ah, Luther

I notice that you have a great deal to say of the doctrine of faith and love which is preached to you, and this is no wonder; an ass can also intone the lessons, and why should you not be able to repeat the doctrines and formulas? Dear friends, the kingdom of God, and we are that kingdom, does not consist in talk or words but in activity, in deeds, works, and exercises. God does not want hearers and repeaters of words but followers and doers, and this occurs in faith through love.

Martin Luther, Invocavit Sermons, 1522

Natural Disaster or Poverty Story?

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed. This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0, struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story.

-New York Times Op-Ed Piece

pics from the neighborhood

Today was a beautiful LA “winter” day, and instead of sitting inside, my friend and I decided to meet while walking around our neighborhood, East Hollywood. The more time I spend exploring this place and walking it’s streets, the more I fall in love with it.

‘For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy –St Thèrése of Lisieux

rainy Over the Rhine day

My friends Krissy and Don used part of this song, “Changes Come” by Over the Rhine as part of a worship service a few weeks ago. I love this song because there is so much pain and lament in it, yet, it rests on “Jesus come.” So when the word seems too fucked up… Jesus come… turn the world around… bring the whole thing down…

Changes come
Turn my world around

I have my father’s hand
I have my mother’s tongue
I look for redemption in everyone

I wanna wear your ring
I have a song to sing
It ain’t over babe
In fact it’s just begun

Changes come
Turn my world around
Changes come
Bring the whole thing down

I wanna have our baby
Somedays I think that maybe
This ol’ world’s too fucked up
For any firstborn son

There is all this untouched beauty
The light the dark both running through me
Is there still redemption for anyone

Jesus come
Turn the world around
Lay my burden down
Turn this world around
Bring the whole thing down
Bring it down

prayer for Haiti

Our great and mighty God
You are far beyond our grasp, beyond all understanding

In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti
we, your children, cry out to you
in unison with the Church around the globe

We do not understand why you allow such destruction in our world
But we cry out for your mercy, Lord

Bring your mercy upon our brothers and sisters in Haiti
Comfort them in this time of grief
Provide for them in this time of need
Love them in this time of desperation

Hear their cries

Order the relief efforts from around the globe
Send doctors and healing
Bring supplies and provision
Raise hope and determination
Bring protection to all those involved

And as your Son taught us to pray,
May your kingdom come
and your will become
on earth as it is in heaven

amen.

failure to follow?

I’ve been thinking a lot about discipleship lately, especially in the local church. What does it mean to be a disciple? What are the ‘marks’ of a disciple? How do we grow as disciples? How does the local church help grow disciples? Is “grow” even the right word?

Right now our church is looking at discipleship more seriously and thinking about how we can pour into members of our church community in more concrete ways to help them grow as disciples. As I was thinking about discipleship in the local church, I remembered a chapter from Jared Diamond’s Collapse.

In Collapse, Diamond reviews societies that have failed, or collapsed: Easter Island, Mayans, and the Norse of Greenland, to name a few. They all collapsed in some way because they failed to live sustainability in their environment, and when their environment collapsed, so did their society.

In one of the last chapters of Collapse, Diamond outlines the failures of group decision-making that led to all of the societies’ collapse. There are four places a group can fail to make the right decision:

1) A group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. A group fails to see the problem as it arises- possibly because it is hidden (like the loss of nutrition in the soil), or because they don’t connect the dots to see a problem forming.

2) A group may fail to perceive the problem once it arrives. Sometimes the problem arrives so slowly we fail to see it as a problem, because we have become acclimated to it- it becomes the norm over time.

3) When the problem does arrive, they may fail to even try to solve it. Sometimes we fail to solve a problem because there will be short-term losses or costs, even when the long-term benefit of solving the problem is clear. Sometimes those benefiting from creating the problem stop others from solving it.

4) They may try to solve the problem but not succeed. They perceive the problem and put effort in to solve it, but for whatever reason (too costly, impossible, too late), they fail.

Although environmental collapse of societies and discipleship in the church may seem distant-topics, I think Diamond’s outline of failures in group decision-making are helpful when thinking about discipleship within the local church. To modify it a little bit, it seems like we can have the same type of failures in becoming disciples of Jesus:

1) We fail to perceive Jesus’ call to follow him. We may be “saved’ or call ourselves Christians, but for some reason we have failed to see that Christ calls us to a life of following him- of discipleship. We fail to see that there is something more than ‘getting saved’ or showing up to church on Sundays. We’ve failed to hear Christ’s radical invitation to follow him.

2) We fail to understand what discipleship is. We want to follow Jesus, and know that becoming a disciple is an important part of our faith, but we are unsure what it means to be a disciple or what discipleship looks like. We are either at a loss in how to follow Jesus or we get it wrong and end up focusing on “being nice” and not cursing for a lifetime, thinking that is all it takes to be a disciple.

3) We fail to actually live a life of discipleship. We have heard Jesus’ invitation to follow him and have a pretty good idea of what that looks like and what that means in our lives, but we fail to become a disciple. We want to follow- but it just seems too hard. The costs may seem too great to actually follow Jesus, or we may desire to follow Jesus but lack the ability to actually do so. We may also feel pressure from others not to actually follow Jesus because they are benefiting from our lack of action- they like the status quo and not the upheaval of true discipleship.

4) We try to follow Jesus but fail. We want to follow Jesus, we know what it means to be a disciple, and we put effort and intention and surrender into living a life of discipleship, but keep failing at it.

Thinking of discipleship with these possible hang-ups in mind have helped me when thinking about how the local church can handle discipleship. If we spend a lot of time teaching and preaching on what it means to be a disciple, we address #2 but leave people stuck in other places. If we keep inviting people to “follow Jesus”, but fail to help them see what discipleship looks like through the Scriptures, we leave them stuck at #2. Or we may be doing a lot of inviting and teaching, but are at a loss when everyone seems stuck at #3! I feel like #3 can often be our biggest hang-up, and one of the hardest ones to address. We actually need to get into the grit of people’s lives and walk together in dying to ourselves so we can become more of Christ. That ain’t easy.

As local churches, perhaps it would help to look at all the places we can, and do, get hung-up when becoming disciples of Jesus, and make sure whatever we are doing to create disciples addresses the places we can get stuck. (I’m of course not saying that we actually make disciples- that is by the power of God and the prompting of the Holy Spirit alone, but the local church does have some calling to participating in that and allowing God to work among us.) We need to be invited to follow Jesus, we need to be taught through the Scriptures what that actually looks like, we need people to walk alongside us to help us live as disciples and make the sacrifices and changes it takes to do so, and we need a community of grace to forgive us again and again when we fail to actually be like Jesus, because I don’t think there is any getting past failure #4. We just need grace.

moving to East Hollywood

This past weekend Mike and I picked up our one bedroom apartment and moved into a house in East Hollywood, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. East Hollywood is home to our church, Kairos. We moved into a four bedroom house with several other people from Kairos, right around the corner from where our church meets for Sunday gatherings. We really enjoyed living in Pasadena, especially since we had great neighbors in student housing and I was a 5 minute walk from class. But a few months ago we realized that we felt like we needed to move to East Hollywood. We wanted our lives to be more integrated and not split between two different places, neighborhoods, and communities. We also realized that to be fully part of our church community and it’s mission, we needed to be in the neighborhood.

David Fitch recently gave this definition of “missional church” over at his blog:

Now I define the Missional church as the church mobilized for incarnational (as opposed to attractional) ministry occupying the place of Christ’s humble servant presence in a locale (as opposed to a place of coercion and presumption) whereby we live (visibly) an entire way of life that witnesses to the salvation of God (His Kingdom) birthed in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is natural, it is concrete, and it is above all local. In this witness, people are invited out of their lostness into a vital relationship with the Triune God and all He is doing to make the world right through Jesus Christ.

As Kairos seeks to be a missional church in East Hollywood, it becomes easy to see why proximity becomes so important. A missional church is missional within a context, within a location. That means that Kairos is specifically missional within the cultural context of it’s church members, but also missional within his physical location of East Hollywood. It brings a serving presence to East Hollywood while meeting and serving neighbors and those in need within the East Hollywood area. A missional church also lives a way of life that witnesses to God’s kingdom and salvation, something that can only be done when people in our church community are living close enough to do daily life together.

I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be more present with people within Kairos and within the neighborhood. I’m excited to be a little bit more about the mission of the church. I’m excited to see what God does with all this.

the gospel and the poor

I just wanted to share a resource with you all. Tim Keller taught a few months ago about the gospel and the poor at a conference and gave a simple, straightforward, and very biblically based case for why word and deed cannot be separated in our ministry as churches. Many churches, incredibly enough, miss all the economic implications of the gospel, which come up over and over again in the bible, in both old and new testaments. So if you feel like there is someone in your life that loves the bible but may be missing all those parts where it talks about the poor… Tim Keller:

beyond dating the church?

I had an epiphany the other day. I realized that I feel like I’m dating my church.

I know all communities are messy, including organic little churches like mine that are very community-oriented, but I realized for the first time today that I am dating my church.

I’ve had two exceptional relationships in my life. One was my friendship with one of my roommates in college and the other one was to my husband. I have had other amazing friends and boyfriends, but these two are something special. And I realized with both of them that the thing that made these relationships exceptional was commitment, loyalty, and trust.

Relationships can only be really amazing when you are both committed to each other long term, when you know what your relationship is, and when there is trust and loyalty.

Dating is different. You are still trying to figure the other person out. There isn’t tons of trust yet. There are always possible surprises about the other person that catch you off guard. There is a lot of possibility for hurt and breakups. The two people often end up having different expectations, desires, or ideas that still need to be worked out. The commitment isn’t there and people can be fickle. It’s dangerous and difficult to invest yourself fully. And you’re often asking the question, “what are we? where are we? where are we going?” with the realization that just asking those questions can take you two and a half steps back.

I feel like I’m dating my church.

But the bigger question is, is there anything else?

A church is a community of real people living in the real world. People are always (hopefully) becoming part of that community, so the community is constantly changing. The church is full of people who are broken, sinful, and messy. We live in America where individualism grips us and true community is often beyond our grasp. We’re not very good at sacrifice and our busyness often leads us to being too overwhelmed in just getting ourselves by. We are unfaithful to God, our mission, and each other way more than we’d like to admit.

I love the church. I think the church is beautiful. A body of God’s people on earth entrusted to participate in God’s mission by God’s amazing grace. I love the idea of the church, I love the church in reality, I love the people of the church. Heck, I’m going to seminary and planning on devoting my life to serving the church because I love it so much. I am the church. I think the church is a gorgeous mess. I even love the messy gritty imperfect humanness of the church. And I love my church, the little local community of believers I think of as family, so much so that my heart often breaks for them.

So, is the church worth dating? Oh yes, it is. When you love something enough, it’s worth sticking around and trying to figure things out. It’s worth dating.

But, no matter how much we love the church, is there anything beyond dating it? Is anything else really possible?

The greatest piece of marriage advice I ever got was from the pastor who married us. He told us, “when you are in conflict, move towards each other, not away from each other.” I remember that every time I feel like running away or ignoring an issue. Instead, I try to turn around and run straight into it until it is resolved. It’s worked so far.

And maybe that’s all we can do with the church. Keep running straight into the mess.

living the STORY

Our ethics have to start with the Story. Not rules, but the Story.

What is the Story of God? What is our Story as a community? What are we trying to live in? This is where ethics needs to start. Not a list of the rules, but the Story. Instead of searching through Scripture for every reference to money, politics, sex, children, peace, violence, or justice, we have to read the whole Story, the arc of scripture, the history of God’s interaction in the world.

We realize that the story is holistic. That it is not just a story about our souls and Jesus, but a story that spans the past and present, the physical and the spiritual, brokenness and redemption.

And in this holistic Story we find ourselves trying to find our own place in the Story. Where are we in this story? How do we play our role in the Story well? How do we live our part?

We realize that it isn’t just about us as individuals but that we live out the Story together. That the church joins in the Story, not merely individuals.

And so everywhere small pockets of those following the way are trying to figure out what exactly the way looks like. And it takes…

discussion

hard questions

experimentation

and boldness

I care about my ethics, how I live and interact in the world, because of my conviction that the Story is true. Rules cannot convince me of much- just threaten me with punishment or judgment. But since I am convinced of the reality of the Story in the here-and-now, I am compelled to live out that reality.

The Story has drawn me in so much so that I want to keep playing my part.

So I may hate forgiving my neighbor, but I want to live out God’s Story of forgiveness.

And I may love spending money on myself but I want to live out God’s Story of generosity and provision.

And I may enjoy my place of privilege but I want to live God’s Story that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

The vision of the Story, the promise in the Story, the hope that another world is possible and the kingdom of God is approaching draws me in. Draws us in.

It goes far beyond rules. Ethics is this long process of saturating ourselves with the Story from Scripture, then sitting in real community and asking…

how do we live that?