Kingdom Gospel 1

Posted on May 31, 2009

“Kingdom Gospel 1″ by Scot McKnight

If “kingdom” is the solution, what is the problem?

Jesus’ gospel message of the kingdom of God is itself a blue parakeet for many today. In fact, many have tamed Jesus’ blue parakeet message of the kingdom and this chapter may well provide a reason why some feel this way. Encountering Jesus’ kingdom gospel not only makes us think, but it makes us think we just might have gotten lots of things wrong. It makes us rethink how we are reading the Bible. It makes us think about what the gospel itself is. It also makes us back up to the elements of the Story – creation, cracked Eikons, covenant community, Christ, and consummation – and see which of these elements are the focus of Jesus’ own preaching. In this chapter we will examine how Luke tells the Story and we will see that his focus is squarely on two elements, Christ and covenant community. Some are surprised by what they see when they read Luke’s Gospel.

I grew up on a gospel that was neat and trim; it was clear and simple. The more I read the Bible the more convinced I became, though, that something was wrong on center court. When some folks read the Bible, they only want to see creation, cracked Eikons, Christ and the consummation (heaven).

The gospel that deconstructs church

Many readers of the Bible read the whole Bible through the lens of the gospel they believe and this is what that gospel looks like:

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.
But you have a sin problem that separates you from God.
The good news is that Jesus came to die for your sins.
If you accept Jesus’ death, you can be reconnected to God.
Those who are reconnected to God will live in heaven with God.

Every line of that statement is more or less true. It is the sequencing of those lines, the “story” of that gospel if you will, that concerns me and that turns Jesus’ message of the kingdom into a blue parakeet. And it is not only the sequencing, it is the omitting of major themes in the Bible that concerns me. What most shocks the one who reads the Bible as Story, where the focus is overwhelmingly on God forming a covenant community, is that this outline of the gospel above does two things: it eliminates community and it turns the entire gospel into a “me and God” or “God and me” gospel. Who needs a church if this is the gospel? (Answer: no one.) What becomes of the church for this gospel? (Answer: an organization for those who want to do that sort of thing.) While every line in this gospel is more or less true, what concerns many of us today is that this gospel makes the church unimportant.

I believe this gospel can deconstruct, is deconstructing, and will deconstruct the church if we don’t change it now. Our churches are filled with Christians who don’t give a rip about church life and we have a young generation who, in some cases, care so much about the Church they can’t attend a local church because too many local churches are shaped too much by the gospel I outlined above. To be truthful, the gospel above is a distortion of Romans. More and more of us, because we are reading the Bible as Story, are seeing the centrality of the church in God’s plan and the gospel being preached too often is out of touch with the Bible’s Story.

Yes, Jesus said something like every one of those lines though he never packaged them quite like that. (Nor did Paul in Romans, to be honest.) Is this the gospel? Yes, this gospel is right. The problem is that it isn’t right enough. I can give a bundle of problems with this packaging of the gospel, but it all comes down to one big problem: this gospel above isn’t the Bible’s Story. It is like taking five stars from the sky, knocking them out of their orbits and solar location, and lining them up like ducks in a row and then saying, “Here’s our starry sky!” The only way to understand stars is to learn their location and their history and their connections and let each star shine in its place in the sky – and the only way to read the Bible is is from front to back. It doesn’t make sense if we don’t read the whole thing and to see how each chapter relates to the whole Story. Once we do we come to terms with the gospel that emerges from the Bible’s Story.

If reading the Bible as Story teaches us anything, and we need to emphasize this one more time, it teaches us that God’s work in this world is to form communities that visibly demonstrate the power of God at work in this world.

The Infectious Church

Posted on May 28, 2009

“The Infectious Church” by Bryan Loritts

When we come to the book of Acts we see the church in motion and having a phenomenal, culturally changing impact!

The setting for this infectious movement called the church begins in Jerusalem, but it doesn’t stay there! No! It spreads, just like a virus!

If we can embrace the DNA of the early church in such a way that they become ours we will set the table to have the same kind of infectious impact that they had

1. The Gospel: On the day of Pentecost, Peter preaches a sermon that is centered on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other words he preaches the gospel! With great boldness he calls people to repent of their sins and put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ! Peter preaches the Gospel! And this is how the community is formed, and it is this gospel that catapulted and launched this incredibly infectious church in the book of Acts!

2. Making Disciples: The early church were “devoted.” This word literally means to commit, to stay by, to persist, here it is, it literally means to attach oneself to. In fact this word was used of one who followed another. Discipleship simply means to produce reproducing followers of Christ.

3. Pursuing Christ: The church was in constant pursuit of Christ. The phrase ‘breaking of bread’ is more than just a meal together, although that was a significant part of it. Specifically, Luke is pointing out that the sacrament of communion was a major part of their gathering. In fact it was so crucial to the life of the church that our text tells us that they did this day by day in verse 46. In other words, they were constantly remembering Christ!

4. Aligning Biblically: The church was incredibly committed to biblical truth, or to say it another way they were aligning biblically. We know this from verse 42 that tells us that a major part of the church was a commitment to the apostles teaching which was rooted in their version of the Scriptures which was the OT and centered on the person of Jesus Christ.

5. Loving Others: The first church sold their possessions and gave to each who had need. This is telling us that this church was a socio-economically diverse church. There were the haves- those who had the property and the resources to give. And there were the have nots- those who didn’t have and therefore were in need. These two groups were going to church together and doing life with one another.

But secondly this church was also a racially diverse church. The nations represented at Pentecost included Egypt, Libya and so on. So that this is a multi-ethnic, multi-national gathering. Yet in spite of ALL their differences Acts 2 tells us that they were loving one another, giving up their possessions and sharing with whoever was in need, regardless of race, class or socio economic status!

When the church gave herself to the gospel, making disciples, pursuing Christ, aligning biblically and loving others well her world changed. In fact it would change the mightiest nation, Rome forever. Just three centuries after our passage is written, the emperor of Rome would become a Christian! Astounding! The very nation that tried with all its might to stop the viral infectious movement called the church, ended up catching the virus herself. That’s the church!

Conference Call with Skye Jethani

Posted on May 27, 2009

Eric Bryant hosts a LIVE teleseminar on June 1st from 1-2pm (PST) with Skye Jethani from Leadership Journal, Out of Ur, author of The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity, and the creative team of The Origins Project.

SIGN UP HERE for this free, live teleseminar.

*There is no fee for this teleseminar. It’s similar to a conference call where you have the option to dial in and listen / interact LIVE or you can listen online via LIVE streaming audio. Registrants have the option to submit questions to answer during the live call.

Listen to previous archived interviews here.

Reflections on Ministry

Posted on May 26, 2009

“Reflections on Ministry” by Rick McKinley

1 am on Sunday night and I am enjoying God, and some nice nebbiolo and felt compelled to share with you what I am learning and if it is of no use, totally disregard it, but this is what God is teaching me in ministry I suppose. There were six things that stuck out to me upon realizing that I am a much more dissatisfied person than the average unbeliever because God put in me a taste of heaven and grace that is so real and so acute that I find myself grieving over much of life that I see being lived in me and around me knowing how far it pales in comparison to what I have tasted this far of heaven. Most of what I have learned about ministry has avoided this truth or created a ministry philosophy that tried to work around it leaving me to feel like a nut job, but I do believe after twenty years of following Jesus and ministry that this is true, as a result of that I have listed six ramifications that I think come from this truth.

1. The subversiveness of love is the primary work of the pastor: To be in private love, adoration and worship of Jesus and to see and understand yourself as a person planted in your particular soil by God to display his love to others, that they would feel not your love but Jesus’. They would know through interacting with you what Jesus thinks about them, this is the highest calling.

2. The art of unbusyness and unneccesariness is essential to the being available to God. There is disaster awaiting the one who gets bogged down with doing good, and not dwelling in the excellent. It is our job to pay attention to God and life and to help  others to do the same, this is the heart of the work as pastor. I am not suggesting that this means that we don’t do our work or have work to do. We have a lot of work to do, but what I am saying is that many times we exchange important things for urgent things and the important things never get addressed. The importance of paying attention to God can not get pushed out for the urgent things that distract us from Him.  We must stand before a distracted world, congregation and fellow pastors and help them all pay attention to God.

3. Theological and biblical inquiry is essential to discovering the depth and Glory of Jesus. This is essential and important to the holistic office of pastor and yet this very thing will be the first thing you abandon for trivial busyness. Fight it off with all your are, so you may gain Christ and be every growing in him.

4. Though the experiences of Christ and the Spirit may be ever satisfying, and the word be life giving, the blessings of family and the fruit of ministry be ever present, the longing for heaven and the violent reality of its absence will leave you with a broken heart that will express itself in and empty and sour stomach feeling. Upon feeling this you will very much be tempted to think your doing ministry wrong and want to seek someone/something/some success or affirmation that will take away this feeling. For most pastors you will flee from this feeling through seeking a more successful position. Don’t do it though. It is in this emptiness created by the absence of heaven and this utter dissatisfaction with life apart from heaven, that will keep your lamp lit for Jesus, it will place the gospel ring of truth in your preaching that can’t come about any other way. His true work within you is right here in this place, and it is your half broken heart that allows you to have the burning in your bones of Jeremiah, the passion to weep in the Garden with Jesus and the courage to stand with Paul before an opposing congregation and preach Christ crucified as the power and wisdom of God. It is this knot in our stomach that will keep you an honest preacher in a sea of compromised men.

5. If you want to be a pastor you must learn obedience through suffering just as Jesus did, (Heb 2:10-18, 5:8-10). If Jesus in his humanity needed to learn obedience through suffering then how much more do we need to learn it, as mere men? And how much more those whom God has given us to lead? If Jesus needed to learn obedience through suffering, how much more those of us who lead God’s people? And we must learn obedience this way so we can, with authenticity, declare his beauty and sufficiency to those who we lead, because they will also suffer in this world and we want their faith to prevail.

6. It is the primary objective of my faith and ministry to apprehend such a vision and faith in Jesus, as revealed by his Spirit through the Scripture, that I would follow him not only in his life but also in his death. I would hope that I would die in such a state of faith that I could lay down my life and dismiss my spirit into the hands of the one who appointed my very moment of death, just as Christ dismissed his spirit and entrusted his life into the hands of the Father before me. My aim is that I can do so with full confidence that the one who appointed my death and subsequent judgment is gracious and merciful and good and will lovingly accept my spirit and resurrect my body on His day. I aim to believe this with such conviction that I could encourage and lead my people in such a faith for their day when they will suffer their own death and by grace do so in faith.

That’s my six lessons learned from the truth that nebbiolo tastes great but can not quench my thirst for the new wine of heaven and my dissatisfaction with life until he comes.

Conversations with Dave Gibbons and Skye Jethani

Posted on May 21, 2009

Dave Gibbons is the founding pastor of NewSong Church, core leader of The Origins Project, and author of The Monkey and The Fish: Liquid Leadership for a Third-Culture Church.

Here is a description of Dave’s new book:

“The Monkey and the Fish decodes profound shifts and events taking place in the world today due to globalism, multiculturalism and technology, and introduces an original approach to ministry, church, and leadership known as The Third Culture. The book title refers to an Eastern parable that will challenge you to reexamine fundamental assumptions of the evangelical movement, including erroneous interpretations that have made the church increasingly irrelevant in North America and the global village.”

LISTEN TO DAVE GIBBONS ON ERIC BRYANT’S TELESEMINAR HERE!

Dave and Eric discuss Dave’s book, innovation in a struggling economy, and The Origins Project.  (The interview took place in Feb. 2009).

Eric Bryant’s next Teleseminar will be an interview and Q&A with Skye Jethani from Leadership Journal, Out of Ur,  author of The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity, and part of the creative team with The Origins Project.

SIGN UP HERE for this free, live teleseminar.

Tortured Conscience

Posted on May 15, 2009

A new survey shows most churchgoers support torture. What should  leaders be saying?

A political dissident is arrested for leading a movement that threatens the stability of a region. He is ambushed and apprehended by his enemies, detained without a public trail, and tortured by soldiers at the command of their political leaders.

No, I’m not describing Kalid Sheikh Mohammad or any other detainee held at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I’m speaking of Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that Christians draw their faith, life, and identity from a Messiah who was the victim of political torture seems ironic in light of new research by the Pew Forum that indicates 62 percent of white evangelicals believe torture of suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. The research shows that people who attend church regularly were more likely to rationalize torture than those who do not go to church.

How do we explain these findings? Are Christians being more influenced by Jack Bauer than Jesus Christ?

Lurking behind this passive support of government torture is a utilitarian ethic that believes the ends justify the means-torture is justifiable if the information attained will save innocent lives. But David Neff, editor of Christianity Today, points out a problem with this argument:

Evangelicals have been eager to reject utilitarian ethics when addressing other issues- embryonic stem-cell research, for example. Even if embryonic stem-cell research turned out to be the best way to cure Parkinson’s disease, most evangelicals would oppose it, just as we would oppose abortion even if it were shown to reduce, say, food insecurity.

When it comes to defending the lives of the unborn, most evangelicals utterly reject utilitarian ethics. Life is scared, and all people-even the unborn-are created in the image of God. But this belief is put to the test when the life in question is that of a suspected terrorist. Do we really believe all human life is sacred or only innocent life? Are all people created in God’s image or only those not labeled “enemy combatants”?

This “bad press” about the church’s acceptance of torture may also prove to be an additional barrier for our mission. In an age when many people are already skeptical about Christianity’s legitimacy, the inconsistent application of one of our most central ethics does not help our cause. Here’s my point–I don’t think pastors, church leaders, and Christian thought leaders can remain silent on this issue even though its political dynamics may make us uneasy.

Perhaps the condemnation of abortion and justification of torture found among our congregants is the result of teaching that is losing the forest for the trees. We have taught our people to oppose abortion, but have we failed to lift up the larger ethic of life’s sanctity which applies far beyond the first, second, or third trimester? Maybe it’s time for us to preach, and model, an ethic of life that stretches from the womb to the tomb-one that even encompasses the prison camps the lie in between.

Skye Jethani is managing editor of Leadership Journal, Catalyst Leadership, and Out of Ur, and the author of The Divine Commodity: Discoverying a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity.

Why We Can’t Afford to Wait Until October to Say Thank You!

Posted on May 10, 2009

It’s no secret that Pastor Appreciation Month is in October. That’s the month when churches show appreciation for their leaders through cards, gift certificates, words of encouragement, gifts, and other kindnesses. We celebrate all the work leaders put into sharing their love for Jesus and humanity as they serve. 

Yet my heart is heavy for some of the struggles friends in ministry are facing:

• One leader who was riding her bike was randomly hit by a car. Though she’s recovery, she still has a ways to go. 
• Another leader’s wife tried to commit suicide. Though she’s been discharged, the road to healing is a long one.
• Some friends in ministry were robbed–twice in two weeks–and had tens of thousands of dollars of equipment stolen.
• Another leader is just stepping into leadership–making decisions, raising up other leaders, and learning to handle his role in ministry. He’s facing all the insecurities and fears that naturally arise when you try something new.
• Another leader has had his pay reduced by 40 percent, and wonders how he and his family will survive. 
• Another leader just watched his daughter get divorced and his son walk away from the faith. 
• Another leader is blessed with a growing congregation but lacks the funds or availability of another building in his area to buy, rent or borrow. The frustration mounts. 

So please don’t wait until October to say thank you. Odds are the pastors of your church (including you if you’re on staff!)–and their wives–are living on call 24/7. When something terrible happens in the night, they’re there. When someone is in the hospital, they’re there. When someone is in crisis, they’re there. But it doesn’t come without a cost. Yes, they’re called. Yes, they’ve chosen this way of service as a lifestyle to serve Jesus. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need your kindness, encouragement, love, support, and a night out without the kids throughout the year.

Margaret Feinberg is an author and speaker and part of the Creative Team. Visit her at www.margaretfeinberg.com, on Facebook  and on Twitter: mafeinberg.

Would Jesus Twitter?

Posted on May 7, 2009

I was speaking on a panel at Idea Camp last month and someone asked me, “Do you think Jesus would Twitter?” Interesting question…

Time Magazine recently wrote an article “Twittering in Church, with the Pastor’s OK“. In the article, Bonnie writes, “There’s a time and place for technology, and most houses of worship still say it’s not at morning Mass.”

I don’t know how valid that statement is, but I suspect it’s more valid than not. In fact, I would take it a step further and say that most churches think technology, specifically online/internet technology, is not important not only on Sunday mornings, but just in general.

Compare this to a recent study that found that out of all the discretionary items, broadband internet was the last thing a consumer would give up. The list included furniture, organic groceries, mobile phone, landline phone, personal care/toilertries and others. In other words, according to this study, people would rather use the newspaper for toilet paper rather than give up their broadband internet! (ok, maybe I’m extrapolating a little too far, but you get the point.)

The internet is an intergral part of people’s lives, especially with the younger generation. There is no distinction between online and offline. We live in an integrated world…  reading the paper in the morning, checking e-mail at work, shopping online at lunch time, listening to the radio on the drive home, watching tv at home, interacting on social networks at night. And if we don’t bring the gospel – the church – Jesus online, then we’ve lost touch with the next generation.

Working at Google, I get exposed to all the latest internet technologies, trends and fads – interal and external. Did you know that the second largest search site is not Yahoo? It’s Youtube. There are more searches done on Youtube than there are on Yahoo. A recent study reveals that for the 15 and younger crowd, they spend 3x more minutes on social networks vs. e-mail as a form of communication. That means that e-mail is an archaic form of communication for our youth today. (I can vouch for this – my teenager nephew never responds to my e-mails, but replies instantly to my message on his facebook wall.)

The days of just having an informational website as your church’s technology strategy are over. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. The Time article gets it. “If worship is about creating community, Twitter is an undeniably useful tool.” ChurchExecutive recently wrote in an article, “While the youth group has a website, [the youth pastor] decided instead of spending time and effort to get people to visit the site, he would meet them where they already were – on Facebook.”

I love what the United Methodist Church denomination recently did. They recognized they needed to “rethink church” and just released their new website – 10thousanddoors.org and asked the question, “What if church wasn’t just a building, but thousands of doors? Each of them opening up to a different concept or experience of church – and a journey that could change our world. Would you come?”

I think a lot of times churches just don’t know where to start. Start with what God’s given you. Just like you reach out and recruit worship leaders to help lead worship, reach out and recruit people to help with your online strategy and execution. Make an intential decision to invest — your time and resources. Just as you invest in physical spaces, invest in online spaces.

How about your church? your ministry? Come join me on this discussion thread on our community site on what’s worked for your church and what has not. What questions do you have? What recommendations do you have? Let’s figure this out together…

BTW, would Jesus Twitter? My answer: absolutely! What’s your answer?

Design and $347,000 a Baptism

Posted on May 3, 2009

Church Lessons from HGTV

What our design says about our values.

I was sick in bed, my poor wife by my side, during a class reunion weekend in South Carolina this past weekend. I usually make sure I get the remote control quickly in hand, so I can steer the programming toward the exercising of my mind: ESPN and Fox Sports are two of my top choices. But my wife beat me to the coveted piece of gadgetry in our hotel room. So I spent the day watching or hearing HGTV design shows. I had nausea when they started, but after awhile watching design shows, I told my wife it was getting worse.

Really I did like some of the shows, like Color Splash by this cool Asian guy with tats on his arm. But the take away after a saturation of design tips and styles were some thoughts on how design is a reflection of us, how we see ourselves, and who we want to become.

Have you ever wondered what your church space says about you and God? We often pick our cars based upon our personalities. (Is that why we get so offended when someone cuts us off? In the Middle East and Asia, this happens every two seconds. They don’t seem to care.)

We can look at our homes and see what type of people we are by the way we arrange furniture, paint or don’t paint walls, the type of art we have, what we use as our focal point for guests to see, the rooms that we care about usually get more resource dollars.

How about the church? The truth about design is that it reflects values, perspectives, priorities and beliefs. Design is also a good way to define the reality of your heart. When many of the early missional movements began, the focus was on resourcing the people in optimum settings of growth with tools to enable them. The focus in these movements isn’t physical structures as much as it is human beings.

Again, questions may lead us to answers. Instead of just giving a few thoughts on what I believe about space perhaps some questions may guide us to a reality that we didn’t know existed. It may be different depending upon the culture we live in. We may soon discover as we ponder these questions, termites have been quietly eating away the very values we said our buildings were built with and some fissures have appeared in that firm foundation.

Here are some questions that can help define reality:

• Do people mostly refer to your building as the “church?”
• What does the design of our space tell us about where and how we see the maximum growth happening?
• What does the allocation of the dollars you spend on your space indicate about your priorities? Is it where you want it to be? How does this jive with movements historically?
• How does the Internet reshape your values towards space, especially since the emerging generation doesn’t see a difference between their on-line and off-line life?
• When people look at the design focal points of your facility, what do they feel you focus upon? Is this where you want the primary focus to be?
• What creative space around you—outside the walls of the facility you rent or own—can you use for free or very low costs?
• Do you need pastoral offices?
• Can we show better stewardship in how we share space with our people?
• Do you have a room for innovation? In the past, people created “WAR rooms”. I think it may be time for some new metaphors as well. How about rooms for Creativity, Innovation, Research, Design and Development? Can you think of new rooms or spaces that would clearly articulate what you value?
• Are you reduplicating what Disney can do better? Is it necessary?
• Do the spaces in your church represent a passion for a Volunteer Revolution? How?
• What parking space do you park in at your facility? Where is it?
• What building or space are we to focus on designing anyway?

There was an incredible statistic an entrepreneurial kingdom-minded friend, Bernard Moon, sent me. Did you see it? Here it is: The church spends an average of $347,000 per baptism.

Okay, I know souls are priceless. But this number begs for us to look at how we may have gone down a road we didn’t really want to take. Nike spends $100 per customer for what they call customer acquisition costs. What do you spend to see a life radically transformed?

Flip the Script

What if we turned this thing around and understood the primary buildings we are called to build are the living temples walking around us? What would happen if we put as much emphasis in actually equipping our people with customized assessments, close mentoring, residencies, tools, and other experiences that may not be captured primarily inside a weekend experience or a large group setting or one space?

Maybe it’s time we do a hard assessment of what we’ve already designed and let an outsider or a group of them come in, people who aren’t Christians and ask them as they walk around your facility what does your space say about your values. You may be surprised at how your design really does reflects/defines what you believe

Urgency of Innovation

Posted on May 1, 2009

Have you noticed that we seem to be in the midst of a down time? This may be the understatement of the year, especially for those of us who have lost their jobs or lost their homes.

Just a sample of some of the bad news overwhelming us:

• Our spiraling economy has “fallen off a cliff” according to Warren Buffett.
• The history channel loves to remind us of that we are living in the midst of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse and that the end of the world was predicted by Nostradamus, the Mayans, and many others as 2012.
• Even sooner destruction is predicted by a Russian analyst who predicts the United States will divide into 6 different countries by 2010.
• Prince Charles feels we have 100 months to save the earth from catastrophic climate change.
• Swine flu could be a pandemic.

How do we respond to this avalanche of bad and scary news?

For some of us, we may feel tempted to retreat, hide, and/or give into depression. When we lose hope of a better future we make our present worse than it needs to be!

Others may watch and wait to see which of these ominous predictions come true.

What should we do?!?

Personally, I cannot help but feel hope even in the midst of such grave news.

Perhaps I am naive or overly positive, but I cannot help but remember that humanity survived Y2K, SARS, the tragedy of September 11th, and the war against terrorism all in the last decade. It is tragic that some people have lost their lives. Others have experienced tremendous loss beyond what we can imagine. Even still, we are stronger than we feel we are! Just ask some of those who have been directly affected by these tragedies and have endured the pain to rebuild their lives.

Furthermore, it is possible to have hope even if some of these predictions come true!

Of course, I hope and pray for an economic recovery (just yesterday two friends within an hour of each other shared their financial struggles as it relates to finding work). I am not ready for the end of the United States of America nor the end of the world, but we can trust a God who can bring good out of the disasters we experience.

For those of us who have yet to be affected personally by the economic crisis, now is the time we need to be that much more generous and sacrificial for the sake of others.

Now is the time for us to be more creative and resourceful. Innovation can play a large role in bringing us out of this mess.

Most of all, for those of us who are people of faith, we need to make sure we are also voices of hope.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote:

“Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23)