It's a Story

I met briefly today with Lori Nicol from Augsburg Fortress, and she showed me a new Zondervan product that looks really interesting. It's called The Story, and it's an edition of the TNIV Bible spliced and arranged to tell the Biblical narrative as a chronologically ordered story.

The first thing I like about is simply the format. It's printed in a single column with no chapter and verse numbers. In other words, it looks more like a regular book, and, imho, that makes it much more readable and inviting. Our usual Bible formats create a real sense of unfamiliarity and foreignness, which those of us who have been reading the Bible for years hardly notice anymore.

What I like even more, however is the reminder that the Bible is a story. It's a narrative of God and His creation that centers in Jesus the Messiah-Lord. It reveals wise rules, but it's not a book of wisdom or rules. It teaches theology but it is not a theology textbook. It includes prophecy, but is not mainly prophecy either. It is a story of God's past, present, and future with His world.

The Story shouldn't be anyone's only Bible because it isn't a whole Bible, but it's an interesting resource and could be very useful for the purpose of gaining familiarity with the narrative backbone of the Biblical canon.

Face to Face

Yesterday evening, First Lutheran had its first "listening group," and it was fantastic. Thanks to all of you who were there.

Readers of this blog will know that our church community is trying to clarify its identity and calling. Just exactly who are we and what exactly are we supposed to do?

Last night we asked ourselves these and related questions and had some good heart to heart talking about it. I value these conversations at one level just because they are good venues for articulating great ideas. But, even more, I value these conversations because they allow us to build ownership and partnership together. We can look each other in the eye and build our team together.

If any of you haven't signed up for one of our listening group opportunities yet, please do. You'll be glad you did, and so will I!

Make...Disciples

I just got back from a three-week vacation, during which time I decided to take a break from blogging too. To any of you who have been following along...sorry for the delay.

Our church-wide process of vision discernment is still underway, and I'm really looking forward to our listening groups. I'll probably blog some more about that in the next few days. Today I just want to say something brief about a book that I read yesterday, Growing and Engaged Church by Albert Winseman. Other than sometimes feeling a bit like an advertisement for Gallup Research (it was published by Gallup Press), it was a very engaging (!) book.

What I have to say about the book, however, is really something that I've been thinking about all throughout this process. I am being reminded that the Great Commission of Jesus is to make disciples. That sounds obvious, and it is. But what I've been seeing more and more clearly is that there is no equation between "make disciples" and "make big churches." They might be related, and often they are. As a church succeeds in helping people who don't follow Jesus become followers of Jesus, there will often naturally be an increase in that church's membership or attendance. But so many churches and church leaders have seen church growth as being nearly equal to making disciples that we have sometimes confused the symptom for the cause.

As we discern more clearly the kind of calling that God has for us at First Lutheran, I know it will remain important for us to make and nurture disciples of Jesus and not necessarily to pursue numerical growth. We will preach the good news of the Kingdom of God and teach the Bible and help people discover their individual giftedness and help them to grow and mature in their relationship with God.

I do hope that God will help us reach more and more people and that more and more people will join in the work to which God calls us, but those results are more symptoms of faithfulness on our part than they are goals in themselves. They are vital signs, not actual congregational or spiritual health. I'd rather pursue health than the signs of it.