I know...

I know that you live, and I long to see you
I know that you speak, yet I long to hear you
I know that you are love, yet I long to feel it

Why must faith include so much blindness
God I long to love you, must love exist in the absence of passion?
Grant me a heart that is astir with flame

I have heard your voice, yet now you are silent, have you gone forever
Do not leave me to my fate, I cannot survive on my own
You have destroyed my ability to walk the path of blissful ignorance
I cannot replace the veil of this world, shielding my view of my purpose,
Yet, must I pursue your course without guidance, without your presence?

Has my right hand failed me? Where, O Lord, have you gone?
I am nothing, yet I know my place, I am a son of the Most High
My Father, how can I walk as a Son with no sense of your Spirit?

-anonymous

Atonement

I got a phone call the other day while I was at work; my son Zane had said some nasty things to my wife. She told him he was getting soap in his mouth.

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My kids do this thing that is really frustrating, but also makes me very proud of them; they fight me when I have to punish the other ones. If Zoe is in trouble, Zane will tell me, 'You're mean!' and throw toys at me...

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So my wife is in the middle of preparing Zane for his punishment when Zoe jumps in.

"Mama, I don't want Zane to be sad, so would you put soap in my mouth instead?"

It is at this point that she called me...

What do you do in a situation like this? When your five year old re-enacts this most central act on behalf of her brother? Made me think through some things about what the Father was thinking and feeling, on how Jesus was motivated, on gratitude...

Yikes

As A.N. Wilson (the great biographer of C.S. Lewis) recently wrote of philosophical materialists in explanation of his re-conversion to Christianity, "they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion--prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue."

Unity

"Unity is indeed a second-order doctrine which follows from truth. Peace is a virtue that all Christians should seek after, yet true and lasting peace stems from agreement on Christian doctrine."

Came across this on a blog, and it got me thinking...

Is it agreement on doctrine that provides for unity?

This is Not a Church

Horse Manure

I heard evangelist Louis Palau say, 'the church is like manure, pile it all up in one spot and it sure stinks, but spread it out over the earth and see what grows!'

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The early Church often made the mistake of thinking the gospel was for them. They were very wary of any contact with outsiders, (read for yourself the reaction of the early church to the idea of a mission to the Gentiles on the pages of the Book of Acts). The reality, however, is that the gospel is never for us, it is always for them! One of the major subplots in Luke's account of the early church is precisely the way God of Israel began to reveal Himself as the Lord of all people.

We too, can make the same mistake; thinking the gospel is about christians and Jesus. We retreat to ghettoized seclusion in christian music, suburban homes, Martha Stewart colors on our newly built suburban worship centers, preventing our children from worldly corruption (and so preventing them from engaging in God's mission), informed by all the latest church growth techniques in how to attract all of the christians from other churches to ours...

...hold your nose!

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All of us, however, recognize the real beauty of the church acting as fertilizer instead of excrement. Mother Teresa holding dying lepers, William Wilberforce spending his life and health advocating for the end of slavery, untold missionaries who died on the field; there are those who fight child prostitution, those who teach in poverty stricken urban schools, and those who serve in mental health facilities, all without applause.

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Manure for its own sake is just a pile of poop...

But when it is used to 'bless' the soil, all sorts of beautiful, fruitful, and nourishing, things are produced.

How could we begin to think this way about the Church?

Dandelions Revisited

What if we were to model our church structure on this image?

What if we saw the Holy Spirit, the breath of Jesus as the compelling wind, blowing the dandelion seeds of the church to the four winds?

The internal compelling of the Holy Spirit is 'GO!' The command of our Master and Savior is, 'GO!' The Father is the very One who sends us; 'GO!'

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The first disciples were told to go to the ends of the earth with the gospel. They were promised the Spirit, a Divine Wind that would take them to 'Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Ends of the Earth!'

We read in Acts 13:1-3 the story of this Holy Breath on a dandelion in Antioch. Believers had gathered, God was present, people grew in God's grace, and now a heathy thriving dandelion-church had grown up, the head was white with seeds; Jesus plucked the dandelion and blew!

We are all sent, each one of us is on mission, sent by God, to a specific place or people. The Church should be modeled on this reality. We need to leverage all of our resources to equip people for their specific mission field. We should be sending constantly; each family, each group, each church, each region, is a dandelion that God wants to blow on, scattering seeds to other families, other regions, sprouting up new groups and new churches, till the whole earth is filled with dandelions.

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So how do we incorporate this reality? How could we structure our churches less like institutions and more like dandelions?

Where is God wanting to scatter your group to?

Where are you sent to?

Perhaps you are being sent to another country, or merely across town? Perhaps you are called to leave everything behind and go, or perhaps you are simply to realize that where you currently live is not where you currently live but rather where you have been sent!