This week in YG

Acts 15:36-16:5
The book of Acts is like the sequel to the Gospels.
After everything that happened between the disciples and Jesus.
All the training
and listening
and learning
and wrong answers
and rash promises
and minds being blown
We find them in Acts.
Not just are they in Acts but they are also in charge of the movement that Jesus started.
After a few chapters they've undergone a transformation to become leaders with "authority".
They aren't just in charge, they have God's authority, that is a very special gift.

This is what happens when discipleship is done right.

Within this passage the great missionary team of Paul and Barnabas split up.
Yet this allows each of the great missionaries to take on new partners. Who were not quite as seasoned as either Paul or Barnabas. As well as the addition of Timothy in Paul's team.

The way they teamed up is very important.
1st it shows that ministry was done with at least two people (not including spouses).
2nd We see that there is a "culture" of discipleship already established.

When I say "culture" I mean that there exists an established tradition of the mature (spiritually, skilled, etc.) taking in and educating through direct apprenticeship those of a less mature nature.

Paul and Barnabas do not try and find partners that are just as experienced as they are. Instead what they do is find those who aren't. By finding someone who is not quite as experienced they are able to spread their knowledge and experience to the next generation of Christians. Who will then do likewise. Always one generation training the next in the way of the Christ-like life.

Today the idea of discipleship is a buzzword for church programs and does not usually reflect the direct nature of what is illustrated within the Gospels and Acts.

I may be repeating myself and talking a lot about disciples this summer, but only because I don't want you to ever forget how important this is.

The importance comes from it's unique ability to transform and educate young and immature christians into the amazing saints that exist in our congregations. Although they do not exist in enough abundance.
For example, let us think of a person we each admire as a christian role model. A great christian in our midst.
It is likely that they did not wake up one day as an amazing Christ follower. It is also likely that they instead learned how to be a great christian from another great christian. That they were challenged and grown through a long relationship or multiple relationships throughout their lives.

It may be absurd to point it out but, disciples are willing participants.
I simply point this out because an unwilling student never blossoms.
Within the stories of Jesus we see someone who solicits seemingly random unqualified people and at his beckoning they follow him immediately. However Jesus' method of cultivating disciples is the opposite of the traditional rabbinical style. In which students would go to the Rabbi and be tested as to their knowledge and ability.

Recently I have heard a suggestion that to get disciple you need to go to people and bring them under your wing. While I can see where they would get their conclusion from, I'm not sure it works with the nature of discipleship. As discipleship is a relationship there is a meeting in the middle. The student must want to learn and the mentor must want to teach. Without both parties engaged learning will not happen.

Before continuing I need to make known a very important element of this spiritual apprenticeship. As much as the mentor and student try and foster growth 1 Cor. 3 has a myriad of things to say about growth. While some plant seeds, and others water it but God is the one that makes the seed grow. As much as we each want to take credit for amazing growth that happens in our congregations and youth groups it is God that had them grow. While I don't get to yell "I did that! I made them awesome!" I do find myself yelling "I helped!" This goes both ways as Paul continues in that very scripture. He equates us to God's building. That Jesus is the foundation and Paul did some work on the building and then someone else will do some more work. Paul equates the effort and quality of our work to different building materials: gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw. "their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light" 1 Cor. 3:13 What kind of materials do we build with? Because not only do we have to be accountable for our success stories but also we get to say "I helped!" with those that were not so successful. I will remember those equally as strongly as those that have become great servants.

So what is the work of discipleship? What does one learn in this kind of apprenticeship?
Servanthood.
Very simply one learns the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of what the early church called "the way". The value of discipleship is that it doesn't just teach "right thinking" but also "right actions". To know the significance of Jesus washing his disciples feet is not the same as having Jesus the Christ lower himself to such a humble and nearly shameful task and clean your very feet. Foot washing ceremonies that are reenacted today are seen as a beautiful ceremony or illustration. However when Jesus did it there was likely no sense of beauty in the room. There was more likely a stunned silence. Except for Peter who was offended and did not want to allow Jesus to humble (but more likely humiliate) himself to his disciples.

So to review:
What is a disciple/discipleship?
It is big and it is long term.

programs101011

Churches are full of programs.
By some accounts they are a sign of a healthy congregation. It means you have things that are 'open' to everyone to meet many different needs. Generally they are bible studies packaged in different ways for a multitude of demographics.
But...
They leave me so empty.

Times up time to go!
At first they can be really good. Even well along the way they can be really good with competent people at the helm. Yet when they aren't so competent programs can be the worst. It is times like these that the program gets to be bigger than those that minister.
"The program has to be led by someone because otherwise we'd have no program."
I've had many conversations similar to that.
"Things have always been..."
Some programs can seem to be older than our oldest congregant.
At least in our minds... or sometimes in reality.
What do we do? Where do we go from here?
When we get stuck our perspective can be blurred and it might seem that we are in ally with nowhere to turn (this is a bigger problem when leadership is entrenched and no new people are coming in). A little perspective goes a long way.

If programs are working for you let them keep working. If they are broke let's shop around a bit before we duct tape them back together.
First off obligation is not a terrible word. When those systems get out of whack and you feel like you are on some crazy ride that adds to the stress of work and life then it's not so great.
In high school I went to a youth group, surprise. These friends of mine weren't so great, in fact they were pretty bad friends. They picked on me and pranked often enough. But they were very good at one thing. If youth group was Sunday night there was no reason that they or we shouldn't get together on some other night of the week. Chaperones? nope there were none. We just liked spending time together and playing video games or pulling movie marathons or whatever else. The gatherings weren't regular nor were they abundantly spiritual all the time.

While this was just some teens hanging out it shows what I'm getting at. Why is it that when someone wants Church to get together they either need to be "coming to the building", throwing a potluck, or having a bible study? The Church should be drawn to itself like a magnet. Not led around by a shepherd with some treats in their hand.

The challenge is being thrown down. Let the Church be a magnet, drawn to itself. Get together to share your lives together. Ups, downs, and sideways the church sticks together. Think of "the Mighty Ducks". "Ducks fly together!" Your life or my life could be upside down and inside out but the church still wants to be there for us. The distress of life does not fit neatly into scheduled program time.

Where to start?
Well let us assume that we have at least one or two friends in our congregation or maybe we know some more Christians in our city. Hang out with them. Make prayer and talking a normal but unstructured and spontaneous part of your getting together. If prayer comes at the end then it comes at the end but don't let it go without. When someone asks you "how are you doing?" Tell them the truth. You will be honest with yourself and them (confession) and if they don't want to hear it, they will probably stopping asking. Which solves the problem of them pretending to care!

I have some lofty goals for myself in this city. I want to connect better with pastors, christians, and people in this area. I want to do more of Church without doing more programs.

My first idea is to ask a couple musicians to get together and jam. I'm looking to have a time of musical sharing and worship with prayer injected in there somewhere. Sounds like a service, but it isn't!
The God of Creation enabled us to create.
Therefore I will Create!

Gungor "God is not a white Man"

So a youth pastor friend introduced me to this band when I went to speak at his youth group.
Musically and lyrically they are quite good. Although his style of singing is not my favorite.
I really enjoy them poling at this inclusive love of God. Especially with the people we think
shouldn't be allowed.

(Non)-denominational

Since I have an exam today it seems like a very good time to revive the bad blog. It has been a cluttered school year that has not given me much time to ponder. Probably the two strangest things were
1. getting on the Dean's list (twice)
2. finding it difficult to write papers.
Yah I somehow had a hard time at writing my papers this year, especially this spring. Yet I like to write so I'm not sure what it was that was blocking me.

So denominations...

I may be late to the party but the term non-denominational... It is incredibly accurate and inaccurate at the same time. I'm not sure how people understand this term, but for whatever reason I've always taken it to mean no denominational theology. If that is how it is taken, well it's inaccurate. I've attended many different churches and because it's New England many were "non-denom". The churches though were fairly uniform across the board.
Order of Worship
Active ministries
Songs
Theology
Architecture
It was all about the same the thing. Although some had comfy pews and others had hard pews and then there was the super hip "chairs", they all join together and function the same as a pew.

What does this term mean then? If everything is so chain-restaurant-the-same from place to place? Well it simply means they have no denominational affiliations. They don't have a larger body working together. They are an island of believers with no connection to other "non-denom's". They get to suffer and enjoy all the benefits and shortcomings of being by themselves.

There are of course ups and downs to their position as there is with being part of a Nazarene or any other large denomination. Bureaucracy.

The curiosity of them is their nearly uniform theology. Their title is totally inaccurate in the sense of "Non-denominational-theology". Which is a shame. For me there would be a much larger appeal if they were somehow able to shed non-practical theologies from their existence.

I've found in youth ministry a simple and useful theology. Adults do not want to explain deeper theological ideas to kids because they might not "get it". This of course is the exact thing that happens to adult congregations but not admitted to. Some more theological youth pastors might be able to incorporate deeper theology than myself but of course they could be the exception instead of the rule.

Do not let this seem like I am snubbing theology, in fact I embrace it. However I find that there is quite a lot of superflous theology that I suspect we have created to distract ourselves from the tragic realities of the society around us.

Jesus had a beautiful way of concluding his teaching so that people would continue to scratch their heads.
Continue to think.

Pagan Christianity?

Have you ever wondered why the traditions in life are the way they are? It's probably just me. People are creatures of habit. For proof just go into a classroom, without a seating arrangement students will move around for a few days or weeks but will eventually settle on their own. If anyone were to move seats one day there would be plenty of drama. For a better example visit a church, find a seat that has a cushion that looks like it does not belong and sit down for the service, then watch as a saintly old lady comes and tears you a new one. If people are so willing to get into a groove on such an insignificant thing how likely is it that the grooves of religious life are not quite in sync with what Jesus and the apostles had for us? How much of what we know as "the church" is flavored with local beliefs throughout the ages? That's why I'm reading Pagan Christianity? exploring the roots of our church practices by Frank Viola & George Barna. So far so good, it seems to be written for me. I just want to share a poem they employed at the end of the introduction.

The Calf-Path

by Sam Walter Foss (1858-1911)
One day, through the primeval wood,
A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail, as all calves do.


Since then three hundred years have fled,
And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.


The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bellwether sheep
Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bellwethers always do.
And from that day, o’er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made,

And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because ’twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed — do not laugh —
The first migrations of that calf,
And through this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.


This forest path became a lane,
That bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.


The years passed on in swiftness fleet.
The road became a village street,
And this, before men were aware,
A city’s crowded thoroughfare,
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.


Each day a hundred thousand rout
Followed that zigzag calf about,
And o’er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They follow still his crooked way,
And lose one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.


A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,

And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf!
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.

Ability vs. Desire

The other day I got involved in a tangent.

The discussion orbited around the dispersion of women in the workforce. The discussion went the normal direction that these kinds of discussions go. Why isn't the workforce a statistical representation of the population?

The natural flow of the conversation does not account for enough factors. It relies on idealism and statistics. It may sound that I am anti diversity, but far from it. The truth is that it will take time for that kind of equality to happen. Generations is the likely timeframe we are looking at. Not years. The other thought is that not all jobs appeal to all people across the spectrum. Perhaps there aren't enough aspiring female crab fisherpeople or CEO's or aspiring male administrative assistants.

Well the discussion becomes even more complex when considering ethnic background. Or are people the same across ethnic lines and have the same internal interests and only outwardly different? No I think our background builds our values. Our values determine the kind of work we will do.

I will now refute the claim that "a job is a job." That is simply untrue. It can be true that people do not enjoy the work that they do but they have the option of doing something they enjoy or settling for something they find to be laborious. Do CEO's say "hey it's a job"? No. Everyone always has the option of doing something they would enjoy versus something that may either pay the bills or be convenient. That is up to the individual and how much they have bought into that futile rhetoric.

Lastly, how likely are children to do something the same or similar to their parents? or family? Without the exposure to certain professions a child may never determine to pursue such a career.

I know where I've been.

I know of the Irish very little. I have been surrounded for most of my life with the Americanized version of their culture. I like to imagine that it is a very poor representation. The drinking, fighting, and breakfast cereal endorsements do not seem to fit a functioning society. I’ve been to Ireland, sort of. It was really Belfast, which the Irish want back. It’s still full of Irish or “Ulster Scots” depending on who you ask. Let me recount my experience in Northern Ireland.

I was living in Leeds England for the summer with two other people. We were Americans who had come to volunteer with a church. For most weeks we went on an excursion somewhere in the UK just to see the sights. This day the team hopped on a plane to Belfast. The flight was short and we were grateful for small blessings. The weather was so brisk when we got off the plane. I say brisk but what I really mean is cold, it was really cold. It had easily been 80º F in Leeds but when we arrived it felt like 50º. It doesn’t sound cold now but in the midst of summer it was quite a change of pace. That day the skies were very grey, they looked like rain but none ever came.

 The first obstacle to overcome was finding a ride into the city. There were some very slow looking bendy buses, a few yellow cabs, and other assorted vehicles. Then my team saw it. There was a Jaguar in all of the rabble. I had never been in one and neither had my teammates. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but someone convinced the rest that we should totally take a ‘Jag’ to the city. I didn’t need to be convinced, we only had to persuade the driver to take us. As I stared out those windows I spoke very little. The silence was awkward but it allowed me to do what I like to do best while a passenger. I sat and stared out at the landscape as it swept by. I was often astonished that such an old country wasn’t drastically overpopulated. I imagined that Europe with all it’s history would have a more vast populous than my homeland. The other detail that caught my attention were the trees, or the lack of trees. The hills rolled on and on and they were covered with grasses and shrubs but not trees so much. It astounded me more than anyone else. It felt like there was a nakedness to the land, or perhaps it was instead immodestly dressed.

Belfast itself was not unlike other cites, it had streets and sidewalks that hemmed in buildings and small patches of grass. We had a bit of a miss with the meeting place. Paranoia helped us to wrongly decide that we should walk away from where we were. Down one street and up the next, the neighborhood was very quiet. Banners and flags hung from everywhere. They weren’t Irish flags but the English flag with a hand in the middle. It was a world cup year and an abundance of flags was the norm. We walked down one street to what seemed like a main street and every few blocks we could see piles of wood stacked ten or twelve feet high. It was all very curious. A timely phone call and a few minutes of retraced steps later we met up with our friends from the Belfast team. They did what we did but in a different locale.

Hugs and handshakes started our official tour of Belfast. We asked questions and got updates from all our friends. They even brought along a local kid who was gonna show us the town. We quickly stopped in at the house they all stayed at and got a cup of tea, as is custom. I discovered that those flags denote the “Ulster Scots” and many in Northern Ireland do not see themselves as “Irish.” Most importantly I discovered those piles of wood were not rubbish but instead they were for “The March of Orange” which is a huge celebration in Northern Ireland where they march to the border to snub their noses at the Republic of Ireland. Like a sibling who doesn’t want to admit that they are in the same family, very few would admit to being ‘Irish.’

In town we rode buses to everywhere we wanted to go. We wandered down to the markets and poked our heads in to stores looking for some “Irish” wares. I wanted a Claddagh ring for sure, my teammates wanted postcards. Whenever we mentioned it our teen guide would get very uneasy, looking around, whispering to us that the violence isn’t completely over yet. We finally came to a shop that we could call “Irish” they sold Claddagh rings, shillelagh, a silver scale replica of the Titanic, there was a lot of green. I picked out my ring and then we were on our way to see the sights. There were new buildings and old buildings and all done in a normal western style. Huge statues were in front of the Government building, there was great craftsmanship in these structures. From there we had to do the one thing we had not yet done in Europe.

Hopping a bus in the opposite direction we went away from the city center and towards the coast. We were going to a castle! I had never been to a real castle before. The castle was not especially large, inside there were painted fiberglass statues to give a sense of life to the cold stone walls. It gave our little gang a great chance to run around and take picture after picture. Posing here and there it was like a photo shoot that very few would ever get to see. From there we wandered here and there but always heading back to where we started.

The day was finished. We got back to our plane and headed back home at the end or our whirlwind trip to Belfast and back again. It was a very beautiful country, with very kind people. The actual history of Ireland and Northern Ireland has shaped the people very differently from how American consciousness likes them to be portrayed. They certainly have their culture, and beliefs. I did not find them so alien that I could not recognize the parallels that we all share. I know not nearly enough about these people as a whole, however I do have some first hand experience.