I got this on Facebook from Susan Sims. Me thinks she pulled it from somewhere online. If anyone knows the proper source for citation, give me a shout out.
I thought this picture just perfectly captured what happens on my insides when I get suddenly horrified or surprised. Notice the weird hand gesture of fright. Classic.
In a rather unrelated note, due to my employment research, I found this, and I thought it would make a fine read, even for those not in recovery. Please note the restorative humility it takes to get well seen in these steps. It makes one wonder how many of us are all that well, right?
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol … that our lives had become unmanageable.
“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” (Romans 7:18)
2.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
“… my grace is sufficient for you, for my POWER is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9) ..for it God Who works in you to will and act according to His good purpose.. (Phil. 2:13)
3.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of GOD as we understood Him.
“… If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23**)
4.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
“Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.” (Lamentations 3:40)
5.
Admitted to GOD, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” (James 5:16)
6.
Were entirely ready to have GOD remove all these defects of character.
“If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best from the land.” (Isaiah 1:19)
7.
Humbly asked Him to remove all our shortcomings.
“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up.” (James 4:10)
8.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
“Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:23, 24**)
9.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Give and it shall be given you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” (Luke 6:38**)
10.
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
“For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith GOD has given you.” (Romans 12:3)
11.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with GOD as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will, and the power to carry that out.
“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” (Psalm 19:14) “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly…” (Col. 3:16)
12.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and practice these principles in all our affairs.
“Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:1-2) **The words of Christ
Today’s Featured Writer has something to say about the future of the church. But, he has an altogether different perspective, than our previous guest writer, John O’Keefe, and actually, most people. And this, in a nutshell, is Doug Jackson. But you could ever squeeze him into a nutshell, so never mind. He is a thoughtful and gifted thinker, a searching pilgrim, a devoted Christian, and a baking whiz. And, he’s topped with more than a modest dollop of wisecrackiness.
Please enjoy and interact with Doug’s contribution.
B.A. – English Literature, Grand Canyon College (1982)
The Church with a Future
-Doug Jackson
John O’Keefe is a futurist. I find that intimidating as heck. Personally, I’m a traditionalist. I can quantify the difference. Tramping through the jungle, a futurist and a traditionalist happen on some tiger tracks. “You track him,” suggests the traditionalist, “and find out where he’s going. I’ll backtrack and find out where he’s been.”
There isn’t even a cool name for the preferred direction for my arrow of time. “Futurist” conjures up images of, well, guys with shaven heads and soul patches. “Traditoinalist” calls up images of guys with bald heads (which is SO not the same thing) and no soul at all. This part I can at least work on. I think from now on instead of “traditionalist,” I’ll call myself a “past-er.”
So what can a past-er say to the church’s future? If there is, in the words of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, “time for a hundred visions and revisions” of the people of God in community, how much time do we have (and should we allow) for a rear-vision? Not too much, I don’t guess. Accordingly, I want to state a thesis and offer three theories. My thesis is that, whatever the church OF the future looks like, the church WITH a future will be the one with a past.
To speak of the church OF the future is simply to make a chronological observation. It means “the church that isn’t here yet.” It doesn’t tell us much about what this church will do or how long it will last. By the church WITH a future I mean the local community with staying power. And this church, I believe, has a future precisely because it has a past. Which leaves my three notions of what such a church looks like.
First, I believe that the church with a future cares less about the draft of its craft than the depth of its ocean. In his eightieth sonnet, Shakespeare admits to his chick that other poets can praise her better. So why should he keep scribbling? Then the bard continues:
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark inferior far to his
On your broad main doth willfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride.
In other words, what matters is that her merit can bear the burden of grand praises and meager ones. I come from a generation of ministers who learned that good meant big so bigger meant better. I think the church with a future looks back on the mighty acts of God in history and realizes that the Queen Mary of the megachurch and the rowboat dinghy of the corner congregation all float on the vast sea of God’s greatness, and that plumbing this depth, not scaling our own impressive rigging, is what counts.
Second, I believe that the church with a future cares more about reading its story than writing its narrative. “Narrative” seems to be a big word in church these days. As far as I can tell, it has a lot to do with composing our own future in a compelling way that attaches single acts of worship or service to a greater purpose. I’m all for that, but I think it is important to remember that, at best, we’re writing one chapter in a very long book whose plot is already clearly laid out. This even works at the local church level. Eugene Peterson warns us in The Contemplative Pastor that, “the cure of souls takes time to read the minutes of the previous meeting, a meeting more likely than not at which I was not present.”
We find those minutes recorded in church history and church hymnals, two documents which have fallen from favor in my own denomination, where we seem to believe that the church poll-vaulted from Pentecost over several regrettable centuries until she landed safely in our own generation. That’s why we jettisoned a songbook that came to us polished by millennia of theological mulling on the part of the worldwide body of Christ and opted instead for toe-tappers and hand-clappers that can give us no idea of who we are.
I’m not knocking contemporary music, nor do I believe the Spirit quit inspiring songwriters somewhere around the time Fanny Crosby died. But because more recent music has not had the advantage of the filtering years, I would like to apply C. S. Lewis’ dictum about books to the business of congregational singing: “After (singing) a new (song), never allow yourself another new one till you have (sung) an old one in between. If that is too much, you should at least (sing) one old one to every three new ones.” (I should admit here that Lewis disliked ALL hymns because he thought the poetry was bad. He’s probably right, but to me it seems that their theology is rather good.)
Finally, I believe that the church with a future cares more about present faithfulness than future viability. Because the church of the future will be a mess. Do what we will (and I hope we will), she will remain a morass of carnality and littleness and arguments over service times and carpet samples for the new fellowship hall. And she will be the Body of Christ, the one institution Jesus ever promised to care about, and one which he said would sit on an unshakable foundation.
So the church with a future doesn’t spend too much time reading the chicken guts of the changing culture and dealing a Tarot deck of trends. She doesn’t cross with sliver the grasping palms of earringed “consultants” ensconced in dark tents of occult insider info.
Lewis’ Screwtape rightly warns his protégé Wormwood that the proper focus of human endeavor is the junction of Right Now and Forever which leads us to ask what we need to do in the former in order to serve the latter. But “the future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity.”
The beauty of futurists like John is that they won’t let us rest in Merlin’s tower forever gazing at some ecclesiastical zodiac; they keep demanding that we do something about this stuff. They refuse to let us fall into Screwtape’s trap of forgetting that the future is not (Screwtape again) “a promised land which favoured heroes attain,” but rather “something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
In short, I should simply say that the Church is the church with a future. For two thousand years we have hijacked her with our high-handedness, betrayed, bureaucratized, bushwhacked and bamboozled her, tarted her up, sold her out, locked her in and dragged her down. We have made her impertinent, irrelevant, irreverent and irritating. We have used her to camouflage our carnality and let the slimming stripes of the martyrs’ scars hide the midriff bulge of our overfed carnality. “And for all this,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us (if I may take a large liberty), Christ’s church
. . . is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over Christ’s bent
(Bride) broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I’m thrilled to have John O’Keefe as our featured guest writer. John is at the tail end of finishing his dissertation, and is writing a book about vision for Christian ministry and leadership in this century. Some exciting times are just around the corner, and I do believe John has some valuable insights to share. Below is a brief bio, and then his post. It’s sure to whet your appetite for what’s to come. Feel free to ask him more about it, contribute your thoughts, and give John a shout out.
Bio:
John is a doctoral candidate at George Fox Seminary, and has been called a “creative futurist ,” by people other than his mom. For 15 years has been an active voice in the emerging/evolving conversation regarding Christian Spirituality. As Senior Pastor and Church Planter with 15 years experience, he is leader, and a dynamic, honest, up front speaker and consultant.
Besides being the founder of ginkworld, John has written for a number of other ezines: the Ooze , dtour , Next-Wave , and others. John has also written for homiletics and other publications. He likes to take pictures of himself driving, such as you see here.
John O'Keefe
The Conceptual Church: A Vision
-by John O’Keefe
When I was asked by Lisa to be a guest blogger, I was excited. I was excited because in her request she told me I could share with you what was on my heart and for me, as of late, that has been the idea of leadership in the emerging church. First, I want to say that I am beyond the term “emerging.” Not because I see it as a “bad” word, but because I am beyond thinking in terms of “emerging” and think more in terms of being a conceptual church – let me explain.
When we think in terms of “emerging” I think in terms of “coming from.” That is to say, a flower emerges from the plant. While the flower “emerges” it is still very much the same as the plant it emerged from, with minor variations in color and size. The flower will go to seed and produce a plant pretty much the same as the plant it comes from – the cycle continues; even though they emerge they carry the DNA to the next generations. So I have found with the leadership concepts of the emerging church. Those in leadership are products of what I call the “industrial church” (what many are still calling the modern church). Because of this, many emerging churches are simply younger offspring of the industrial church model. While the church may look different, at its core leadership there is very little difference. So, what I am calling for is something very different, and something very right brained – something I am calling a “conceptual church” (a church for the 21st Century). For the conceptual church we need to develop a “conceptual leader” – a shift from the left brained industrial church to the right brained conceptual church.
I am in the process of writing a book for my doctoral dissertation based on that very reality. The idea to reach out to a conceptual people we need to develop conceptual churches lead by conceptual leaders. Right brain thinkers who are creative, empathic, dynamic, and understanding people who see the world with new eyes, and lead in new (yet very ancient) ways. Without going too deep into the book (not willing to give away the surprise) I will share that one of the keys to understanding a conceptual leader is to see people as people – in the industrial church people are seen as resources and assets and are placed in the “expendable” category when it benefits the organization. Yet, in a conceptual church people are seen as people and add to the diversity of the of a community of faith.
My prayer is that the book will be ready by the middle of 2010 – let me know what you think.
1. You find yourself thinking up illnesses that would suffice for excuses for staying home. Sometimes you even invent names like Snufflititus or Schnozatigo: The serious redness and inflammation of the area beneath the nose from too much tissue rubbing. Rx Coffee, remote control, rest, snacks, and tissues with lotion built-in.
2. You suddenly realize how cool, smart, and savvy the early Sunday morning tv shows are, and feel like you might be getting a raw deal but missing them.
3. You feel deeply offended that your church doesn’t care too much that the coffee offered tastes something like armpit, and you start to identify this characteristic with an inherent spiritual problem of your congregation. (perhaps the misusing of the gift of hospitality)
4. You start to pick apart the pastor’s sermon with a graph, and two columns of hatch marks on your church bulletin, adding up the times he is substituting a self-aggrandizing story instead of using a true parable to teach a point.
5. You find getting tapped for nursery duty a welcomed relief, because you won’t really have to talk to anybody, watch a worship performance you won’t enjoy, or try to not yawn an ungodly amount of times as you try to get through a sermon the pastor must have downloaded from somewhere late Saturday night.
Okay, this was a purposefully whacky list. If you can relate to any of these internal excuses, signs, or avoidance qualities, in some sort of way, then maybe the experience of attending church has grown stale.
It’s normal to have spiritual slumps. It can’t be wise to think of walking with God as a continual emotional high, and when it’s not experienced as such, something is horribly wrong. Like any journey, there will be hills and valleys. Faithfulness demonstrated as a choice done continually, (rather than a feeling-based action) can really see us through times like this. God is always with us, whether we “feel” him or not.
However, I’ll make a different point. There is also a tendency to fall into a consumer mindset, and feel like church-going is like shopping, and picking out something you like. We probably all do it, to an extent. Have you ever walked out of the service on Sunday thinking, “That wasn’t really what I was hoping for,”? Yep. Unmet expectations are common. But, it doesn’t have to wreck the whole bit of it.
Church doesn’t have to delight us every time, and soothe us. Most times it won’t feed us, not in the deep ways we crave. Those times are often found in community that can plumb to greater depths, and do the harder work, but build the stronger bonds that make genuine growth possible. (Think small groups, or spiritual directors, spiritual mentors, and discipleship situations.)
Church isn’t just some way to get recharged for your week, and be poured into. But, have you noticed how easy it is to slip into that bare minimum, and consumerist outlook of it? I have. I’ve been guilty of it way too much.
It’s not about just an experience, nor is it just meant for worshiping God with others. We worship God all the time, whether we do it poorly and unawares, or we tune in and give him our whole selves. We are his creation, our lives lived are a form of worship, like it or not.
Church-going, and the whole of the spiritual walk, are about applying the gospel to our lives in every circumstance and situation, the whole way through. God’s grace and love came down. He draws us to him. He restores. It seems we co-opt and yield to his mighty, gracious work to changing us radically, to be more like him.
Sometimes it just comes down to sucking it up. Sometimes it means you have to change, not your local church.
Have you ever been burned out on church, like I have, at one time or another? What helped you?
