Here’s an image I created for a sermon on Romans 6:1-11 to show that other things get outdated, but our Baptism is new every day.

Title: Buried Alive

Description: We’ve been given eternal life, but we still live in the world of the temporary. How can we experience the eternal now?

I recently wrote an article on the Incarnation and the Real Presence relative to the Passover, and I took some photos that might be useful to those who’d like to tie “The Word became flesh” to “This is My body.”

Find variants with both paten & chalice here.

A Photoshop composite for a sermon from Matthew 5:1-12 (Sermon on the Mount, Beatitudes)

When everything crumbles: When everything falls apart around you, when you have nothing left, is it possible to feel blessed in the middle of that?

Cross in Rubble (from Rikuzentakata_filled_with_the_rubble by Mitsukuni Sato, Creative Commons Attribution License)

A wrestling championship belt around a Bible

From a sermon based on Genesis 32.22-30

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?