A fellow pilot, David Lytle, discovered a cassette tape in a small recorder he purchased for $3 at a flea market last week. It contained a recording made in 1978 of a few World War II bomber gunnery crew members who hadn’t seen each other in many years and were reminiscing about their experiences during the war. David mentioned the tape on a forum for other pilots that I frequent, and with everyone’s encouragement converted the recording to an MP3 file and posted it online.
Worship
This is another YouTube video posted by a friend on Facebook (give credit where credit is due!). It’s a hilarious spoof on worship.
It’s good, sometimes, to laugh even if it’s at ourselves!
Regeneration
A friend posted this short video on Facebook and it’s too precious, timely and relevant to pass up. As you listen, may God mercifully and lovingly wound you in order to heal you.
It’s by Paul Washer, who I first mentioned in a blog back in March (see God Is Not Passive). His burden for the Church touched my heart then, and continues to do so now.
Pimping the Gospel
As I’ve previously ministered in other parts of the world, I’ve been alarmed at the growing influence of the so-called “prosperity gospel”.
The prosperity message is simply the latest incarnation of the historically persistent “gospel of self” that’s been a blight on the Church since the beginning. Going back to Simon the Samaritan in Acts 8, there’s always been those among us – with gifted personalities and beguiling, mesmerizing spirits of seeming sincerity – who pimp the gospel for personal gain.
Such God pimps – including John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Joel Osteen and their minions – are all over the airways peddling their seductive gospel of “self”.
The Lost Art of Dialogue
As last Friday’s church met over a shared meal (nothing fancy — KFC this week!) around a kitchen table, someone asked a question that opened up a great discussion on God’s sovereignty and human will. We must have spent at least an hour in dynamic exchange — with amazing questions, comments and seeking Scripture together as God’s truths opened up for everyone.
Evangelical Prophets or Martyrs?
I vividly recall leafing through World magazine back in 2006 and reading the unsettling but hardly surprising news that Randall Terry – 
the firebrand evangelical who formerly headed Operation Rescue and was then financially wiped out following a series of lawsuits by pro-abortionists – had joined the Roman Catholic Church.
“Unsettling,” because it provides further evidence of the growing weariness and disillusionment I’m seeing among spiritual “entrepreneurs” who’ve been laboring within evangelical circles to expand the Kingdom of God in all spheres of life and culture.
“Hardly surprising,” however, as those “on point” for the Kingdom increasingly seek refuge from the prevailing pop-theology (or dare I say lack of theology) and me-focused brand of Christianity that pervades evangelicalism (which includes charismatics and Pentecostals), animates many of our local church and national leaders, and cuts believers off from the great historic doctrines and creeds of our faith.
Participatory Church
Recent events forced me to confront the troubling truth that “church” for the last several decades has been a habitually disappointing part of my spiritual journey. This could be saying more about me than about the state of the church, except that I hear the same lament from many other believers.
The Gift of Mercy
Of the seven spiritual gifts listed in Romans 12, the last – but, I believe, the greatest yet least appreciated and most abused – is mercy.
As I watch and sense what God is doing with an emerging new spiritual generation, I see that their dominant characteristic is mercy. I also have begun to realize that God wants to use “mercies” (those with the primary spiritual gift of mercy) as catalysts to unleash additional gifts in others. That, in turn, will bring this rising generation to new pastures where God wants to dwell among us.
This doesn’t mean everyone in this new spiritual generation has mercy as their dominant individual spiritual gift. But as a whole, they nonetheless seem to collectively exhibit the main motivations of mercy – which are a deep, personal craving for the presence of God and for genuine intimacy with others.
As a result, this rising generation has little interest or patience with the moral and cultural wars of my generation, or with our prevailing hypocrisy as we tried to fix everyone else but failed to exhibit God’s presence in our own lives. Nor can they understand the focus on programs and institutions – with a resulting lack of authentic community – among older Christians.
Following God’s Presence
Today in the jail, after two hours of powerful ministry between the men one to another, they stopped and said they decided earlier this week to do something for me. They then stood around me, laid hands on me, and prayed the most wonderful, tender prayers of blessing I’ve ever heard.
I cried as I realized what they were doing, because they’ve learned – maybe with some of them for the first time in their lives – to give rather than always take or receive.
After months of mentoring them on “being” the church (see my blog, The Church in D Pod), they heeded God’s gentle call to new pastures. As a result, they now “get” it and wonderful life is flowing between them and from them – even to me!
How many church leaders – who so closely guard the microphone and the prerogatives of their front podium as they try to direct even God himself during their closely scripted and controlled Sunday services – have ever experienced the joy of being just one of many?
Do they realize they have no monopoly on the many spiritual gifts God wants us to give as acts of worship, to Him and in fellowship one with another?
If not, then they are missing the blessing of letting life and ministry flow under the prompting of the Holy Spirit – not simply from them, but to and around them.
Discovering Our Motivational Gifts
Each of us is born with a personality that’s uniquely tailored to what God created us to do with our lives.
Understanding God’s calling, and the associated personality He’s gifted us with, is not difficult: Our calling matches our gifts, and our gifts match our passions.
Furthermore, when we use our gifts and fulfill our calling according to God’s will, we feel His pleasure – in addition to our own.
There’s a problem, however, when our validation comes from using our gifts or pursing our calling, instead of pleasing God. Rather than being content with God saying “well done, thou good and faithful servant,” we seek legitimacy in who we are, what we do, how others react to us, or in the results of our actions.
Such validation comes from and is focused on us, rather than God.
The Church in D Pod
This Sunday, like most Sundays, I will be fellowshipping with the “Church in D Pod” at the local jail.
D Pod is a unit housing around a hundred men, and God has been pouring out his new wine in an exciting way among those inmates.
A couple of months ago, I started shifting my focus from “conducting” church services “for” the men. God was challenging me to start mentoring and training them instead to “be” the church by learning to minister one to another.
At the same time, God sovereignly arranged for two brothers from Africa — where Christians generally are way ahead of their American brothers and sisters on these issues — to be jailed in that unit. They, too, understood the concept of ministering one to another and started fostering authentic fellowship among the men.
The Sunday “God Show” at Your Friendly Podium Church
When did “church” become a podium-focused “God Show” watched by passive spectators for an hour or so each Sunday morning?
Where do we even find that in Scripture?
I believe that the days of the “podium church” and the Sunday “God show”are passing — where we gaze each Sunday past the back of the head in front of us to passively watch carefully scripted ministry delivered from a front podium through a tightly controlled microphone.
The Growing Idolatry of Civil Government
“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” ~ Margaret Thatcher
Some may think we’ve not yet sunk into the clutches of socialism — 
which happens when we have a state-run economy. But consider this: In 2009, federal and state governments will consume 40 percent of the United States’ TOTAL gross domestic product.
This means that nearly half of all the wealth generated in America this year will be taken by civil government to fund its ever expanding control over more and more of our lives and our economy. As a result, we have run out of money while undercutting the means for producing future wealth.
Yet the federal government seeks to expand its reach even more.
New Wine Sucks
As God brings forth new wine in a new generation, there’s a fundamental dynamic that can’t be ignored. To put it bluntly, new wine sucks!
In my younger days, I was an amateur wine maker. So I know what Jesus means when he says, “no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.'” (Luke 5:39)
The Charismatic Movement is Dead
On June 30, 2009, no less an authority than J. Lee Grady, the editor of Charisma Magazine, declared that “the Charismatic Movement is dead.”
When I Fell In Love
It’s the 4th of July weekend here in the United States, and I was thinking about the first time I truly fell in love with America.
It was during my first trip overseas on my own, at the ripe old age of 21, after a year of grad school at Westminster Theological Seminary. I was sitting in Trafalgar Square in London on Independence Day, after more than a month of backpacking through the British Isles. It had been a grand trip of personal discovery as I hitchhiked from town to town, ate my meals in open air markets, slept on church steps, and occasionally visited youth hostels to take a shower. During my stay in Scotland, someone had given me the book “When Free Men Shall Stand,” and I had been reading it off and on during my travels.
As my trip was coming to a close and I was hanging out in London waiting for a stand-by airline seat home, I finished the book while sitting in that park. For the first time, I started looking back at America through the filter of another culture and began thinking about what made America unique. Many, like me that day, never really discover America until they’ve had the opportunity to leave her.
At that time in the United Kingdom, Thatcher had not yet been elected Prime Minister and the Liberal Party was wrecking that nation with policies that destroyed personal responsibility and initiative. Even as a twenty-one year old, the culture and the people, by and large, struck me as bland, crass and dominated by attitudes of entitlement. As money was being sucked out of the economy to feed that sense of personal entitlement at the hand of big brother, hope and opportunity were dying.
As a result, the Brits had lost their spark and zest for life. It finally was dawning on me that those qualities are vital for any people. I also was beginning to realize that those qualities had persevered in America because of the ideals that sparked the revolution of 1776 and then the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Those ideals, in turn, were gleaned by our Founding Fathers from Biblical principles that gave birth to the first Constitutional Republic to grace the earth in nearly 3000 years (since dying out when Israel foolishly chose a King rather than continuing as a constitutional republic under the Decalogue through locally chosen representative leaders).
I very much had been a liberal activist until then, but started weeping that day as I suddenly realized how I had taken for granted – and been ignorant about – the principles in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I also began to appreciate how truly revolutionary the core value of our Founding Fathers had been: Mainly, that the liberty to pursue virtue requires limited civil government, and that the greatest danger to virtue and liberty is a government which assumes the prerogatives of individual responsibility under the guise of benevolence.
I came back a changed man.
Are there any other 4th of July stories out there, or tales about your own political and cultural epiphanies, as we celebrate Independence Day?
(c) Copyright 2009, Fulcrum Ministries. All Rights Reserved.
New Wine And Old Skins
Here’s an interesting article, reprinted below, on how people will stick to what they believe or think even in the face of contrary facts or circumstances. As I’ve watched people react to challenges and controversies 
over the last couple of months, and to God bursting old wine skins as he brings forth new wine, I can believe it!
Isaiah 9:6-8 tells us that God’s Kingdom, from the incarnation onward, has been and will continue to be ever advancing. As such, God is constantly fermenting new wine — and providing new wine skins to contain it — as his progressive plan of redemption moves forward from one spiritual generation to each successive spiritual generation (which can include individuals of all ages!). God’s active and ever expanding intervention in history is clear, and his tendency to discard the old while bringing in the new is repeatedly seen in Scripture.
Yet it never failed to fascinate me, as a graduate student in church history back in the 1970s, to see how — time and time again — most Christians reject God’s new wine of new anointing for new generations. Instead, they choose to stick with their old wine and old wine skins.
New Covenant Fellowship? Beware!
New Covenant Fellowship in Manassas, Virginia, started out as a great church twenty-five years ago under a gifted pastor who’s since left. Under Robin Bayles and the current “pastor/elders” (the term they choose for themselves), massive numbers of additional people have left as the church sinks into cult practices and cult doctrines. As a result, attendance has plunged from thousands to barely thirty adults on Sunday mornings.
- Robin Bayles, the current senior “pastor/elder”, has been secretly enriching himself with around $200k annually from church funds for a sizable salary, a generous housing allowance, numerous benefits and various other perks amounting to somewhere around a million dollars in total
over the last several years — despite the tiny size of the congregation and the fact that he doesn’t even work at the church but works for an unrelated organization. When his self-enrichment was exposed, he denied it and falsely claimed to have taken only a small fraction of the true amount. - Robin Bayles has personally acquired and gained wealth from numerous investment rental properties purchased with funds taken from the church. He also has been employed nearly full time for many years — and earns a significant income — from his separate employer. Nonetheless, he has tried to manipulate his shrinking congregation and justify his self-enrichment from church funds with false pleas of poverty.
Father’s Day
I received a number of calls and cards this weekend wishing me a happy father’s day. What was special is that they came from various men who I’ve mentored and walked besides over the years while they were in jail and upon their release. I felt very honored, blessed and humbled.
People don’t realize that the Biblical mandate to be “a father to the fatherless” is not talking solely about babies and children. There are many young men who need spiritual dads. It can be messy, but the impulse to embrace these men springs from the heart of the Father. There should be no orphans — of any age — in the Kingdom of God.
(c) Copyright 2009, Fulcrum Ministries. All Rights Reserved.
Confessions of an Excommunicant
Yup. It’s true. In 2009, I was “disfellowshipped” from New Covenant Fellowship in Manassas, Virginia – and in an odd sort of way I felt deeply honored!
I first posted this for a few months on my old blog in 2009, but decided to dust it off and make it public once again under its original publication date. Fortunately, it migrated over – with its original publication date and original comments still preserved – when I set up this new blog in late 2009.
I’m re-posting my story because many others have experienced similar fates as they try to deal with abusive leaders who hide their leadership sins behind a wall of unaccountability and by intimidating – and then expelling – all voices of integrity from their church.
I hope my experience encourages others to have the courage to raise legitimate concerns under Biblical procedures, even if it means being kicked out of your church. Stand firm, because there is life after “excommunication”!
Dealing with Chronic Fatigue
My closest friends have seen me walk through some very difficult times with my health over the last several years. Where others see the “together,” upbeat and accomplished Jim, they see the reserved, careful and slow-paced Jim who is learning to live with chronic fatigue.
This all started several years ago. I had founded and was running a number of successful international businesses, including a law firm and a cutting edge scientific consulting firm. But in 2006 I had to walk away from it all due to debilitating chronic fatigue that began more than a year earlier.
Stress As a Factor
At first, I thought I was struggling with routine burnout – which I now realize may have been a factor but was not the full story. In early 2008, my doctors discovered that I had been suffering from a very rare autoimmune condition called systemic sclerosis (sometimes known as scleroderma).
Initially, I was relieved to know that my fatigue wasn’t “all in my head” and that I really hadn’t gotten lazy. But that didn’t make the fatigue or the impact it was having on my life any less devastating.
Eventually, as I researched systemic sclerosis and talked to my doctors, I learned that stress – as typically is the case in many autoimmune diseases – was a big issue. It doesn’t necessary cause the disease, but it can trigger the onset and then exasperate the symptoms.
With me, those symptoms – which on top of the fatigue also included mild depression, chronic pain and joint stiffness – had become so bad that in 2007 I couldn’t function anymore in the basic aspects of life. By early 2008 I was reduced to walking with a cane due to the fatigue and the overall pain, and my prospects were bleak.
I ended up losing everything: my marriage, my family, my businesses, my wealth and eventually my sense of self.
Since then, God has been bringing resolution to many of the stressful relationships that were making things worse – sometimes by giving me the grace to let folks go who couldn’t otherwise handle my deteriorating situation.
As I began to find my validity in how He defines me – rather than how I and others were defining me – I’ve seen great improvements. As part of that process, I’ve also been learning to manage any stress that still occasionally surfaces by understanding, more and more, that God – rather than some circumstance – is sovereign over my life!
Overall, as I’ve been re-discovering the joy and wonder of life, most of the more severe symptoms of the disease have abated. The pain has lessened (although I still need various medications, but at greatly reduced doses) and since early this year the intensity of the fatigue has decreased.
Nonetheless, I still have fairly constant, low-level chronic fatigue.
Running Out of Energy
To those wondering about chronic fatigue, the best way to describe it is to contrast my life with “normal” folks.
Most folks wake up each morning with essentially a full reservoir of energy. Think of it as a big gallon jar (although the size of the jar will vary from person to person) that’s filled with stamina and spunk.
Someone who is healthy uses and replenishes the energy in their jar throughout a typical day. They do some things that are a net energy drain, but they also restore their stamina by doing other things that energize them. Those things vary from person to person, but their jar very seldom runs totally dry and after a good night’s sleep the jar usually is full again and ready for a new day. (And please, don’t tell me how drained you are at the end of the day — unless you have experienced chronic fatigue, you have no idea how much energy you really have even after a particularly exhausting day!)
Someone suffering from chronic fatigue has the same gallon jar, but they struggle with all of the expectations – both their own and from others – of what they once could do each day with their normal reservoir of energy. But now the gallon jar is never full – it is partially empty even when they wake up from a good night’s sleep. More significantly, as they participate in the activities of life, those things that once energized them can’t replenish their energy as quickly as before.
Two Kinds of Fatigue
With my systemic sclerosis, I’ve experienced two kinds of chronic fatigue. With one kind, the valve used to draw energy out of my jar is very, very constricted. I can’t suck much energy out at any one time. It’s like stepping on the gas pedal, but the car barely sputters along and lacks power. There’s gas in the tank, but I just can’t get it flowing fast enough to run the engine at full speed.
That’s what it was like when my fatigue started and I ended up divesting myself of all of my business and professional interests. I just couldn’t get enough energy flowing to do much of anything. The simple, routine tasks of life were nearly impossible — even when I was motivated and wanting to do more.
With the second kind of chronic fatigue, the valve is able to handle a full flow of energy and I rev up my engine just like normal people. The problem is, there’s just not as much energy to keep that flow going. In this example, I step on the pedal and the car accelerates to 60 mph just fine, but it’s just not going to go very far before the tank runs dry. To use another analogy, I am “good in the moment” and full of spunk and life, but when the task at hand is finished, so am I! This is more like my life now, although I’ve learned some important coping mechanisms.
Pacing Myself
Under either type of chronic fatigue, I’ve learned to pace myself if I want to keep from depleting my energy jar. I don’t have as much energy in my jar as most folks, and even if I’m able to get a good flow of stamina going, I know I can’t replenish that energy fast enough to take on the whole day at a “normal” pace.
This means I need to carefully regulate my activities throughout the day so that I don’t use more energy than is needed for the entire day and it’s expected activities, while also protecting my ability to do those things that energize me (howbeit more slowly than normal) – which may be a nap, lunch with a close friend, taking a quiet walk, reading a good book, generally just chillin’ out, bass fishing or whatever.
For those suffering from chronic fatigue, and those dealing with this condition in friends and loved ones, accept what’s happening. Denial is deadly! Everyone involved needs to adapt to an entirely new reality. If you have chronic fatigue, don’t beat up on yourself because you can’t do everything you once did at the pace you once did it. Such guilt only causes more stress and makes your situation worse. Rather, find joy in simplifying your life and learning to focus on what’s truly important. Also learn to let others do some of the things for you that you previously did yourself – for me, allowing this remains very hard but I’m learning to adjust.
Most of all, learn to monitor how much energy you have left in your jar at any given time, how much energy is needed (and how quickly you need it) when evaluating what you should and shouldn’t do, avoid over-doing things, and find time for the things that uniquely replenish your energy reserves (while factoring in the reality that it will take longer than normal).
Adjusting to Reality
When dealing with chronic fatigue, you will feel guilty and struggle for a season over what you can’t do. Others may not understand your slower pace, or why you can be perfectly “normal” when doing one thing but then need to excuse yourself from further activities. But if that relationship is worth keeping, they will learn to accept and understand your limitations. But most of all, take joy in learning all of the new things you can do as you re-order the obligations and responsibilities of life. If you let it, that will be a wonderful journey of discovery.
The bottom line is that you need to get comfortable with figuring out your own pace and activities so that you minimize how frequently your energy jar runs dry. It will take some time, but I’m learning that it certainly can be done.
Despite it all, I have found that a slower paced life – where I can take the time to relish fulfilling relationships, focus on the truly important things of life, and enjoy those things that renew my energy – is more fulfilling than my past life. For that, I’m grateful and I can’t imagine ever going back to the hectic, stress-filled existence I once fought so hard to foolishly preserve.
In an odd way, I have become a better and a happier person.
~ Jim Wright
Related articles
Post-Release Community
I’ve been meeting with various brothers who also minister in the informal Christian networks I’m part of, along with others, to discuss starting a weekly fellowship (possibly in my home) for ex-inmates. My burden is for men whose lives are dramatically captured by God in jail, but then stumble when they get out because they can’t find authentic Christian community in our churches.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but health issues and distractions over problems in my local church prevented me. The church problems persist, but my health has improved and my heart is stirring once again over this. That’s causing me to ask whether it’s time to stop putting the Kingdom of God on hold while waiting for some who hold local church offices to climb out of their seemingly perpetual leadership ruts, to begin moving forward, and to trust that God’s provisions will follow.
Maybe, my heart is saying, the best outcome is to provide an opportunity and a motive for churches in general — including mine — to get their acts together and start being the church, rather than doing “church”, by showing what’s possible when people of vision become engaged with each other and engaged in what God is doing in the earth today. After all, the Kingdom of God is much, much more than “church”, although hopefully each of our local churches are part of that progressively advancing Kingdom!
Fellowship and Light
Self Delusion
“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I John 1:5-9 (KJV)
Church As Starbucks?
I’m not sure about who did this parody, or know anything about them, but it’s too good to pass up. No church is perfect, and each has its problems and quirks, but I suspect we’ve nonetheless all experienced something like this video.
So the question I’d like to pose is whether “church” as we’ve known it needs to morph into something different, and if so, what?
Leadership Abuses: Private and Public Sins
“Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” – Martin Luther
“Church” can often be messy, especially when ongoing sins and improprieties begin to come to light – maybe even among our leaders. Yet God, I believe, is calling us all to a new level of collective integrity.
So how do we handle leadership failings, especially when they go beyond merely personal sin and involve an abuse of position or trust within a church, movement or mission, and hurts others?
Crossroad Junction 