litany-of-dedication-lsbx

Written for the dedication of a new chancel wall at Saint James Lutheran Church, September 25, 2016

In the time before time, when the past met the future,
Eternity spoke, and His voice produced nature
“Let there be light,” and the darkness was ruptured
Land, feather, hoof by pronouncement alone

Then the One Who is plural, the “They” Who is “He”
Said, “Let love take on form, tangible simile,”
From the Spirit and clay, the Lord formed family
And all was deemed good by Creator alone

But love isn’t love without loving an object
And the infinite King saw the need of His subject
So He acted again to improve on the perfect
Because it’s not good to be a man alone

Alone in the garden, the man anaesthetized
The one became two, dream became realized
Then two became one as each other they prized
So they would be never again all alone

Then serpent and fruit, “Did the Lord really say?”
Brought doubt and mistrust: “No, you won’t die that day.”
Relationship severed brings sorrow, decay
As choice leaves the two both together alone

Excuses aside, the Lord calls to His children
Assuring them they haven’t halted His mission
By wounds in the heel, He would bring restoration
“I will cover your sin. I won’t leave you alone.”

In the fullness of time, man again in God’s image
The Word became flesh; we saw grace in His visage
He went to the cross that the grave He would pillage
To save us from being forever alone

Eli Eli Lama Sabachthani!
The Word cried in excruciating agony
The fruit of a woman gave up life on a tree
The only man ever that God left alone

But why do you look for the dead in a graveyard?
The stone rolled away, the Lord revealed the trump card
“Peace to you; touch the wounds.” Heaven’s gates will not be barred!
Restored to the Father, no longer alone

So now you’ve received the image restoration
Go forth in that image to each people and nation
Spread the word. Speak His name. Baptize for regeneration.
I am with you always, to the end of the age. You are not now, not soon, not ever alone.

(From a confirmation camp weekend that focused on Genesis 1-2)

English: Church attendance stamps. The second stamps in each of the bottom two rows have a Shield of the Trinity diagram. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Church attendance is down. That’s partly due to living in a post-churched culture and partly due to more activities that compete for time. People’s schedules are jammed, and for many, church is less essential than so many other agenda items. Why?

The 20th Century approach to doing church presented the church as a member-based club like the Lions, Masons, or Girl Scouts. It worked well in a churched culture, and attracted people who were looking for that sort of community, but not so well for those not actively looking for it. The Church Growth Movement came out of this mentality, essentially creating competition among churches for numbers, focusing on butts & bucks (public worship attendance and offerings).

But that’s not working anymore. Honestly, it was never really working, because we never should have focused on those markers. They’re important, but they’re not measurements of success or effectiveness, and focusing on them can actively inhibit true success.

So how do we discover the problem? Go back to the start: Genesis. God created us in His image. (Genesis 1:26-27) Trinity: a multiple unity. The first problem? Being alone. (Genesis 2:18)  God solved this by creating Eve, also in His image. And when we’re isolated, things get bad. (Genesis 3:1-8) This has been demonstrated in the lab and has massive repercussions for legislation, parenting, and especially churches.

So if we’re created for community, why isn’t the church flourishing? We gather people together every week! I was listening to a leadership podcast with Glen Jackson, the co-founder of Jackson Spalding, which talked about how to compete, and it left me asking, “What is the church’s competition?”  I realized that the answer takes us back to the first problem: isolation.

When we gather, we look at the backs of each other’s heads! It’s not community any more than a movie theater except that we know the names of more of the people around us, usually. We might know some details through prayer requests, like illnesses or anniversaries. We might know some superfluous details through small talk before or after the service, like who went to the fair and what they ate there.

But think about the people sitting around you. Do you know how they struggle with sin? Do you know their life dreams, what they’re doing to accomplish them, or why they’ve given up on them? How many could you call up at 3 AM in a crisis, and they’d be glad you called and insulted if you didn’t?

Realistically, you can’t have that deep of a relationship with dozens of people. Outside immediate family, most people could only handle about a half-dozen, tops.

The answer, then, is small groups with no more than 6 people. These can be same-sex groups like Journey Groups, interest-based groups, or anything else. Topic isn’t all that important, but they need 2 components for spiritual success: safe vulnerability (created by an informal-but-explicit confidentiality agreement and willingness to unconditionally accept and forgive each other) and a framework to promote spiritual conversations, like a topic-based discussion, Bible study, or accountability group. Groups should meet regularly, face-to-face whenever possible, and stay in touch when not meeting. Serving others together in some capacity strengthens bonds, as does enjoying some entertainment together, and welcoming newcomers into the group expands the benefit to others. (Although when the group gets larger than about 6, it needs to multiply into 2 groups so it doesn’t lose its closeness. Friends should remain friends, but they’ll often find their level of connection changing due to each person’s social capacity.)

Other forms of communication (social media, texting, phone calls, greeting cards) can supplement this personal interaction, but they’re no substitute for sharing spaces and faces.

It’s no coincidence that the church grew exponentially in its early years through this method. (Acts 2:44-47)

So why did we give it up? I don’t know. But it’s time to take it back.

A little background: When the church first started, it met with a lot of opposition. It was a pre-churched culture, where people didn’t know what Christianity was about and had never heard of some Hebrew preacher named Jesus of Nazareth. But over time, the Gospel spread, because Christians had a reputation for extreme love, like picking up discarded babies on the roadside and adopting them, or when a plague would hit a city, and the healthy would leave to avoid the plague, the healthy Christians would stay behind to minister to the sick and dying, even though many of them would end up dying in the process.

Most Western churches use the Attractional model and have used it for over a century but especially within the past 70 years. It focused on attracting people to come to church, bringing them to the property. Once on site, we hope they’ll stay based on the preaching, music, décor, friendliness, or whatever. That model worked in a churched culture where “Christian” was synonymous with “good citizen.” More or less, the Western world has been churched since Constantine legalized Christianity and essentially made it the state religion in the late 4th C. In a churched culture, politicians attend services on Sunday morning regardless what they believe, because it makes them look good to the general populace. Note that the Attractional model will increase the number of people in the pews still today, but mainly transfer growth or churched Christians, not the unchurched or dechurched.

But since the 60’s, and especially in the past 20-30 years, we’ve been moving gradually to a post-churched culture. The church is now seen with suspicion. It’s irrelevant. Evangelism is considered extremism. We find ourselves in a similar situation as the early church, where the church is no longer at the center of the culture, except people have heard of Christians and see us more as a voting bloc than a movement of love.

Figure of a Missional Perspective (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In response to that, a new movement started in England by Mike Breen, who saw the Christian church there decaying. He looked at the way the church functioned in its early years and decided to follow the model of the apostles, so he formed “Missional Communities,” small groups (like “the 12” or even the 4 in the Gospels) centered on the Bible who would go out into their local contexts (neighborhoods, workplaces, etc.) and get involved in the community together, building relationships, inviting others into their Missional Community. Eventually, those small groups grew and split and grew until multiple groups came together for medium-sized groups (like “the 72” in the Gospels) who would have Bible studies similar to what we have here (while still meeting and serving with their small groups), and the medium groups eventually came together for large groups (like “the crowds” in the Gospels) for corporate public worship. This model has been replicated around the US with great success. I’ve talked to Mike Breen personally about implementation and spent a couple thousand hours listening to him and others who use the Missional Model. I’ve also listened to pastors from China, where they’re Baptizing 30,000 people per day where they can go to jail for it, and the model they’re using is very similar, because when trained to live their faith and pass it on to others, disciples make disciples.

Understand that Attractional and Missional aren’t mutually exclusive. Heating the church in the winter, having a website and sign out front, preaching to “felt needs” (every one of my sermons centers around a real-life question with an answer found in Christ.) and remodeling the sanctuary are all Attractional methods, and they’re necessary to seeing people come back, but they won’t get an unchurched person here in the first place. That also gets to the question of what’s our goal in outreach, but this is getting long enough already.

To this end, we’re developing Delivered Hope. So what does Delivered Hope have to do with this? It gives people who are used to a solely Attractional model a taste of what Missional outreach looks and feels like. It gets us collectively into the community, changing our focus to working with the community for the greater good. It’s a way to make it easy for people who aren’t used to outreach that reaches out.

Strange phenomena seen with churches that shift their focus to more Missional: people start showing up—not the people directly affected by or involved in the efforts. I hear this over and over. It’s as if God is saying, “OK, now that you’re shifting your focus outward, I’ll send help.” But we also need to move our focus and goals away from numbers on the weekend to number of disciples making disciples.

From a sermon based on Luke 10:38-42 Finding God in the Clutter (Jesus, Mary & Martha)

No matter the space, we’ll fill it, whether our homes, our computers, or our schedules. How do we find the space we need for everything that needs to go into it?

Illustration for sermon from Isaiah 66:10-14

“Comfort for the Nation”

When the stress of life is too much, where can we find comfort? Is comfort from God just platitudes, or does He truly have comfort to give? How do we find that comfort?

Introduction

Every year, our congregation gives free bibles to all of our third-grade students. Until this point, we have given them the Faith Alive Study Bible, but CPH just changed the translation for that to the ESV, which has a 10th grade reading level. We don’t want the reading level to be an obstacle so students think, “This is too difficult for me to read. I guess I am not a Bible reader.” That led us on a quest for a new Bible to distribute.

Translations Included in Study

Based on reading level, we narrowed our search to the GWV, HCSB, and NLT translations, but the GWV has no options available for a good study Bible, so we removed that translation from the list of options, even though it is a favorite among us. The CEV also received consideration but was removed for lack of viable options. Just for the sake of comparison, we also included the ESV in this study.

Rating System

To rate the translations, we used the same guidelines that were used in the Comparative Study of Bible Translations and Paraphrases distributed by the Commission on Theology and Church Relations of The Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod from September 1975.

Ratings

Using the same sampling of verses, taken from the “Explanation of the Second Article” from A Short Explanation of Dr Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, questions 121–159, passages are rated with a score of 0–2:

• If it was found acceptable, it was given no notation (0).
• If judged usable but in need of more accurately reflecting the original, it was marked with the numeral 1.
• If it was judged as being not usable, it was marked with the numeral 2.

Scores were then totalled to rate the translations. Low numbers are better. See the original spreadsheet for additional notes.

Conclusions

First, note that this study only examines which passages had problems, not which had the preferable translation for clarity, conveying the original intent of the idioms, or readability by a modern audience. The purpose was to separate wheat from chaff, not find the choicest kernels. Even such subtleties as word order, article, interpretation of the Greek imperfect verb tense, or preposition choice, and punctuation can have a significant impact on the passage, and at times, while a translation may be not inaccurate, another’s emphasis makes it a preferred translation. And the difference in rating any given passage between 0–1 or 1–2 was often a fine line, so when in doubt, I rounded down, as seems to have been the practice of the 1975 study. Even these ratings have the disadvantage of not being weighted by importance, so a glaring Christological error that makes a passage unusable and could lead to heresy would have the same impact on the final score as a reversal of pronouns that reverses the intent of the passage but, while causing confusion to the reader, has no significant doctrinal impact. In the same way, two minor 1’s may not be collectively as important as a major 2. Given more time and input, a rating of 1–10 for each passage based on a number of factors, both positive and negative, would be preferable, but that would require a significant investment of time with an inordinately small return. These judgment calls might also change based on others’ theological emphases, thus a blind study by a committee with averaged scores and discussion over each passage would be preferable, but we didn’t have the man hours available for that, so feedback from others is welcome. Among these three translations, none were perfect, but pastors, parents, and others making these decisions will have to decide what is “good enough” for the reader in question. Considerations should also be made for which translation is easier to read aloud (some roll off the tongue easier), poetic form both verbally and visibly, and ease of memorization (easier to understand translations tend to be more verbose, thus more words to memorize).

Also note that this study examined 101 important passages, but arguments could be made to include 1001 more. These focused on Christology, but a study of the passages on the Sacraments, eschatology, gender roles, or any number of other doctrines, especially those debated among various theological traditions, could affect the outcome of this study. This study examined English translations against doctrine, not spending significant amounts of time re-translating the original languages or examining manuscript variants for comparison, which might be considered a backwards approach, but the principle of Scripture interprets Scripture was used as the criteria. This study also ignored footnotes, which can significantly impact the perceptions of the reader and often have glaring discrepancies with the actual text, any study notes from any study Bible that comes from a different theological tradition than ours will raise even greater concerns, so readers must be taught to think critically about anything added to the text by the editor or publisher.

Recommendation

The NLT is definitely more readable and often carries nuances of the original languages better by explaining them in the text and thus more clearly expressing the intent of the text, thus making it a viable translation for those new to Christianity or anyone looking for a translation for daily devotional use. Its roots as a paraphrase that was reworked into a translation are evident, as it often varies significantly from most English translations in sentence structure, which has pros and cons.

The HCSB has a slightly higher reading level than the NLT but rated a lower score in the above study, making it arguably doctrinally safer for young readers, above caveats notwithstanding. Since it more closely mirrors more formal equivalent translations, it provides a bridge for the readers as they grow until they’re ready for a more in depth study Bible like The Lutheran Study Bible, as well as aiding teachers more familiar with those translations in a Sunday school setting. Since we currently use the ESV in worship, the Small Catechism, and elsewhere, the similarities with the HCSB will also aid in familiarity with the texts and not bear such a stark contrast. Less verbose wording will aid memorization.

So pending finding a viable Study Bible with minimal confusion and error that wouldn’t undo the translation advantages, I recommend the HCSB for use as a general purpose student Bible. Given that the WELS seems to be leaning toward adopting the HCSB the way the LCMS has the ESV, I hope they will produce a HCSB student Bible, or a number of churches work together to produce a crowdfunded HCSB student Bible with confessional Lutheran study aids and explanations.

This summer, we ran a week-long morning camp for age 10–high school to teach kids some acting skills, discuss our hope in Christ, and give them an opportunity to express that to others. We culminated in a final performance that combined what we had learned in a series of skits with a running story that tied it all together. Here’s our notes and script from the week for anyone who’d want to do something similar:

• Final Script
• Planning Notes
• Skit Resource: We used a lot of skits from this site for practice and ideas
• Montage Video: Google Photos made it easy to put together a video showing off what we did all week. We played this video during the offering the following Sunday.

We can’t show the final production, because parts of it were improv, and we used the kids’ names, and we don’t share photos or video that connect kids’ names with images publicly, but I hope this will be a helpful resource.

Inspired by a sermon I recently heard, here’s a simple illustration depicting God’s name placed on our hearts through Holy Baptism, that He claims us as His own like Andy claimed his toys in Toy Story by writing his name on their feet.

Title art for sermon for 5/29/16

Text: 1 Kings 8:22-24,27-29,41-43

Description: “Bringing the World to the House of God” Where is the house of God, and how can we bring people to it?

The idea is that the house of God is now the human heart through Holy Baptism, and we bring others into God’s house by bringing them into our hearts and showing them the love of Christ, letting our light so shine before men….

(And of course, because the Word of God is in our hearts, when they’re in, they’ll hear it, because it’s everywhere in there.)