TILL HE COMES Blog

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this short series on the Future of the Church, I wrote about how the church needs to escape the attractional, church-growth model of the church, and become more missional. Doing so will enable us to prepare for the world-wide reawakening of the church that is coming.

In this post, I want to focus on a process by which you personally can prepare for this reawakening.

1. You must reimagine the church as the body of Christ. Forget everything, and I mean everything, you know or think you know about the church, what it is supposed to be, do, and look like. Then, start reading the Gospels with the understanding that Jesus is showing by example and teaching with words and works how His followers are to live and act. I believe that Jesus’ life is God’s dream for the church. If we are the body of Christ, then we must be the body of Christ now as He was 2000 years ago. When people say they want to get back to the early church the way it was in Acts, I believe they have not gone far enough back. They need to get back to the way Jesus lived and acted. He is our church model.

2. Follow up this study by reliving the life of Christ. In other words, try to live like Jesus lived. But here’s the key: You can’t do this by yourself, because you are not Christ, and you are not the Body of Christ. It is only “we” who believe in Him and follow Him who are His body, and so we can only live as He lived, and do what He did, in concert with other members of the body. So, find some other like-minded people, and together, start trying to be Jesus to the world. As the body, you can help the poor, set captives free, help the blind to see, heal the sick, feed the hungry, and show people the way back to God. And I don’t mean with miracles, though I don’t rule miracles out. It is amazing what a few people can do together who share a common desire to help others.

3. Don’t revert! When people start to join with you, and your numbers begin to grow, and people start coming to faith in Christ, resist the urge to protect what you have gained by reverting to more safe and common ways of doing church. Trying to become safe and protected is the beginning of decline and ineffectiveness. I’ll let you decide what this looks like in your context.

When you embark upon this process, you’ll notice that once you are able to discard everything you think you know about church, and begin the adventure of reimagining church (step 1), your life begins to spiral upward in some new and interesting ways (step 2), which then causes you to both seek more from Scripture (step 1) but also desire to run from risk and return to what is safe and known (step 3). So this is a constant process of going back and forth between reimagining (step 1) and reliving (step 2), while warding off the temptation of reverting (step 3).

I know because I’m right there. It’s a terrifying and thrilling place to be.

2 Comments »

I was reading the Gospel of Matthew today and came to the sobering realization that if I were alive at the time of Jesus Christ, I probably would not have been one of his disciples. All Christians today like to think that if we were alive when Jesus walked the earth, we would be the thirteenth disciple. I think most of us are delusional. I know I am.

In Matthew 8:19, a man comes to Jesus and says, “I’ll follow you!” It’s so easy to say. Isn’t it?

How does Jesus respond? He basically says, “If you follow me, you won’t have a home, an income, a bed to sleep in, or regular meals to eat. Still want to sign up?” (Matthew 8:20).

Take a real, good, hard, honest look at your life. Are you really willing to give up your house, your job, your bed, your income, and your meals to follow Jesus?

I know my own heart. I think I would have said, “Oh. Well…in that case…let me go home and ‘pray’ about it.” (Which is Christian lingo for “No.”)

And then I read this in Alan Hirsh’s book The Forgotten Ways:

I have come to the conclusion that for we who live in the Western world, the major challenge to the viability of Christianity is not Buddhism, with all its philosophical appeal to the Western mind, nor is it Islam, with all the challenge that it poses to Western culture. It is not the New Age that poses such a threat; in fact, because that is a genuine search going on in new religious movements, it can actually be an asset to we who are willing to share the faith amidst the search. All these are challenges to us, no doubt, but I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism (p. 106).

Consumerism has actually become the driving idealogy of the church’s ministry (p. 110).

[Consumerism teaches us] that the thing that will complete us in a new kitchen or a house extension, whereas in fact these only add more stress to our mortgages and our families. … Offered “heaven now,” we give up the ultimate quest in pursuit of that which can be immediately consumed, be it a service, product, or pseudo-religious experience (p. 111).

What are your thoughts on all this? I want to follow Jesus, but I also want to provide a nice home, good food, warm clothing, and a soft bed for my wife and three girls. How can that be incompatible with following Jesus? I don’t see how it can be, but maybe I’m just drunk on consumerism and am in denial. Any suggestions?

No Comments »

A while back I read Dan Kimball’s They Like Jesus, but Not the Church. I highly recommend this book since it does reflect the thinking of a lot of people in our communities. However, I ran into a whole group of people today who don’t think much about Jesus either. They don’t like Jesus OR the church!

My family and I attended the Scarborough Renaissance Faire today in Waxahachie, TX. We went last year, and loved it so much, we bought a season pass this year. Today was opening day.

One of the things that amazed me last year, and was impressed upon me again today, is the amazing community of this place. I have never, in my entire life, witnessed such a close-knit and fun-loving community as I have seen at this Faire. I ache to find a group of believers that can even come close to such a sense of community as this. They are an odd bunch of people, with strange clothing, behaviours, and language, but they all love each other and welcome everybody, even those who are very different from them with wide open arms. The church has a lot to learn in this area.

Anyway, as we were strolling around, taking it all in, we came upon a certain vendor booth where they were selling those little twirling sticks (I don’t know what else to call them). I have always been amazed by this, so stood there watching. One of the stick twirlers (Lance), came over and offered to teach my whole family how to do it. As we learned, we talked.

He soon found out I was a pastor, and immediately began calling me “Pastor Jeremy.” As we talked, it turned out that he has a pretty pessimistic view of the future of humanity. I said, “I don’t know, I’m pretty hopeful.”

He said, “Why? What is your hope in?”

You can’t ask for a better opening than that, so I said, “My hope is in Jesus.”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “Jesus!? Yeshua the Carpenter? That Jesus? You hope in Him? How can a dead guy help us today?”

I decided to not get into the resurrection yet, and so said, “Well, as people believe in Him for eternal life, and live their lives according to His example and teachings, their lives are changed, and whole communities and even countries can be changed for the better.”

He said, “Who sold you that lie? I have never met a single person whose life was significantly changed for the better because they followed the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was a fraud, and so is the Bible, and so are his followers.”

I was astonished. He has been living in the United States his entire life, and has never met anybody who he thought had been positively influenced by Jesus! So I asked him what his hope was in, and we talked for about another 20 minutes or so about his lifelong search for truth which culminated in discovering the Mayan seven-fold spirit agreement and how, like trees, we can dig our spirits deep into the earth, and throw the energy up into the atmosphere. I really didn’t understand most of what he was talking about. He said he learned all this from his spiritual advisor/babysitter named Merril. I also met Merril, who hasn’t cut his hair in 38 years, is missing most of his teeth, and talks a lot about Mayan calendars and spiritual auras.

Lance gave me the name of a free online movie to watch which he said would open my eyes. I have already watched the first 15 minutes and am excited to watch the rest. After I watch it, I’ll make a blog post about it and tell you what what movie it is. I hope that by respecting him and his beliefs, and by watching this movie, he might be open to talking more about Jesus next week when we go back to the Faire.

As I think over my conversation with him today, and after watching only 15 minutes of the movie, I have two questions I want to ask him. First, I want to ask him why he dislikes Jesus. I imagine that the Jesus he dislikes is the Jesus of religion, not Jesus of Scripture. There is a vast difference between the two.

If this turns out to be the case (that he has a skewed view of Jesus), then I want to ask him if, in his lifelong quest for truth, he has ever read about Jesus from Scripture, rather than just hearing about Jesus from others.

Anyway, I hope to build a friendship with him over the next six weeks, which I hope will last for many years, and maybe allow our family to become friends with others at the Faire. These people are some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my life! I wonder if they need a Faire Friar…

5 Comments »

I think that one of the best ways to reach people for Jesus today is not to try to persuade or convince them through rational arguments and persuasive reasoning. Certainly, some will respond to this, and so there is a place for it, but the majority of people today are relational in their approach to truth. Most people are not asking, “Do I want to believe like you do?” but instead are asking, “Do I want to live like you do? Do I want to be like you?”

Whether you agree or not, most people today believe that beliefs result in behavior. So if your behavior stinks, they assume your beliefs stink too, without even knowing what it is you believe.  

If you want to convince people of the truths of Christianity, the best way to “argue” it today is not through reason and and rational propositions, but by becoming more and more like Jesus is everything we do. Since Truth is a person (John 14:6), truth is best learned through knowing that person, Jesus Christ, and truth is best shown by living like Him. (And be careful! I am convinced that most of us Christians and many of our churches have a very skewed idea of who Jesus was, so while we think we are living like Jesus, we are actually living like Judas.)

If you want to reach our culture for Jesus, the best (and most biblical) thing you can do is show people Jesus and invite them to follow Jesus with you.

7 Comments »

I remember when I thought that the most important thing about Good Friday is that it actually happened on a Thursday. Yes, I was one of the freaks of Christianity who got his kicks studying, debating, and teaching the finer points of theology that few people even knew existed, and fewer cared about. (For example, did you know Peter actually denied Christ SIX times? I can prove it!)

So I laughed when I recently read in Vince Antonucci’s new book, I Became a Christian, and All I Got was this Lousy T-Shirt, that one reason he started to investigate Christianity was because of some old guy teaching on television about how research had proven that something actually occurred on Wednesday rather than Tuesday (pp. 11-12). Vince doesn’t remember what the event was, but I bet it had something to do with the Passion week. Scholars are always debating about the order of the events of this week, and what happened on which days. You will even hear some talking about the “missing day” of Jesus’ final week. I used to be one of those people. Of course, I didn’t have a “missing day” in my order of events, because for me, Good Friday happened on Thursday. I think I preached a sermon about this once. These are the things I cared about most.

More than the people in my church. More than my wife or kids.

Recently, I have begun to realize that a change has occurred in me. Much of what I once thought was so important, I now consider to be almost completely irrelevant. I have also found myself crying a lot. Yes, there, I said it. I am a man, and I cry. A lot. Maybe I’m emotionally imbalanced. Maybe I need some testosterone boosters. I don’t know.

These crying bouts have confused and concerned my wife. Three nights ago, as I was crying about something, she tenderly asked, “What is going through your head right now?” Blowing my nose, I sniffled, “I don’t know. This is all so confusing to me as well. I don’t understand it either. I’m not really thinking anything except, ‘Why in the world am I crying?’”

So I started to think more about it, and observed the times when I start to cry, then talk about it with my wife. I noticed I cry when I read or hear stories about people who have experienced great personal pain in life. I cry when I learn about people who lost a loved one, boys who were beaten or neglected by their father, girls who were molested or raped, women who were abandoned by their husband. Last night, when I shared this with Wendy, she said, “I think that while you used to love theology, you now love people.”

I think my wife may be right. I’ve even noticed changes in my reading patterns. It used to be that when I read books, I would underline and scribble all over the theology sections, and skip over or get annoyed at the stories the authors would include as illustrations. I saw such stories as a needless waste of words. Now, as I flip through books I’ve read over the past six months or so, I see that I have underlined and scribbled all over the stories, and left the “theology” portions nearly untouched. I want more stories. I find myself reading and re-reading them. I share them with my wife. I ask myself how I would respond (besides crying) to people who have such pain in their lives. I want to get to know these people whose lives are so full of pain. If possible, I want to soak up some of their pain, and share with them some of the love they so desperately need and which I have been given in abundance.

And I realized today, on Good Friday, that this is why Jesus died. Did He die for the “propitiation for the sins of the world”? Of course. Was it an “unlimited and substitutionary atonement”? Yes. But I believe that more than any of these theological truths, Jesus died to associate with us in our suffering, to understand our loneliness, and to soak up our pain.

His death was not primarily a theological event. It was the greatest act of love that ever occured in the history of the universe. Jesus died because He loves you.  

9 Comments »

If there is one thing I have learned in my life as a follower of Jesus is that it is impossible to live like Jesus. I mean, after all, He was God! He lived a perfect life! If He is my standard, I’m throwing in the towel right now.

But thankfully, we aren’t called to live like Jesus. We are called, however, to like Jesus. God does want us to love Jesus. Loving Him leads to obeying Him (John 14:15), which certainly allows us to reflect Him in our lives, but it will never make us exactly like Him (not even in heaven!). I think the best thing we can do is be ourselves for Jesus. So don’t try to be Jesus. Just be yourself for Jesus.

Biblically as well, we are not called to be like Jesus. We are just called to a part of Jesus (1 Cor 12-14). None of us can be like Jesus by ourselves. We can only be like Jesus in a community of others who are also trying to be themselves for Jesus. The Bible calls this living as the body of Christ. Those who are toes live like toes for Jesus, letting those who are elbows be elbows. No part should try to be the whole person.

So stop trying to be like Jesus. You can’t do it, and He doesn’t want you to try. There’s only one Jesus, and you are not Him. Instead, just like Jesus, and be yourself for Jesus.

6 Comments »

I wish I’d had the courage when I was pastor to walk across the street. Oh sure, I walked across it every day back and forth to the church parsonage. But a bit further down the road was an atheist who had never set foot in our church, and probably never would. I wish I had gone over there and asked him out for lunch. It’s one of the great regrets of my years as a pastor. I thought about it every week, but I never had the courage.

Today I started reading Jim & Casper Go To Church. Jim is a Christian who makes a regular habit of befriending atheists. Casper is an atheist. Together, they attend churches and then write about what they heard and experienced. If you want to know what unbelievers think about you and your church, you should go ask them. But if you want to read about it instead (since it’s so much safer and easy), you can be like me and just read Jim and Casper’s book, and others like it (e.g., They Like Jesus, But Not the Church by Dan Kimball).

Jim has a ministry called Off the Map devoted to helping “Christians learn to communicate better with non-Christians, or as some of my more outspoken ‘lost’ friends prefer to put it, Off the Map helps Christians learn how to not be jerks” (p. xxii). It’s true. We can be real jerks. I’m sure it makes Jesus proud.

Anyway, I’m not even to the first chapter yet, but here are a few quotes from Jim with comments by me:

Humanity is divided into two groups: (1) people who follow Jesus, and (2) everybody else. It doesn’t matter to me whether you call yourself a Christian, a Buddhist, a humanist, an agnostic, or an atheist. If you aren’t following Jesus, you’re in group two (p. xxiv).

I could be wrong, but I don’t think he means that there can be Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists who follow Jesus. Sure, some may claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, but they would have to reject some of them. Just like many of us Christians do as well. And that’s his point. Just because you call yourself a Christian doesn’t mean you are following Jesus. I wholeheartedly agree with that. He goes on to say that “some professed Christians are not actually following Jesus but are instead following religion” (p. xxv). So true. I’m one such person in many ways.

He goes on to say that authors of a generation ago (and even many today):

…Provided Christians a way to defend the faith-the expectation being that if we provide a biblical response to the arguments of atheists of doubters and essentially prove them wrong, they will be forced to admit the error of their ways and join us. (Short of that, we will at least experience the pleasure of intellectually humiliating them.) (p. xxxii).

I’ve been in “witnessing” encounters like this. The only results that I could discern were increased blood pressure, as evidenced by red faces and bulging neck veins. Jim says, “Ordinary Christians like me know that when you start defending the faith, you also start losing your friends” (p. xxxiii).

The solution, Jim says, is to actually make friends with non-Christians, and live out the teachings of Jesus among them:

Jesus didn’t just teach principles; he taught practices. He gave people something to do. He didn’t just teach them about forgiveness; he told them to forgive their debtors. He didn’t just talk about love as a concept; he told people to love their enemies. He didn’t just tell people to think about changing their behaviors; he told them to repent. Sure it’s challenging, but it doesn’t take a weekend seminary to understand what he means (p. xxxiii).

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this book.

8 Comments »

After a recommendation from Vince Antonucci, I purchased a copy of The Gutter. I was so impressed by this book, I got online to find out more about the author, Craig Gross. I found that he is one of the co-founders of XXX Church, a ministry reaching out to those caught up in the sex industry. Whether you are a person addicted to pornography, a woman caught in prostitution, or anything in between, they want to help. Also, if you want to help keep yourself accountable when surfing the Internet, I recommend their free X3 Watch software.

Although I recommend buying a copy of this book, I just discovered that you can download a free copy of the book in PDF from Craig’s website. Get it and read it! He has a new book out called Starving Jesus which looks good also.

5 Comments »

Did you see the recent article in USA Today about the unchurched? Maybe it was only online, but check it out here. The basic findings are that the average person who doesn’t go to church wants to learn more about Jesus and is even open to talking about Him with Christian friends, but doesn’t think the church is doing a very good job representing Jesus (either in our words or actions). Here are a few quotes:

Most of the unchurched (86%) say they believe they can have a “good relationship with God without belonging to a church.” And 79% say “Christianity today is more about organized religion than loving God and loving people.”

“These outsiders are making a clear comment that churches are not getting through on the two greatest commandments,” to love God and love your neighbor, says Scott McConnell, associate director of LifeWay Research. “When they look at churches … they don’t see people living out the faith.”

But despite respondents’ critical views of organized religion, Stetzer is optimistic. He cites the finding that 78% would “be willing to listen” to someone tell “what he or she believed about Christianity.”

They already know believers — 89% of the unchurched have at least one close friend who is Christian, Stetzer noted.

And 71% agreed that “believing in Jesus makes a positive difference in a person’s life.”

“What surprised me is the openness of the hard-core unchurched to the message of God and Christianity — just not as expressed in church,” Stetzer says.

So who do you know that you can start a conversation with about Jesus?

No Comments »

A critic paid me quite a compliment today when he accused me of befriending and conversing with atheists and people who use the “F-word.” If only he knew the truth…

…but I’ve got nothing to hide, so I’ll share it: My wife invited a lesbian couple over to dinner a while back. They haven’t accepted yet, but we are hoping they will. Wendy says that if I ever meet some prostitutes or strippers, I can invite them over too. I have not met any yet (and I’m not going to the places they tend to hang out), but maybe one day I will. I gave a $50 Burger King card to a drunk on the street a month ago. If I had the time, I would have gone and eaten with him. I keep looking for him at his corner but haven’t seen him yet. Before coming to seminary, we let an alleged murderer stay in our house for six weeks while he was on house-arrest. All of his friends and family members abandoned him when it looked like he was guilty, so we took him in. It was one of the best six weeks of my life.

So not only am I trying to make friends with Atheists, Agnostics, and people who use rough language, I am also trying to befriend homosexuals, prostitutes, strippers, drunks, and murderers.

And to tell you the truth, I’ve never felt closer to Jesus. I believe that if Jesus were walking the earth today, he would befriend and converse with these people too. Of course, the Pharisees and religious hypocrites would get upset at him today, just as they did 2000 years ago: “Gasp! Jesus is eating with tax collectors and sinners! Doesn’t he know what they’ve done?” (Read Matt 9:11; 11:19; Mark 2:15-16).

Yes, he does know. That’s why he eats with them. That’s why I eat with them too…. Not because I’m “holy like Jesus,” but because I’m one of those “sinners.” I hope that if Jesus were walking around today, he would come up to me and say, “Hey! I’m having a BBQ over at my place for sinners. Want to come?”

If he were to ask you that question, what would you say?

9 Comments »