family more purposefully even than biological sons and daughters. I wonder, though, how often Christians similarly underestimate their standing in the family of God.