A Million Miles...

Here's a preview of Donald Miller's new book, A Million Miles In a Thousand Years, which is scheduled for release towards the end of September. I found the code on this site if you'd like to embed it - it'll also post to twitter and facebook.

I received a few strange looks when I laughed out loud in the library while reading it. Donald Miller you have humiliated me again...but I like it.

A Million Miles In A Thousand Years by Donald Miller

New Contact Info Available

Rachel and I have new local cell phone numbers. If your cell phone number is saved in my phone, you should have gotten a text message. You can also check on facebook if you're my friend. Otherwise, anyone who needs our new contact info can email us:

bret@christjourneylife.com

rachel.wells@yahoo.com

Our Struggle

So, here is a 15 minute discussion with David Fitch - a writer, church planter and teacher who has been quite influential for several of us church planter types. He is discussing issues of church planting in a post-Christendom context (if you aren't sure what that means, Fitch describes it in the clip). Let me just say that we here in the metroplex are not really in a post-Christendom context YET. It is happening but this is still the Bible Belt. 

I think that many of the people we encounter are post-Christian - they don't know much about Jesus and don't necessarily care. But our culture is still filled with images of the megachurch and expectations of program and event driven church models. 

In this clip, Fitch lays out several struggles that we are definitely experiencing. Interestingly in talking about his 7 year-old church he references their near-death experience around year 3. His conviction is that missional church plants must hang on because it takes about 5 years for the community to really solidify. We're in the middle of that battle right now. Christ Journey is doing great things, but there are some serious hurdles that must be overcome.

He also talks about bi-vocational ministry. This is an issue that we've wrestled with in prayer. Chris and I are both pursuing several things to bring in some additional income, but have decided that for now, an additional 20-30 hour/week job is not the right route. We're about to enter into a new period of discernment regarding the next phase of life for Christ Journey and our families...hopefully it will be spiritual discernment and not merely financial pragmatics that decides the issue.

In any case, I thought the video was worth posting here. Thanks to James Nored for putting it up on missionaloutreachnetwork and Chris for linking it on facebook.

Take a look and tell me what you think.

Dave Fitch - the Cultivate Talk on Missional Orders from Bill Kinnon on Vimeo.

In the News: Zombies will Eat Grandma's Brains at 3 am

And if you don't forward this to 10 people you don't love Jesus and you'll get head lice.

I rarely talk politics.

There are plenty reasons why. For instance, when I want to go around in circles spouting the latest catch phrases from the left or right, I simply play with my children. Their conversation is usually more intellectually stimulating anyway.

I have about as much faith in the current two-party, line-up-across-from-each-other-and-fire-regardless-of-what-we’re-talking-about system as I do in my current business plan of winning the lottery.

Also, what is there to talk about? We have 24 hour news stations covering both Republican and Democratic propaganda - what good will it do for me to weigh in?

And, to be honest, I think that political discourse is nice, but I’m busy with my (not-so) subtle ploys to subvert the empire in other ways.

I don’t trust either of our major political parties. I think both have their own interests at heart and typically those interests only line up with the common good when the common good happens to benefit the party’s interest. 

I don’t trust what politicians say and I trust political talk show/talk radio personalities even less. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the minority...at least among people who have my email address.

And I am unbelievably tired of deleting forwards. I’ve never liked them and to be honest I rarely read them. I find fishermen’s tales to be more factually accurate than the majority of “true stories heard on the news” which are constantly rotting in my inbox.

I do, however, love Snopes.com - I wish more people who enjoy sending ridiculous fear-mongering email forwards would learn to love Snopes.com as well. If you feel strongly enough about an issue to send to it to 100 people in your distribution list...please feel strongly enough to find out if its true. Just because the email begins with, "this was on the news" doesn't mean it was on the news. 

If you don’t have time to check the facts, don’t feel too bad, apparently the news media doesn’t either. But, since they’re already (not) doing the work for you, why bother?

Lately I’ve been bombarded by the most horrendous “facts” about the healthcare reform bill. First of all THERE ISN’T A HEALTHCARE REFORM BILL YET!!! There are still 4 or 5 proposals floating around - and to my knowledge none of them mention the President killing your grandmother. However, we’ve all been asked to ponder what’s gonna happen when he answers the phone at 3am...maybe he’ll get cranky and take out his frustrations on an elderly woman who makes good cookies, I don’t know.

This may be a bit harsh - in retrospect I probably should have vented this frustration slowly over the past 30 years. To be honest, I don’t necessarily care whether you’re a Democrat or Republican (unless you assume that everyone who aligns differently than you should leave America), I don’t care whether you support universal healthcare plans or not - though I hope you do care that the system is broken and something needs to change. 

And I care whether or not we’re mindlessly spreading hysteria because Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity (or if you don’t live in Texas, Keith Olbermann) have given us their word that its true. 

There are a lot of serious things that need to be decided regarding healthcare and the economy and any number of other things. And we have got to be able to talk about it like big boys and girls. A friend of mine posted a link to this article, which is at least an attempt to wade through some of the fear tactics that have people so worked up these days. 

You may still oppose the health care reform options being discussed. That’s fine - I’m still trying to sort through the details myself. But please disagree because you think it won’t work - not because the President and a band of zombies are going to eat grandma's brains while burning churches and confiscating our guns.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled brainwashing.

I Need God to See Me

Why the Reformed Overemphasis on Substitutionary Atonement Falls Flat with Me.

To whatever degree my sins have needed to be atoned for, it is only in Christ that such atonement has been made available. I fully believe and affirm this. I’m just not so sure that this is the fullest picture of what has happened (see my previous post on the Wrath of God). My problem with substitutionary atonement is one of degree rather than kind. 

I also struggle with the statement that sin has created a rift that has made it so that God cannot even look on us without a blood offering covering our trespasses (see my previous post Telling Better Stories). 

Recently on his blog, writer extraordinaire Donald Miller talked about the power of stories and how listening to the wrong ones will completely screw you up (you should check his post out...go ahead, I’ll wait). 

I love that he started his telling of the Story by saying, “The Trinity existed forever in a completely loving community.” When I was asked to write a paper on my theological center for ministry it was titled “God, the Community of Love” and began with the words: 

Before the beginning there was Community. God, the Community of Love, which we refer to as the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit had a perfect relationship of mutual love and respect. This isn’t to say that there were three gods - there is One God and this God is the essence of Love. Love does not exist and is not expressed in isolation, it is expressed in community. This God, this Community of Love was not incomplete, the Trinity was the definition of completion. Community needed nothing, Love lacked nothing. Love was eternally expressed within the Community of the One God in Three Persons.

While the Community of Love was not incomplete, neither is God static. The nature of True Community is expansive. It is dynamic. It is always growing and bringing into itself everything around it. The relationship of the Community, being rooted and established in a deep indescribable love, felt compelled to create. For that is what love is and what love does, it continually creates expansive opportunity for love to be expressed. 

So God, the Community of Love created. God brushed away the darkness, stepped into the midst of chaos and brought forth solid foundations. God molded and formed an unbelievably expansive and expanding universe, and in an inconspicuous section of all that began to paint with beautiful strokes a landscape that was begging to be enjoyed...

Now, at the end of Miller’s blog post you’ll notice a postscript that speaks of white 20-something males whose parents are paying for their education...well, I can’t deny that he’s got me pegged on some of those descriptors (hopefully my monthly student loan payments give me some street cred here...). I don’t want to bash Miller; I’ve been following his tweets about A Million Miles and can’t wait to read it. I hate that I’ll be at SMU while he’s speaking at ACU’s Summit in September. Blue Like Jazz was great and Searching for God Knows What was even better. But he temporarily loses me when his story gets to the reason and function of Christ’s Incarnation.

I’ve always wondered how it is that God could create and declare “good” a universe which is not God (therefore less pure than God, the essence of purity) and be unable to be in the presence of something impure. Of course we immediately point to the Fall destroying creation’s purity. I’m going to leave off the discussion about just how perfect everything was pre-fall - was it realized or potential perfection? The Eastern Church Fathers and Mothers have some interesting thoughts on this subject.

Instead I’d like to point to God’s immediate response to the fall...he walks right up to Adam and Eve and asks what they have done. How is that possible? I thought God couldn’t be in the presence of sin? And from that point forward God continues to come near - long before the institution of the sacrificial system...which the prophets later tell us that God isn’t so interested in anyway. 

Yes, the relationship is dreadfully damaged and the effects of sin are overwhelming. Of this there is little to debate. Humanity seems doomed for total destruction, a path which we remain incredibly gifted at following. But God continues to come into our midst. He sets up his tabernacle among the people and dwells with them. God enters our mess over and again.

Jesus’ incarnation is not the first time God has come near. It is the seminal event in that vein but not the first. And for that matter if Jesus is God and God can’t be around sin then what was Jesus doing here for 30-something years?

My critique here isn’t leveled at Miller, he is simply representing a telling of the story that has been around for a while (though contrary to what we may be told, it has not always been the dominant telling). I get it. This telling of the story has some attractiveness to it - it provides security and a way to explain the pain we see all around us. And it does so because it isn’t entirely untrue. But as the controlling metaphor it continues to fall flat.

I think one of the aspects that really keeps this view point muddled for me is the statement (again, this isn’t unique to Miller) that when God looks at us he sees Jesus. 

I’m sorry but if that is true it is a devastating blow. 

You see there are lots of people who look at me without seeing me. There are plenty of people who like or dislike me because when they look at me they see someone (or something) other than who (or what) I actually am. I don’t need a god who does the same thing. If my creator can't even look at me then what hope do I have? And if I find out that he's only pretending to love me and instead is able to fool me by pretending that I'm someone he DOES love... 

Maybe everyone else is okay with it, but I need to know that God sees me for who I truly am and loves me anyway. I do not need to hear that until my transformation is complete this God is going to pretend I’m his Favorite Son so that he can stomach the sight of me. 

And for the record, I believe that God is in the process of healing me of the sin and brokenness that I exhibit and even before this transformation is complete God loves THAT me. I believe that while everyone else sees me in bits and pieces, some bits accurate and some clouded by their own baggage or mine, God sees straight through to the core, the essence which he created. And I believe that this God, my Father, loves me more than I can possibly understand...already. I believe and pray that this transformation is into the image and likeness of the Favorite Son. But I don’t get lost in translation, I get healed, restored and remade. God doesn’t see Jesus, God sees me and we all rejoice as the family resemblance increases.

I don't think that the marriage and reunion with God will happen in some disembodied heaven in some distant future. I think that the reclaiming and remaking of creation (including myself) is already in process  and I have, in a very real way, already received new life and reconciliation with God. I agree with Miller that things are not yet as they should be and it is because of Jesus that we have hope. But we aren't just sitting around waiting either. The Kingdom of God is at hand! This is the very gospel proclaimed by Jesus. We can begin to participate in this community and come alongside of God in God's ministry of reclaiming all things. It is about the future and it is also about the present.