We don’t go looking for or emphasize miracles, but in our fellowships we’ve been seeing the miraculous happen time and again.
We had one man collapse and then die right in front of the paramedics and the fellowship he had been helping to start in the jail – and then come back to life shortly thereafter on the gurney in the jail infirmary after brothers gathered together to pray for him.
This picture has great significance for me. It is from one of our fellowships – this one meets in my home on Sundays.
Yesterday, as we gathered together, we prayed and give prophetic words of encouragement over Oscar, a close friend who is moving forward with his road-side pit barbeque business by signing a contract to have a mobile food service trailer built for him (Oscar’s Barbeque). He has worked faithfully towards this moment – as unto the Lord – for two years.
I’ve watched and walked with Oscar as he’s progressed over time, step by step, in growing, proving and succeeding in his business model as part of God’s call on his life.
Are we living up to God’s plan for His body? What is His plan for His body? Are we all heart? Are we all head?
I believe a spider web exemplifies the body of Christ. A spider web is both beautiful and useful, but also very complex. The spider’s silk has the unique ability to become softer or stiffer depending on the stress the web receives. It is not stagnant but active. God so designed the spider’s web that when one strand breaks, the strength of the entire web actually increases.
God desires the same for His church. There are times when a situation requires softness and the “web” needs to reach out and actively demonstrate that attribute. In contrast, sometimes the body needs to show stiffness and resolve, so rushing to the rescue might not be the best answer.
Ministry One to Another?
On Facebook, I posted a comment supporting a recent blog by Neil Cole about why the “organic church movement” is important. One of my smart-aleck Facebook friends responded:
Organic Church Movement? Is that a movement naturally fertilized? Or maybe movement marching only to organ music. Could also be a church movement of Kidneys, Livers and Colons?
So I thought I’d be a smart aleck in responding:
I believe in the future, and in God’s sovereign ability to redeem history, nations and cultures.
I believe, because right now there is a fellow believer…
In the hospital quietly holding the hand of a friend recovering from life-saving surgery.
In grad school, heeding God’s call to basic research which will lead to new therapies that save countless lives.
Trudging through the woods, visiting tents, and checking on the well being of homeless women who “fell through the cracks”.
Standing outside an abortion clinic, ministering love and hope to a woman who knows neither.
Experiencing the first blush of lace and the joy of total intimacy on his wedding night, undefiled by the world.
Several weeks ago, I was asked how to find “ekklesia” (the Greek word in the New Testament often translated as “church”).
Many today are frustrated because they can’t seem to find authentic fellowship, or feel stuck in the “wilderness” after leaving the institutional church.
As I’ve thought about this, it’s been hard for me to know how to respond. The last thing anyone needs is another “program”, “method” or “three easy steps” to find something that God designed to be authentically birthed, and sustained, organically.
You see, God intends that life reproduce life. That principle is built into the very fabric of creation. Like all things that impart life, real ekklesia is organic, through and through.
And by “organic”, I mean simply this: The authentic and diverse life of Christ in me, which is then expressed among us and through us as we become the wonderful, dynamic, multi-gifted and participatory Body of Christ.
The key to finding this, I think, is found in those two words: authentic and diverse.
So here’s my response on how to find ekklesia, rooted in my own experience of finding, and then helping others find, real life and real fellowship – not as one who’s arrived, but simply as one who has been on the path maybe a little longer.
One of my strongest beliefs is that God calls us for a purpose – and gives us individual grace and gifts to match.
As Christ in us is expressed through us, we expand His Kingdom for the blessing of all – wherever He calls us.
Different Grace, Different Gifts, Different Callings
Where He bids us go, and what He bids us do, is different for each – and I have also learned that it often changes with the seasons of our lives.
For some, at this time in their life, it is to go and raise Godly families. For others, it is in the business realm as they create resources and opportunities. For some, it is going out to the fringes of their communities and ministering to those in need.
This is a fifty-five minute teaching I shared with about thirty men, based on hundreds of pastoral counseling sessions where God showed up and brought freedom and healing from deep hurts – including abuse, abandonment and so much more.
My blog is a feeble attempt to upload a lifetime of service to the King of Kings. I believe this audio teaching, however, captures better than anything I’ve written some of the most significant things I’ve learned as I’ve walked with folks to those ugly places of bondage and hurt in their lives. When we get there, and they exposed their hurts and lies to the Lord, He brings His loving, healing truth.
In this talk, I also share some of my own very personal story about my own places of hurt, which I had to expose to Lord so He could then bring wholeness to me.
You may think you know me from my writings, but this captures my heart in ways that a written blog never can.
If this resonates with you, I also recommend my related blog, God Shows Up.
Wherever he went, the Apostle Paul always sparked either revival or riot.
Does our age, and our culture, deserve any less?
Let’s boldly smash our boxes of insular spirituality and cultural lethargy by confidently proclaiming that Jesus is Lord of all.
Let’s reject narcissist Christianity by allowing Jesus in me to be more than about me – and my sensibilities.
Let’s stop foisting our own grace, gifts, callings and motivations on God’s people as normative for all.
Let’s embrace the diversity of His grace, gifts, callings and motivations in the context of true ekklesia – local authentic community where Jesus in us is expressed through us as His multifaceted and participatory Body.
Let’s stop saying everything is about my relationship with Jesus while discounting his Kingship – including His commands and His precepts.
Let’s stop saying I only do what I hear Jesus subjectively tell me, while denying the power and authority of what He also says in His written Word.
Let’s stop proclaiming “Christ is all” while minimizing all that Christ has given for knowing more of Him – including not only His presence in us, but also the plenary authority of Scripture to guide us in sound doctrine, balanced community that affirms objective standards, holy lives that please Him, engaging our culture, and wise counsel from mature believers who model His precepts.
Let’s reject gnostic tendencies that seek to separate the spiritual and the material world of our everyday existence by denying the authority and relevance of Christ – and His body – regarding all of creation.
Let’s stop discounting those who went before us, and their creeds and experiences, by humbly learning what they have to teach us despite the reality that we all have flaws.
Let’s affirm God’s continual sovereign advance through history and reject the spirit of our age and its myopic, isolationist pessimism.
Let’s be discerning about self-proclaimed apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers or other itinerant ministries – and their writings – when they are not themselves presently rooted in, accountable to, coming from, or even able to demonstrate a history of integration into actual, functional, local ekklesia.
Let’s reject the voices of those who try to separate the centrality of Christ from the Great Commission, mission and discipleship.
Let’s unleash God’s people to be fruitful at all stages of their growth, as Christ enables, and stop burdening them with the bondage of our preconceived preconditions of “root before fruit”.
Let’s start embracing balance and maturity – as together we become His disciples through functional, participatory ekklesia that reflects the life of Christ but is also rooted in the authority of His written Word.
Let’s be mighty men and women of God, who once again spark revival or riot as we proclaim the fulness of Christ as merciful Savior, gracious Lord, sovereign King and ultimate Judge to a desperate world.
As such, may we be life-transforming, culture-changing ekklesia once again – the visible Body of Christ which doesn’t merely say come, but goes forth into all the world.
I wrote and posted this on the morning of my birthday, when I officially became a “senior citizen”. It summarizes a lifetime of experience serving the King of Kings. May it be both a present and a challenge to my passion: the wonderful, multifaceted, participatory Body of Christ.
We all tend to put God in a box bounded by our own biases, giftings and sensibilities.
I do it. You do it. We all relate to Jesus within the confines of our own God-given (and sometimes not so God-given) attributes. And we all tend to think our own box defines, or should define, the totality of life, reality and even Jesus Himself.
Maturity, however, is recognizing and affirming Christ – often in others (including their warts and shortcomings) – outside our box.
I keep hearing from folks who have felt troubled and marginalized by authors and bloggers who seem unable to go beyond their own sensibilities and who seek to make their own gifts and limitations normative for the entire Body of Christ.
In response, I can’t shake this urge to proclaim what I see in scripture and experience daily in our own fellowships: The multifaceted, multi-gifted, multi-called Body of Christ.
I am convinced that God’s heart is passionate about releasing His people to be all that He created them to be – not just in our churches, but in all spheres of life.
Our collective failure to do this – both within the institutional and organic church communities – and the insular, anemic fruit that has resulted, is one of the biggest challenges facing the West today.
Individual Limitations
Here’s the problem I see daily among individual Christians:
Those who are primarily motivated by the heart, feel all must be the same. Those primarily motivated by renewed minds, think all must be the same. Those primarily motivated by transformed wills, act as though all must be the same…
We are post-modern in our sensibilities, so all must be the same. We are called to this, or to that, and so all must be the same. We not are called to this, or to that, and so all must be the same…
Please, everyone, can’t we just stop this nonsense!
Yes, Christ is all. But is He just Lord of YOUR all, or Lord of all?
Is He just heart, or just mind, or just will?
Is He just mercy, or just prophetic, or just ruler, or just giver, or just relational, or just whatever you want or seem to need Him to be?
Is He just generation X, or generation Y?
And let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: Has He really surrendered His Lordship over all creation, culture, spheres of human endeavor, nations and history itself, just so He can be all about you and your sensibilities?
For real???
Leadership Limitations
It is bad enough when individuals try to make their own strengths and limitations normative for all. But it is an order of magnitude worse for a leader to do so.
Fathers delight in others exceeding them.
The more I contemplate and reflect on this, and seek the mind of Christ, the more I am coming to believe that these problems are rooted in the difference between a teacher verses a father in the faith.
Both are needed.
But teachers are primarily motivated to reproduce what they have only personally comprehended or experienced. They tend to minister from whom they are, and are very good at laying a foundation based on what they personally understand, but often are not very good at taking us much further.
Fathers (and mothers!) often stand on the foundation laid by the teachers, and may themselves engage in didactic teaching, but their motivation is very different. They tend to focus on who you can be, and are good at helping others be more than themselves and to exceed their own understanding and experiences.
Where teachers delight in replicating what they have personally figured out, fathers delight in us going beyond their own abilities, comprehension, biases and sensibilities.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not an absolute either/or. But there are different core motivations, even though some can operate in both arenas.
Maybe a hands-on father in the faith won’t be motivated to burrow down into all the details to bring us deep understanding on this or that – or be motivated to write many books – like a teacher. Rather, his greatest joy is releasing others to be more than himself.
The joy of a father is for you to exceed him by helping you find your own – and often very different – abilities and calling. He delights in watching you conquer the unknown as you venture into new spheres of endeavor in areas he may not even comprehend, rather than simply conveying and replicating his own motivations and understanding.
Moving Forward
We have wonderful teachers, writers and bloggers, and they have taught us much from the perspective of their own journey, their own comprehension, and their own sensibilities.
But we have too few fathers in the Body of Christ these days.
As a father who has birthed and mentored many in the Lord, I make this plea to the gifted teachers among us who have taught me much: Keep writing, blogging and teaching. You have much to offer. But understand that Christ, as head of His body, never intended for your own understanding and experiences to become limiting factors, or God forbid, the new legalism.
He calls all leaders in His Church to enable and equip others. And yes, Christ is all. But “all” is not defined by or limited to your own understanding and sensibilities.
Unless we all grasp this truth – individuals, teachers and fathers alike – we will never become the wonderful, amazing Body of Christ.
This is my passion. This is my calling.
Exactly. This video captures my passion and expresses my life.
Jesus is not about “us” ministering to “them”, or “us” creating cocoons of shared sensibilities as though we are “Beyond” everyone else.
God help us – institutional and organic churches alike.
Hear me on this: God may not call all of us individually to this or to that, but He does call all His people to a big “us” – also known as His Church, the multifaceted Body of Christ.
And in His Church there is no “them” when it comes to His life being expressed in us, among us and through us.
I spent Sunday afternoon with the guys in one of the churches that we planted three years ago in the local jail.
My voice went hoarse from singing along with them and my fingers became sore from playing the guitar as they took the initiative in starting song after song and leading forth.
For nearly an hour and a half they sang non-stop praises to the Lord, and were so loud and enthusiastic I’m sure they could be heard throughout the building.
They were stompin’, clappin’ and rockin’, with lots of laughin’ and cryin’ in gratitude before the Lord!
Now, I don’t want to shake up anyone’s theology, but the Holy Spirit also was grooving to some powerful, spontaneous rappin’ that was going on!
This is an appeal for help by other churches and ministries in reversing the local probation office’s de facto ban on church attendance in Prince William County, Virginia.
Our network of fellowships, with other churches in the county, actively ministers to and embraces men and women on the fringes of society. We have found that if the Gospel doesn’t work for those whom some consider the worst among us (including ex-sex offenders), then it works for none of us.
Our work with sex offenders often begins in the jail as we reach out to them and they turn their lives over to Jesus. We then engage in intense pastoral counseling that focuses on confession, forgiveness and repentance as we get to the issues in their lives and allow the Lord to bring healing. We also foster indigenous churches in the jail where they, and others, can experience vibrant fellowship and grow in their faith. It is not easy, but we have seen great success.
The more I minister to folks, the more I realize how simple it is.
And the more I realize how hard it is to get to simple.
Often, longstanding hurts, disappointments and emotional wounds are like old, familiar friends. We let them become so engrained into our sense of identity that they begin to define us.
When that happens, we often aren’t willing to transparently expose and turn them them over to Jesus, but tightly hold onto them like a child clinging to a security blanket.
Instead of finding transformation and wholeness, we become our past.
If this is a struggle for you or someone you know, let me suggest an old blog I wrote years ago called God Shows Up. It’s a good starting point on the road to healing.
Two days after I posted my series “Beyond Evangelical?“, Milt Rodriguez – who I took to task in my series – wrote a blog which helps close the gap, so to speak, that I was addressing.
I urge everyone to read Milt’s new blog. It really is very good, and is at http://miltrodriguez.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/10-myths-about-organic-church-part-9/.
But the gap still exists so long as he continues to have a very limited view of the “objective” aspect of his “holistic approach” (as he discusses in his blog).
Specifically, does he still discredit, as he’s done in other blogs, those who (to quote him directly) engage in “praying and working toward … bringing this nation back to God” because political and civic engagement “is just another distraction from the person of Christ Himself” (emphasis added)?
Helping the poor and needy – as Milt’s blog urges – is not just doing charity and personal ministry (it certainly can include that, and I’m active in those areas), but also can legitimately include dealing with systemic social and political issues. It also can include those who labor in economics, law, politics, media, the arts, education, and all other spheres of life – not as “distractions” from Jesus but as expressions of the love of Jesus which is alive in them.
I have no idea if God has called Milt to those larger arenas, but my plea is that he expand his vision to embrace those who are called – and rethink some of his very harsh prior rhetoric against other brothers and sisters whose holistic approach may be broader than his own.
As a fellow church planter, I think it is best that we avoid imposing our own gifts, callings and sensibilities (including our political likes and dislikes and maybe our natural tendency to discount those things that we don’t necessarily personally grasp) on God’s people as somehow normative. That is so limiting to those who have God-given abilities and motivations which may exceed or differ from our own.
As I state in my Beyond Evangelical? series, and it bears repeating: Jesus is subjective, personal and relational. But He is also objective, cultural and propositional. And true fellowship – organic, missional, or whatever – must permit folks to express all of Jesus, no matter what our gifts, our callings, or our sensibilities.
Again, though, I think Milt Rodriguez’s latest blog is excellent and I applaud him for it.
Post-Modernity
The “You Can’t” Crowd
What I find most bizarre among emerging “Beyond Evangelical” authors is how vocal they are in telling Christians what we can’t do – we can’t be engaged in cultural or civic reform, we can’t go and disciple the nations, we can’t be engaged in politics, we can’t ever take a social position that offends, we can’t this, and we can’t that.
Sometimes, it gets so bad that you can only laugh.
Increasing or Decreasing?
Ever notice the strong correlation between how “big” a Christian leader is and the degree of Christian immaturity in “his” organization (i.e., church, ministry, or whatever)?
May we come to grips with the words of John the Baptist, who told his disciples that Jesus “must increase, but I must decrease.”
This is the true measure of leadership in the Body of Christ.
~ Jim
Is there still no room at the inn?
It’s not too late: Invite to your time of Christmas family sharing, or to your Christmas meal, that man or woman who recently was released from prison, or that person who has no family in your area and is alone, or someone who is destitute and living in the woods near your home (trust me, they are there).
Embrace
You and your family will bless them, and be blessed, more than you can ever imagine.
If you don’t know anyone to invite, call your local homeless shelter or battered women’s shelter. Ask for the staff person on duty. Tell him/her you want to invite someone to join your family Christmas morning, or to share a Christmas meal at your home.
Let them know if you are interested in inviting a family, or maybe just an individual or two, and ask for their recommendation. They will know the residents, and will do a good job introducing you to an appropriate person or family.
Some of my most enduring friendships have come from reaching outside my comfort zone to those who are destitute, abandoned, imprisoned or just plain alone. It will change you far more than them.
And please, don’t try to “fix” them – just be a friend. The rest just sort of follows naturally – including them fixing you as you open your heart and your life to those who you previously treated as “other” or only “helped” through impersonal “programs”.
Take a chance. Open your home and your lives to embrace the Joseph’s and Mary’s of our age.
This is true church. This is true religion. This is true grace.
~ Jim Wright
I think I’m slowly comprehending the profound cleavage that’s occurring today in how folks understand “Church”.
Old Covenant Church
The Old Covenant was a revelation about God – His nature and precepts – with a tabernacle/temple where people could go to find His presence and a priesthood to help get right with Him.
This is like many churches today, which do a wonderful job teaching us about the Lord, providing a place and an environment for us to experience His presence, and serving as a bridge between God and His people.
Many are content to go to church to learn about God, feel His presence, and have an anointed and appointed pastor and his worship team mediate from the front. It would be dishonest to deny that those can be truly amazing, life-affirming pillars for one’s faith.
But in the New Testament, is that God’s perfect will?
Sometimes I get angry and need the Lord to settle my spirit.
I am so frustrated over the shattered lives of man after man who I help find the Lord in jail, who then go to some on-fire, podium-focused, pastor-centric church when they get out.
The Show
Inevitably, I will see those men back in jail again a year later, or I’ll hear that they have relapsed and fallen back into addiction or bondage.
Why are they back in jail or back in bondage? Because that “church” is little more than glory-halleluiah feel-good meetings with exciting sermons framed by manipulative emotional intensity which masquerades as “worship” – all deliberately designed to serve as a platform to showcase the gifted pastor and his gifted team.
On Tuesday evening, I understood how Jesus felt when his disciples finally “got it” and reported back, after He sent them out to minister on their own for the first time, that the sick were healed and darkness conquered. In His joy, the Lord said He saw Satan fall from Heaven because of them.
On Tuesday I’m teaching and mentoring a class of students on how to minister in the areas of confession, forgiveness and repentance. After seven weeks of foundation laying, the students this week started doing ministry sessions on their own and – wow! – it was amazing what God did through them that evening.
Crossing The Chasm
Earlier this month I had the privilege of visiting a network of churches in Branson, Missouri, comprised of over a dozen recovery homes where people were ministering one to another in authentic community. In the context of that community of love, grace and fellowship, the Lord was using those whom He had redeemed from sin and addictions to bring healing and reconciliation to other broken people.
During the trip, I innocently made the comment that I was seeing an amazing example among them of what the “church” should be. One of the men I was talking to looked pained at my well-intentioned compliment, and responding by gently but emphatically stating they were NOT a “church”.
Over the next several days, I finally understood where he was coming from.
Here’s a TV program that’s been airing in our area about one of the ministries in which I’m involved. I, and others, have been mentoring and working with folks who are gifted with entrepreneurial aptitude. Our focus is helping them start and grow new businesses, based on solid, real-world experience and sound Biblical principles. Often, we work with “alumni” of the local jail.
The host, Liz Charity, starts out interviewing me, then does an on-site interview with one of my protegé’s, Oscar Weeks, who started a road-side pit BBQ business.
Crossroad Junction 