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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Stephen Wright

Be You

God wanted me to be me and only me. He wants you to be you and only you. God never repeats Himself in creation. No two snowflakes are alike. No two people are alike either. We shouldn’t be surprised that He only made one of each of us. Be you. It’s one of the most Godly things you can do.

Mike Glenn

Awe

The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends one’s current understanding of the world.

Dacher Keltner

The Pursuit of Bigness

“The pursuit of bigness is a relentless monster that demands to be fed but will never be satisfied. It consumes everything and everyone in its path.” Numbers can toss shade on weak teachings, cheap grace, relentless ego-making. “Wanting to reach people for Jesus and wanting bigger attendance are not the same thing.”

“The pursuit of bigness in the church is morally, theologically, and emotionally damaging.” Yes, growth. “We should prepare for growth. We should be ready for growth period but we should not pursue growth.” He lays down another strong claim: “It is not possible to pursue Jesus and to be obsessed with bigness at the same time without one of them becoming diminished in the process.”

Karl Vaters – De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles (495-429 BCE)

“You’ll stop worrying what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”
– David Foster Wallace

Conversations from the heart

Our own conversations, both when speaking and listening, do well to be grounded in the heart.

Here are some tools to use to remain in the heart:

  • Use fewer words – be silent if possible. (Eccles. 3:3)
  • Only speak the truth, though it is not necessary to be unkind. (Eph. 4:15)
  • Resist the effort to defend yourself. (Matt. 10:19)
  • It is not important to be right. (Proverbs 26:21)
  • Do not argue. Your effect on someone else’s ego will come to nothing.  (Hos. 4:4)
  • Tell your anxieties that everything will be ok. (Phil. 4:6)
  • Don’t be in a hurry to speak. Let someone else finish their thought. (Proverbs 29:20).
  • Breathe.

Fr Stephen Freeman

A Prophecy

Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

The Atlantic

Reading Fiction

Professional golfer John Daly, who rarely does or says anything intelligent, accidentally stumbled from a fairway onto a stage of reporters and commented ever so accurately that he didn’t like fiction because, “after all, none of it is true”. Depending, I guess, on what you mean by “true”, but the floppy-haired, droopy-faced golfer was onto something. At least at the time I thought he was. Why, I have asked myself for nearly 30 years of serious reading, why read those who play pretend when I can read those who tell the truth? Fiction, to quote the words of one who did write a bit of fiction (Frank O’Connor), “covers every reality with a sort of syrup of legend.”

Scot McKnight

View from the Front Porch

The Friendly Church

Is your church friendly? 
If a first-time visitor commented they did not find your church to be very friendly, what would be the response ?
How would you reconcile the visitor’s experience with a conclusion your church is friendly ? Easy enough…
She was probably not very approachable..  She may have left immediately after services before anyone had a chance to engage her… She didn’t speak to anyone… et al.  More significantly she was a stranger.

It only takes a cursory observation of the foyer to see how friendly a church is. People are everywhere, warmly greeting and talking with one another. A closer look reveals that friendliness is mostly directed to people we know. Yes we are friendly.  That sort of interaction is what we have in mind when we declare that we are friendly. One author would describe the foyer scene as “The Territory of Our Kindness”

The Territory of Our Kindness

The walls we have to tear down to make room for each other are rarely physical. The walls that separate us are mostly psychological. Feelings are what exclude people from our friendship and dinner table: ignoring versus noticing, suspicion versus trust, exclusion versus embrace.

To describe how our affections carve up the world into friends versus strangers, the ethicist Peter Singer uses an idea he calls “the moral circle.”  A moral circle is created by a simple two-step process. First, we identify our tribe. We make a distinction between friends and strangers. We locate our family, friends, peeps, and BFFs. Everyone in this group is inside my moral circle. Everyone else is a stranger. So that’s step one: make a distinction between friend and stranger, between insider and outsider. The second step is this: extend kindness toward those on the inside of your moral circle. Consider the roots of the word kindness—kin and kind. Kindness is the feeling I extend toward my kin (my tribe, my people, my friends), toward those who are the same kind of people as me. Our affections are for sameness—like attracted to like, as Aristotle noticed millennia ago. We’re drawn toward the similar and the familiar. We care and look out for “our kind.” There is goodness in this dynamic—our love for family and friends, our loyalty to our tribe and “our people”—but there is also much darkness. The moral circle highlights our natural tendency to restrict our kindness to the few rather than to the many, limiting our ability to see or notice the stranger, let alone welcome him or her. Because the walls that separate us begin with our emotions, only a few people are admitted into the circle of our affections, the circumference of our care.

http://fortresspress.com/product/stranger-god-meeting-jesus-disguise\

Perhaps the better question is: “Are we hospitable?” Being friendly is not the same as being hospitable.

… hospitality — welcoming God in strangers and seeing Jesus in disguise — begins by widening the circle of our affections , the circumference of our care , the arena of our compassion , and the territory of our kindness.
We make room for each other because God made room for us . “ Welcome one another , ” Paul says in Romans 15 : 7 ( NRSV ) , “ as Christ has welcomed you . ”
Hospitality is expanding the moral circle to make room in our hearts for each other .

Beck, Richard. Stranger God: Meeting Jesus in Disguise (p. 9). Fortress Press.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

The Presence of God (8) – Leaving aTwo Storey Life

George 0 Comments

… a “two-storey universe.” In short, this is a description of how many modern Christians see the world. There is the first floor – the natural world which operates according to naturalist, “secular” rules, and the second floor – the world of God, heaven, hell, angels, etc. The spiritual crisis of much of modern man is the inherent disconnect in these two worlds.
How to believe in a God who is “everywhere present and filling all things” is a very different way of life than to believe in a God who is “out there.”1 Fr Stephen Freemanhttps://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/unbelief-and-the-two-storey-universe/

This post concludes, but does not exhaust, implications of abandoning a Two Storey life. In addition to “moving from abstraction to the realm of living“ “and “being more about knowing than believing“; today’s post focuses on Christian Atheism. at You can read the previous post HERE.

When we live our lives in the two-story world, we practice what Freeman calls “Christian atheism.” Since God is “upstairs,” God is “not here.” God isn’t close; God is elsewhere, far away and distant. And not just physically distant, mentally distant as well. God is at the back our minds, an afterthought, if we think of God at all.” 2Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)

Having confessed to mostly living in a Two Storey life; Beck’s assertion that I have been practicing Christian Atheism is a shocking declaration worthy of some serious scrutiny. What follows is a synopsis of Christian Atheism from Fr Stephen Freeman’s essay “Christianity in a Two Storey Universe”

CHRISTIAN ATHEISM

How can one be both an atheist and a Christian? 
In the history of religious thought, one of the closest versions to what I am describing as a “two-storey” world-view, is that espoused by classical Deism.
[In] an almost pure, two-storey worldview. God, “the Deity,” had created the universe in the beginning, setting it in motion. He had done so in such a way that the world could be described as directed by His Providence, but not in any sense interfered with after its creation. 
The creator had accomplished His work: it was up to us to conform ourselves to His purposes and morality – which were pretty indistinguishable from natural law. If you read the writings of the period it’s much more common to read Providence where a Christian might put God. Many modern evangelicals mistakenly read such statements as Christian.

…other than having some notion of an original Creator, Deists were practical atheists. The God Who created had completed His work. Ethics were as much a matter of scientific discovery as any other principle of physics. They believed in something they called “God” or “Providence” but only in a very divorced sense. It would be hard to distinguish their thought from that of an atheist except that they clung to an idea of God at least as the initiator of all things.
…“practical atheism,” meaning by it, that although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God’s non-existence would make little difference.

…“practical atheists.” Though they had great, even absolutist, faith in the Holy Scriptures, they had no relationship with a God who is living and active and directly involved in their world. Had their notion of a God died, and left somebody else in charge of His heaven, it would not have made much difference so long as the rules did not change.
The more the secular world is exalted as secular, that is, having an existence somehow independent of God, the more we will live as practical atheists 
Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, have only ideas which can be substituted – the result being the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than theoretical. 
…much of modern Christianity functions on this ideological level rather than the level of the God-Who-is among-us, much of Christianity functions in a mode of practical atheism. The more ideological the faith, the more likely its proponents are to expouse what amounts to a practical atheism.

The more truly sacramental becomes the Christian life, the more thoroughly grounded it is in the God-Who-is-among- us. Such a God is indeed, “everywhere present and filling all things.” Our options are between such a God – as proclaimed in the New Testament – or a God who need be no God at all for He is removed from us anyway.

There is a dialog that may take place between Christians and atheists. But there is, prior to that, an even more important dialog to be had, and that is with the practical atheism of Christians who have exiled God from the world around us. Such practical atheism is a severe distortion of the Christian faith and an extremely poor substitute for the real thing.

Richard John Neuhaus has written frequently of returning the Church to the public square. I think the problem is far deeper. In many cases we have to speak about returning God to the Church. In cases where practical atheism is the faith of a goup of “believers,” their presence in the public square makes no difference. Who cares?

God cannot be exiled from our world no matter how men try. He has come among us, and not at our invitation. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He is already in the Public Square as the Crucified God who is reconciling the world to Himself, whether we like it or not. The opposite of practical atheism is to do the only thing the Christianity of the first- storey can do: keep His commandments and fall down and worship – for God is with us.

although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God’s non-existence would make little difference.

Next: Christianity in the One Storey life

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

  • 1
    Fr Stephen Freemanhttps://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/unbelief-and-the-two-storey-universe/
  • 2
    Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)

A Word or Two

Steve Elliott 0 Comments

You Never Know

A wonderful thing begins when the rule and reign over your life is ceded to the One who has given you new life, Jesus Christ. You abandon the sense of needing all the answers and needing to be in control and you never know what a day might hold or what wondrous thing might unfold. 

Which must mean that you never know (1) what will come of an everyday conversation. At the end of John’s gospel we find Nicodemus at the foot of the cross, a fearless follower of Jesus who defies the Sanhedrin and identifies fully with Christ. But he doesn’t get there if the conversation doesn’t happen in John 3.

So I repeat myself, you never know what will come of a conversation. You with one of your children, you with a friend at work … you with that guy you meet at the auto parts store all the time. I meet people all the time who say to me, “Pastor, I’ll never forget the time you said…” and I’m too shy to admit that I sure can’t remember having said that.

But words last and conversations matter. Part of what it means to sew the good seed of good news, is to treat every conversation with the possibilities it contains. You never know when it might be the conversation of a life time. 

Because there are times when like a young mom you walk someone toward the right understanding of what it means to be a child of God. Yet on a lot of days, you don’t have the chance to give the gospel explicitly. But folks should be able to read the gospel in you implicitly by what you say and how you relate to them. Every conversation is a doorway for Jesus to be seen through.

And another you never know is that you never know (2) how God might use you. Nicodemus proves that it’s not about credentials or status. It’s about who is reigning in your heart.

I remember a young man who ran a small trucking company, the kind of guy with grease under his finger nails from work and creases in his forehead from worry about work. His name was Gord and I was his pastor. 

Gord was an introvert of the first order. Shy, quiet, a back ground kind of guy. He had a high school education, loved his family, loved golf and hockey… if you mentioned Augustine in a sermon, he’d probably ask you what team he played for. And Gord would often say of himself that he was a just a garden variety follower of Jesus. 

But I always saw him as a great saint. Because he lived in such a way that people were drawn to him…they admired and trusted him. I remember a year or so after he moved out of our area, bumping into a neighbor of his at the grocery store. We knew each other a bit but we both knew Gord well and his name came up quite naturally in our conversation.

And Gord’s old neighbor said to me, “Ya know, the thing about Gord was, if ever I was going through a hard time, he’d be the guy I turned to.” Not to me, a pastor. Not to a credentialed counselor. Not to a lawyer. But to a guy with a grade 12 education who loved Jesus.

Somewhere this morning, Gord is probably wondering if his life really mattered to anyone. He has no idea. And neither do you, because you never know how God will use you. It’s not about your spiritual credentials. It’s about your spiritual life.

Steve