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From The Archives... and For Bill Kinnon.

Looks like I'll get to meet Bill Kinnon (a blogosphere heavyweight and online friend of mine) next week. In honor of his latest (Preaching doesn't make disciples), I'm pulling this from the archives. 

Because it's true, in the same way that proper nutrition alone (you need exercise, good sleep, a healthy mental/emotional life) won't make you healthy, preaching won't make disciples. But together with good one-on-one relationship, participating in the learning life of a gathered community is (and I think I'll go so far as to say biblically, should be) a big part of the discipleship process. 

But maybe that's what we'll talk about next Monday over a drink?? :) 

preaching... It's kind of like...

How many sermons do you really remember?

I'm sitting in my second Starbucks today, and my old friend Johnny V walks in. Johnny is the Cable Guy, pushing quality digital entertainment all over Southwest PDX.

Anyway, we got to chatting for a minute and he asked me how the whole sermon thing was going...

"Ehhh..." I said. The last few weeks have been tough for me. I'm not sure I've had anything revolutionary or even memorable to say about the passages we've been walking through. 2 weeks ago, it seems like God did something cool in spite of my "ehhh...-ness". Last week, a little less so. This week? I guess we'll see.

Johnny's comment to that was "That's okay. No one remembers what you preach anyway."

Thanks Johnny.

But he's totally right.

And as we talked, I realized that "No one remembers what you preach" is basically what I think too. Preaching (and listening to it) is like taking vitamins. It has a cumulative effect. Few of us remember many of the sermons we have heard, but over a long period of time, we are taught. Few of us remember many of the gatherings we're a part of, but over a long period of time, we are formed.

Johnny told me about hearing Jack Hayford talk about this once (on TBN!). Hayford likened reading God's Word, listening to others teach us, etc to eating. Novel, eh? But keep reading.

He said that every once in awhile, we have a really memorable meal. But most of the time, when we are hungry, we eat. It's not earthshaking, it's just what we do to keep our bodies functioning. We don't really remember what we had for lunch two saturdays ago, two months ago, two years ago. But somehow, eating every day keeps us alive. It would be silly to expect it to rock our world every time. 

Same with reading God's Word, with "going to church", with discussing Scripture with other people... Every once in awhile, something amazing jumps out at us and changes us. But mostly, it's the every day discipline of coming to God's Word, it's the every week submission of putting ourselves under God's Word... that's what keeps us alive.

That's good news to those teaching a community... we don't have to hit one out of the park every time at bat. It's enough to put together the singles, the doubles, the occasional strike out and the occasional home run. And when the whole community is practicing the discipline of bringing themselves to God's Word regularly... I guess the Holy Spirit can take it from there.

Preaching....

Dustin (one of our elders, and the main teaching elder at our Hawthorne gathering) has a great meditation on preaching here. I feel you, bro!

Here's a sample:

When I was in high school I was captivated by the art or preaching. I loved listening to a good preacher, thankfully I was in a church that had a great one from whom I've learned much! I loved the storytelling, the comic timing, the intentional use of words. It would be that preacher that I listened to for three years who would give me my first opportunity to preach and that man's encouragement that pointed me down the path I am on.

In college I slowly and painfully learned the nuts and bolts of preaching as I did a B.A. in the subject (you probably didn't know that existed huh?). I remember preaching classes where we would deliver sermons that would be instantly critiqued by our peers and the two preaching professors (one gracious and gentle, another more like a lion) although I loved and respected them both. I'm not sure how many bad sermons these guys have had to listen to, but I'm fairly sure it amounts to more than the bad singing Simon Cowell has put up with. Plus Simon doesn't have to listen to someone dying for 30 minutes at a time!

As the college years went on, my friends and I started doing "pulpit supply" on Sundays which basically meant we were rented out to small, dying churches who couldn't afford a full time pastor. It was in these small country Illinois churches that I started to learn what it meant to "die to self". One time I remember preaching at Irish Grove Presbyterian Church to four people, all in the front row! (one of which died about three weeks later). A second memory I have is a church where the same woman would get up every week, someone would start the tape and she would sing "Majesty". Strangely it seemed that people enjoyed it just as much every week...

Read the rest here

The Death of Preaching

It's a pretty bold statement to say that video venues will eventually mean the death of preaching... but I think I can make the case. 

In his new book, Flickering Pixels (which I encourage you to check out!), Shane Hipps makes this point:

"Every medium, when pushed to an extreme, will reverse on itself, revealing unintended consequences. For example, the car was invented to increase the speed of our transportation, but having too many cars on the highway at once results in traffic jams or even injury or death.
The internet was designed to make information more easily accessible, thereby reducing ignorance. But too much information or the wrong kind of information reverses into overwhelming the seeker, leading to greater confusion than clarity. It breeds misunderstanding rather than wisdom...
In the same way, surveillance cameras, when there are too many that see too far, reverse into an invasion of privacy."

In other words, what was originally meant to make us go fast now slows us down, what was meant to make us smart now increases our ignorance (well, never our ignorance... just other peoples', right?) and what was meant to make us feel safe now makes us feel exposed. 

This is the rule: Technology, taken too far, creates the opposite of what it was intended to create. 

Still doubt it? Ask yourself- Email was meant to keep you in touch and ease communication, right? But when you are trying to process 100 emails a day, you don't feel in touch, you feel crushed. You're not communicating- you are wading through spam, forwards, fyi's... Your emails get shorter and shorter, more and more terse, and mis-communication happens more often than not. 

Reversal.  

So, what about technology in preaching? 

First came architectural improvements to increase the range of a speaker's voice. Then microphones to throw the voice even further. Then radio, television, tape and CD ministries, podcasts, vodcasts... and the seed of the video venue, the "overflow room."  All with the goal of taking the gift of preaching and extending its reach and impact. 

So far, so good, right?

But now, we have all this technology. We're not only recording the sermon, we're video taping it and we have discovered we can send that video, not just to the next room, but to a building across the campus, across town, across the state, around the world...

Now, the preaching gift of one person has the ability not simply to reach the back row, but the next town, state, continent. And we're not just talking about Spurgeon publishing his sermons or Schuller putting his on TV or Driscoll putting his on iTunes... 

NOW we're talking about not just influencing local preachers by making the "best" communicators' sermons available... we're talking about replacing those local teaching elders. 

Talk about pushing something to an extreme. 

The technology that once enhanced the preaching of others, influenced and enriched it? It's making it superfluous. Start up churches and smaller churches that used to have a team of three or four elders (or in our case, seven) who would be called on to teach on a regular basis now have a video screen and a "campus pastor" that gets to preach at most once a month. 

The technology reverses on itself. What once extended and enhanced the gift of preaching now effectively begins to strangle it, as fewer and fewer actually get the chance to ever do it. 

If we're not more thoughtful about this, soon, every city and town will have the Driscoll franchise... maybe even two or three. And the Andy Stanley, Ed Young Jr franchise as well. Is Joel Osteen too far behind? Hybels, Warren, Groeschel... the market is going to get crowded. 

Sure, smaller churches will still exist, but in fewer and fewer numbers as dying churches are replaced not by vibrant church plants full of people forced to build a community from the ground up and so learn all the lessons along the way, but by video venue franchises- prepackaged church-in-a-box. And I'm telling you- there will be fewer and fewer men and women (most certainly fewer women) who ever learn to preach, who ever get the experience of working with others to discern what God is saying to their local body through Spirit and Word and prayerfully struggle through how they can creatively communicate that as well over the course of weeks, months and years of life together. 

We're talking about the death of preaching in evangelicalism by all but a small handful of Celebrity Communicators who have little knowledge about those they teach from such far distances.

Sound like a bleak vision of the future?  Yes, it does. But we don't have to go there...

If the Church will just learn to pay its taxes. 

Stay tuned to see what I mean by that...

to be cont'd.

(And since I know it will come up in the comments, let me just address it now: No, I don't think preaching is the end-all, be-all of ministry. I don't think it's even the most important piece of ministry. But I do think it's vital and necessary for the continued health of the Church.) 

My sermon prep...

Someone asked about my sermon routine... I give this with the caution- if you are in school or just starting out, do what your teachers told you, not what I do. I think it's important to work through the mechanics and science of sermon prep for a good long while... as you do that, it becomes second nature and the art starts to appear. Try to start with art before learning mechanics and you'll be very frustrated. I think it's that way with most skills, and homiletics aren't any different...

Here's what I do

1. I meditate on/read/reread the passage looking for the "preaching point", which is generally where the main point of the passage and what God/the author were trying to communicate and where the community I pastor is currently at intersect. 

2. When I feel I have that direction nailed I start writing out my intro and my conclusion- how I'm going to point us in that direction and how I see us landing. I spend more time writing the conclusion than the intro, and generally want to write it out first. When I don't do that, I find myself repeating things at the end. When I've already written the end and said what I want to say there, it makes for much less repetition in the body. If you find you're the kind of preacher who can't "land the plane" consistently, try writing the end first. 

3. I start working verse by verse through the passage, writing as I go, connecting that intro and conclusion. This is where I generally compare translations and check the Greek and commentaries, working out any hard interpretive issues.

That having been said, some weeks step 2 and 3 are reversed, particularly with tougher passages- I don't see that intersection point (and thus my destination) until halfway or more through the process. Those are harder sermons to write and (I'll bet) to hear.

4. When I have a completed draft, I ask myself the 5 questions:

 Where in this message do I clearly point to Jesus?
 Where in this message do I speak to non-Christians?
 Where in this message do I speak to Christians?
 Where in this message do I speak to the heart?

 Where in this message do I give people something to do right now- rather than later…

5. Then I do the final draft, making revisions where prayer and the five questions tell me I should...

6. Go over it on Sunday morning making corrections and changes, often adding any missing interactive elements which seem to come easier to me when I've sat with/slept with a completed sermon for awhile. 

All in all I'd say I spend an average of 10-12 hours a week on sermon- 8-10 hrs mon-thursday and 2 on Sunday morning before the gathering. Sometime less, sometimes more...

From the Archives: The Cowardly Preacher

Awhile ago I published this piece I called The Cowardly Preacher. 

I thought of it, and writing the other side, Bravery in Preaching, while working through a sermon on 1st Cor 11 this week. I'll let you connect the dots. 

Anyway, from the archives...

"If you are a coward by nature, don't worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text saying, 'I don't know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.'"- Walter Brueggemann (as quoted by Will Willimon)

This has been a go-to concept for me. The longer I have been doing this preaching thing, the more I see in the text that is at odds with modern sensibilities---things so outsized and seemingly indefensible... commands to kill, commonly accepted actions declared as heinous sin (seafood anyone?), descriptions of awful, awful actions held up as praiseworthy (Psalm 137)...So many texts I’d just rather not preach. 

The preacher has two ready choices: either declare it as 'The Word of God which Must Be Accepted Without Question!', or hemm and haw, apologizing for the text, explaining it away into irrelevance. 

The first option leads to rabid fundamentalism, particularly as it often gives no alternative, no interpretive method for sifting the timeless from the time-bound. If the Word says it, we do it. End of discussion. No, you can't ask a question about it... I said "End of Discussion!" And beyond just the kooky externals that inevitably work their way into the life of a community that lives this way (NO! Of course women can't wear pants to church! The Old Testament forbids it!), something happens inside. Questions are stifled, left unasked (at least out loud), doubt is seen as a sign of lacking true relationship with God and with the text ("You just don't value God's Word!"). And eventually people are divided into two groups: The fully accepting who stay, and the doubters and questioners who leave. This last group, in their leaving, often leave Church and God completely, thinking that if that's what it's all about, then I want none of it. 

The other option, explaining the text away into irrelevance leads to the kind of bloodless religiosity that rarely does anyone any good. Church takes on a social function, the Bible is patronizingly accepted as a necessary inconvenience... any religious book would do, this just happens to be ours... and because they are bound together in the same Book, in the losing of the difficult parts we necessarily lose all the rest- the power of God's Word and the Gospel itself.

But there's a third option, one which I use as necessary... and although I've titled this "the Cowardly Pastor" and Brueggemann's quote does nothing to counter the notion, I tend to think that approaching the text this way, especially in our preaching, is actually a courageous choice. 

It's courageous because what we are saying to our community is: "I don't understand this. I have wrestled with this all week. I have read commentary after commentary and none of the 'answers' offered satisfy. There's no getting around this... this is a hard text." And if any of you have ever preached, you know that the last thing you want to stand before the people and say is "I don't know."

But between asking the community to accept blindly and asking them to disregard casually lies the third option, asking them to wrestle. 

This begins when we ourselves wrestle with the text. When we walk shakingly up to a passage that threatens to shipwreck us, to do us in and we stand before it, determined not to give way. Like Jacob wrestling with God, we approach these most frightening texts and say "I will not let you go until you bless me" and we wrestle, as individuals and as a community with the words that we know hold truth and meaning for us, a blessing for us, a communication from God Himself, if only we could understand them.

And so we wrestle. As a community we say, "We know this doesn't sound good, and we're not particularly sure that we really get this..." and we pray, and we ask, and we discuss... and we don't back away. Perhaps understanding comes quickly. Perhaps it comes after many months. Perhaps it never does. But we keep on wrestling.

And we keep on wrestling, because we want, we need to hear from God...and we know that God does not always speak things which we will like, nor does He always speak things which we will easily understand... but He never speaks things which are unnecessary. We refuse to write off His Word. God speaks to us for reasons, His own reasons, reasons which may not be readily apparent, but reasons. 

And so we neither say "We just accept it, la la la!" and to hell with those who can't quit manage that mental trick, nor do we say "Well, no matter... let's just move on…"

As preachers, we can stand and say, "No, I wouldn't have said it that way myself, but the text certainly does say it. Now, what will we do with it?"

And then we wrestle.

Preaching: This might hurt a little...

"A person emerged from our church a few Sundays ago, saying to me at the door as she left, 'I know you would not intentionally hurt anyone with what you say from the pulpit, but I was hurt by what you said today in your sermon.'

And I thought, 'Where would you have gotten the notion that I would not want to hurt you? I'm a preacher. Some infliction of pain goes with the job!"

-Will Willimon, Pastor

One of the things I hated most about ministry in more the more traditional, baptistic churches I started out in was the social pressure to preach what certain factions wanted to hear. Better give an invitation this week- it's been two weeks and so-and-so gets grumpy if I don't do it regularly. Can't say much about this verse- so and so thinks this and that about tongues and that would just get them riled up. 

I think we in the emerging church might be tempted at times to think we left all that behind, but of course... that's a fantasy. You never leave that behind. 

Now, the issues are simply different- it's not the pressure to include invitations and speak about charismatic gifts a certain way- it's different issues. 

It's a regular emphasis on the poor. It's toning down the passages on sexual sin. It's an emphasis on God's love and a de-emphasis on the idea that God will someday judge all of humanity (except when we're talking about how we relate to the poor.)

Don't get me wrong- I'm not saying anything other than that the reality of preaching is that we who regularly lead our communities through the Scriptures will always face these issues- mainline, evangelical, emerging. 

Or at least we should. 

My sense is that no matter who you are or where you are at, the Bible is a challenging book and God wants

 not only to comfort you in your affliction, but to do the converse as well. And when we sermonizers wake up one day and find that the idea of actually challenging our communities on the things that maybe they or we would prefer not to have to address is far down our list of priorities, we probably need to realize that all we're doing is duplicating the sins of our fathers and mothers that bothered us so much we had to leave and start all these new churches. 

Yes- I heard plenty of sermons on sexual sin and few if any on the sin of ignoring the poor when I grew up. 

But I'm fairly sure the answer to that problem isn't to preach a lot on the sin of ignoring the poor and leave off the messages about sexual sin. It's as easy to preach a sermon on God's heart for the poor in an emerging church as it is to preach on purity in a Baptist one. And that should tell us something. 

I'm in no way advocating weekly poking people with a sharp stick. But... is preaching for the nod, and nothing but soothing and comforting, even soothing and comforting disguised as "challenging" but that's really just hitting a pet issue or two of certain people in the community any better? 

If you never have to lead your community through a text or preach a sermon that leaves you quaking, that you wish wholeheartedly you didn't have to preach, you really aren't doing anyone any favors- not your community, yourself and not the God who wants to rescue and renew all of creation. I mean seriously- how could that not sting even a little? 

"If you don't trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you. For example, if a wife is not allowed to contradict her husband, they won't have an intimate relationship...

Now what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have a Stepford God. A God, essentially, of your own making and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction."

Tim Keller- The Reason for God

Update: This post comes mainly out of my experience of preaching 1st Cor over the last few months. There have been a number of times when I felt like a cowardly preaching approaching these texts and wished I had stuck with something easier- you know, like Revelation. 

Another thought- whenever I talk about preaching about sexual sin, one thing I want to make really, really clear- Paul is adamant in 1 Cor 5: we don't judge those who aren't followers of Jesus. When I talk about sexual sin, I'm in no way meaning to imply I'm shaking a finger at the city around me and all their sexy, sinful ways (though at times, they pretty clearly overdue it). My emphasis is solely on those who claim to be Christians and yet are willfully choosing not to live like it. And even in that, I approach the issue with the humility of one who hasn't live a perfect life, still doesn't, and leans totally on Jesus for any sense of righteousness I might have, as opposed to my faithfulness to the Christian ethic I try hard, but imperfectly to live by. 

it's a mitzvah...

""This is something no one else would give him," she said in an interview. "It didn't cost a lot of money. It was highly memorable. It met all the criteria for a really great gift."

Brad was less than fully enthusiastic, mostly because, he says, his wife often has big ideas and poor follow-through. After all, she hadn't been especially generous in that department since they'd had their two children. He paid closer attention when he realized that she was serious."

Could I have asked for a better intro to/illustration for this Sunday's sermon on 1 Cor 7:1-16?

It's highly doubtful...

365 Days of Sex- The Secret to Marital Success?

How do I preach the Resurrection?

Words of wisdom from NT Wright:

"So many people think preaching the Resurrection means doing a little bit of apologetics in the pulpit to prove it really is true. Others simply say, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death." This isn't the point! Those types of sermons may be necessary, but there's more to it than that. To preach the Resurrection is to announce the fact that the world is a different place, and that we have to live in that "different-ness." The Resurrection is not just God doing a wacky miracle at one time. We have to preach it in a way that says this was the turning point in world history.

To take preaching seriously, you need a high theology of the Word of God. When your preaching announces that Jesus is the crucified and risen Lord of the world, things happen. The principalities and powers are called into account. Human beings who once thought the message of someone rising from the dead is ridiculous, actually find that the message of resurrection can transform their lives.

Finally, there must be a relationship between what you say and who you are. Preaching is the personality, infused by the Spirit, communicating the Word of God to people. If there's a mismatch—if you're not being a resurrection person—you may say the right words, but something radical is missing."

Read the rest of this great interview by Brian Lowery of Preaching Today.com here

Dialogical Preaching, part 2

Part two of my interview on preaching with dialogue is up on the Preaching Today website.

As an aside, this interview was done over the phone in October. In the intervening time, they had it transcribed and seriously cleaned up my diction/grammar. I'm amazed at how erudite one can sound with a little bit of help from an editor :)

In (partial) defense of the sermon...

There’s a lot of questioning out there in books and blogs- do we really need “sermons?" Should they really be so central to what we do as the church? And I’m fairly convinced that question comes out of a misunderstanding of worship.

For all our talk of moving away from the consumer model of church, it has to be said that one of the biggest underlying motivations in critiquing the sermon is this: I don't like it.
Oh, I know, I know... the real issues are its "pagan" roots. Or its non-interactivity and irrelevance.
But rather than simply asking- how can we be more interactive? or how can we aid people in connecting the truth of Scripture to all of life? the question seems to center more on, "do we even need to do this at all?"

Yes- At its worst, a sermon is dull, boring, impractical and just plain painful to sit through. I've sat through enough boring sermons to know. And here's an insight- preaching a boring sermon is no picnic either. Trust me... we know when we are fouling one off. 

But here's the thing: At its best? It moves us, it's used by God to change and rearrange us, and if I understand it correctly, that's worship.

When we willingly forgo other things to come together as a community and put ourselves under the Word of God- when we listen to Him, and allow Him to speak to us, push us, challenge and change us- that’s worship. When we respond in inwardly and outwardly in prayer and song saying, "Yes God- You are more worthy than my job, than my possessions, than my hobbies and than myself of my love and devotion," we worship.

Worship is trusting God, not myself, and it’s loving God- not my idols. It’s actively pulling my focus from myself and my wants and putting that focus on Him- His desires for this world. I think about who God is, what He’s done for me, and I am moved.

The whole point of worship is to “move us.” But when I say that I’m not talking about simply whether or not we had an emotional, charismatic-like experience. When I say “moved” I mean: If we don't find that our hearts have been moved from idols, whatever they are, toward God, we haven't worshiped.

Worship is finally being hit with the fact that what I am putting my heart on- my idols and functional saviors, cannot hold that weight, cannot give me true, lasting happiness... but Jesus can. And it’s being moved to respond- in my emotions, in my will, and then finally in my actions. And if worship is what moves us from focus on ourselves to focus on God, you can see that a lot of what we want to call worship, might not count- including singing, if in our singing our whole focus is on what we like or don’t like- whether the style, or the lyrics, or the band meets our approval.

At Evergreen, we try to give freedom to worship in the way that feels comfortable for them, in an effort to help people worship. You want to stand, stand, You want to sit, sit. Raise your hands in expressive worship, fold them in your lap in contemplative worship.

BUT… the danger is that you or I would begin to intuit, to feel that worship is somehow about me- what I like, what I don’t. If the music is right- I can worship. If it’s lame, I can’t. If the person leading talks too much, or not enough, or if they ask me to stand up, or if they don’t ask me to stand up, if this or that isn’t right, I can’t worship. And the problem is, right off the bat, that’s completely backwards- because worship- true worship, is about moving from self-centeredness to God-centeredness, and if I’m the one laying out all the conditions that have to be right for me to really “enjoy worship”, then I’ve completely missed the point.

And as someone said in our gathering this last Sunday... anything can be worship, but nothing automatically is.

So- yes, we can worship through song. We can worship through giving. We can worship through serving. And check this- we can even worship through the very act of being present in and to a community that is coming together for a guided time of meditation on/hearing from Scripture…
Also known as a sermon.

Should we strive to be more interactive and all the rest? Absolutely. But...  if the point of worship is to focus more on God and less on us, I can hardly think of a better tool than a community, together, exploring the truth of Scripture.

Preaching Today interview with...

me. :)

One of the coolest parts for me of this year's National Pastors Convention was getting to meet and hang out with Brian Lowery, the Associate Editor of PreachingToday.com. Very cool guy and a friend of Dustin's from back in the day.

I had actually spoken to Brian at length back in October when I did a phone interview with him on dialogical preaching. That series is now starting to run on Preaching Today.com, with the first installment up now.

Also, next week sometime, I think at least part of the interview is going to be excerpted on Out of Ur. Very cool, but since that means we'll probably be having a lot more visitors stopping by, at least in the short run, I'd like everyone to be on their best behavior, okay? Can you all sit up straight and tuck in your shirts at least?

I'd appreciate it :)

Top 5 Reasons Preaching a Poor Sermon is Good For Me (in the Long Run)...

When I preach well, it's easy to say "It's not about me." When I preach poorly, I quickly and painfully realize how little I truly believe that. And I need to realize how little I truly believe that.

When I preach poorly, I see more clearly the area(s) in which I need to work harder. When I preach "well", those areas of my weakness are masked and hidden by my strengths... and may remain hidden, yet nonetheless performing sabotage on me and the community I'm helping to teach.

But even if I know the areas of my weakness, I may be content to let them be or make excuses for them if I know I am doing well in other areas. Preaching poorly actually motivates me...moves me... redoubles my resolve to pray well, study well, discuss the text well with my community in advance and preach it well. "Failure" motivates me to think more and more creatively about what I'm doing than "success" ever could.

I can take heart that it worked for/was helpful to someone (it's always helpful to someone) and in this case I know that it was the Holy Spirit that actually moved someone- not me... definitely not me... (also known as "God's strength is made perfect in my weakness")

And when I do redouble my resolve (yet again) to pray well, study well, discuss the text well with my community in advance and preach it well, and  God chooses to honor that by using in the lives /life of my community, what I feel is not  pride in my gifts or even my hard work- but the feeling of having humbly submitted to the Spirit, done my real, absolute best... and thankful amazement that God would allow me to be a part of the spiritual journey of members of His Body.

Preaching with Dialogue... pt 3

It's been a while since I wrote on this... And much of what preaching with dialogue is can really be inferred from my post on what it is not. But let's think for a bit on what preaching with dialogue is, and sometime next week, we'll talk some mechanics... some lessons I have learned (and am still learning!)

1. I said in my last entry that preaching with dialogue 'is not a small group discussion writ large." What it is is an entire community coming to the Word of God in a listening pose. Now, I know that (at least in theory) that's no different than a sermon anywhere, in any church... and that's my point to the critics of this method. A whole community coming under the Word of God, together, is no different whether one person speaks, 2 people or 20. And the reason why this is specifically different than a small group discussion is the intentional driving towards the point of the text. Generally, in small group discussions, there's discussion around a theme or a question, and it tends toward the open-ended. That's fine in that context centered more on getting to know one another, but for the whole-community gathering, this is not what I'm advocating at all...

I'll describe more of how it looks for us in a bit, but suffice it to say, when I lead out in our discussions on Sunday, there's a point I want to get to- a place I want the whole community to go to, derived from the text.  People are free to speak, to ask questions, to make points... but not to redirect, to hijack, to grandstand. The text, what it says and where it takes us is the determining factor, not "what everyone thinks." (and yes, the charge could be made by those who dislike the whole exercise of preaching that all of it is merely grandstanding- that the discussion is not so much driven by the text as by what one person thinks the text said, which ultimately is no different than a discussion driven by what 10 or 20 or 30 people think the text says. Here's where I think the value of things like Seminary and study and  having a sermon dialogue led by someone who has poured hours into the prepapration and who is listening both to the needs of the community and to God comes in to the picture and keeps (ideally) the whole thing where it needs to be- centered on the text and what God is saying to the community)

2. I also said in my last post on this that preaching with dialogue is NOT a pooling of ignorance, as some high-profile preachers have called it. What it is, is believing not only that Jesus is the pastor of the Church, but the Holy Spirit is its teacher. And it is believing that the Holy Spirit has taught more than one person in the room. And it is making room for the Holy Spirit to speak through and teach the community through more than one person. I recognize my role as teaching pastor in the community. I take it seriously. But in the same way that I as pastor take a back seat to Pastor Jesus, the real Shepherd, so I take a back seat to Teacher Holy Spirit, the real instructor of our community. And in the same way I as under-shepherd exercise my gifts to pastor the people, I as a teaching pastor do the same to teach them, to keep things on track, to proclaim and push us towards the truth.

How this works out is that we as a community- (Ideally) Meditate on and discuss the passage ahead of our gatherings/during the week. Solomon's Porch does that in a meeting on Tuesday nights I think. We do it on our forum. Either way, people know the basic content, the basic direction, have a chance to prayerfully meditate, to ask and answer questions, to soak in where God is taking us and what He is telling us. Come Sunday with some work already done in the text, and in their hearts (again, ideally... I recognize that the number of people who actually take advantage of this is far from 100%. It's something I want to continue to hold up as the ideal, though) we come together and continue our interaction over the text. And that discussion is generally led by a pastor/elder who has prayerfully considered all week (or longer) what God is saying to our community through the Scripture.

Consider too that a community like ours is made up of not just people who are new to faith and exploring, but many who have been following Christ for years. We have an abnormal amount of people among us with deep Bible knowledge- a lot of people who have spent time at schools like Capernwray and Multnomah and Golden Gate and Western... MA's, MDivs, a Dmin or two... not to mention a lot of people who, while not having an advanced degree in Bible or Theology, have a hunger and thirst for God's Word and actually read it, study it, etc. So when we come together, when I ask questions that do more than just set up the discussion or get at feelings, but actually ask them to do some of the interpretive work, I do so with the confidence that the Holy Spirit is among us, moving, teaching, guiding and that many of us have spent much time in the Word. I ask those questions with confidence that our community, together, can answer them. So, you can see how someone calling what we do a "pooling of ignorance" really gets me a little upset, can't you?

3. Not an abdication of declaration, but in fact, helping the whole community to declare to one another. That's where we'll pick up monday, okay? And then we'll move on to practicalities and do's/don'ts

Preaching with Dialogue... pt 2

What It Ain't...

When I hear people criticizing the concept of preaching with dialogue, 99 times out of 100 what I am hearing bears little relationship to what I have personally seen and done in this area. Somehow, the straw man of a group of people with little knowledge of Scripture, sitting around in a circle with everyone expressing "what it means to me," no right or wrong answers, and certainly no expectation that anyone would proclaim anything has crept in...

I really, really want to kill that ridiculous mis-characterization.

In part, that's why I want to spend some time processing this concept on the blog this week. As well, I tend to be a verbal processor (remember that term- it will be important later), and want to suss out some thoughts and concepts in my head.
But first, let's get medieval on that straw man, eh?

What preaching with dialogue is NOT.

Preaching With Dialogue... pt 1

First some disclaimers...
I'm not an expert. The only thing I offer in this area is some experience, and some lessons I've learned over the last couple of years. As my friend Mark says, "Your mileage may vary."

Second, I believe in the gift of preaching and its place in the local community. Proclaiming God's Word to a people leaning in to hear what the Spirit is communicating to them through prayerful listening, listening prayers, songs sung and sermons spoken is an awesome thing. I can't think of much in the world I would trade it for...

Third, preaching happens in many ways, from many members of the community. There's no doubt that the elders of the church carry a significant portion of that, and there's usually one elder in particular who does the majority of that, but... the community is responsible to teach one another. I don't want anything I write about preaching to give anyone the impression that I think one person is the teacher and all else the students. We all sit at the feet of Jesus as learners, as seekers. And we all have things to teach one another...

But given that some are particularly gifted for teachings and others not, and given that some devote themselves and their time to the teaching of the community, it seems like a good idea to discuss ways to do that well.

And so we come to dialogue in preaching...

Tomorrow, I'll tell you what it isn't. The straw man criticisms of this practice would be funny if they weren't shouted so loud and with such vehemence... Until then, here are some other things I have written about preaching on the ol' bob.blog. And check out The Cowardly Preacher? as well...

Preaching with Dialogue... pt 2

What It Ain't...

When I hear people criticizing the concept of preaching with dialogue, 99 times out of 100 what I am hearing bears little relationship to what I have personally seen and done in this area. Somehow, the straw man of a group of people with little knowledge of Scripture, sitting around in a circle with everyone expressing "what it means to me," no right or wrong answers, and certainly no expectation that anyone would proclaim anything has crept in...

I really, really want to kill that ridiculous mis-characterization.

In part, that's why I want to spend some time processing this concept on the blog this week. As well, I tend to be a verbal processor (remember that term- it will be important later), and want to suss out some thoughts and concepts in my head.
But first, let's get medieval on that straw man, eh?

What preaching with dialogue is NOT.

Preaching With Dialogue... pt 1

First some disclaimers...
I'm not an expert. The only thing I offer in this area is some experience, and some lessons I've learned over the last couple of years. As my friend Mark says, "Your mileage may vary."

Second, I believe in the gift of preaching and its place in the local community. Proclaiming God's Word to a people leaning in to hear what the Spirit is communicating to them through prayerful listening, listening prayers, songs sung and sermons spoken is an awesome thing. I can't think of much in the world I would trade it for...

Third, preaching happens in many ways, from many members of the community. There's no doubt that the elders of the church carry a significant portion of that, and there's usually one elder in particular who does the majority of that, but... the community is responsible to teach one another. I don't want anything I write about preaching to give anyone the impression that I think one person is the teacher and all else the students. We all sit at the feet of Jesus as learners, as seekers. And we all have things to teach one another...

But given that some are particularly gifted for teachings and others not, and given that some devote themselves and their time to the teaching of the community, it seems like a good idea to discuss ways to do that well.

And so we come to dialogue in preaching...

Tomorrow, I'll tell you what it isn't. The straw man criticisms of this practice would be funny if they weren't shouted so loud and with such vehemence... Until then, here are some other things I have written about preaching on the ol' bob.blog. And check out The Cowardly Preacher? as well...

preaching with Dialogue...

I'm planning a series for next week on preaching with dialogue... much of the criticism I read of "dialogical" preaching is criticism of things I really don't see anyone doing, leastwise myself or others that are heavily promoting this practice...

So what I'd like to know as I organize my thoughts:
What questions are there?
What concerns are there?

Hit me...

Rut...

Let me say it before anyone else does... I'm in a rut when it comes to preaching. Rut, rut, rut...
So frustrating.

When I started, 2 1/2 years ago, at this "teaching pastor" thing, doing it week in and week out- I had a lot to say. Now I've said it. And said it. And said it.
And you know, if I was writing this a year from now, I might have some good advice for you, should you ever find yourself in the same situation. As it is, I can only tell you what I hope to do to get out of this rut- maybe you have some suggestions for me in the comments?

*Read something different- Someone different, someone outside my normal tracks. I need to jumpstart my brain onto a different track. I've been reading too much of the same stuff for the last 3 or 4 years... I've never read Eugene Peterson or Walter Brueggemann- maybe I'll start there.

*Listen to something different- I enjoy certain podcasts... time for me to intentionally find some other voices with some other styles. Right now it's Driscoll and Piper and McManus. Who else, who else???

*Change my sermon prep methods- I feel like when I was at my best, more of my sermon prep took place earlier in the week... and that gave me time to marinate. I've gotten into the bad, bad habit of doing the majority of my sermon prep on Thursday and Friday... Okay... Friday.
I need to get back to doing more on Tuesday and sitting on it, mulling it over, meditating on it the rest of the week. More time, more meditation= better thoughts and sermons.
Also, this will help me on Sunday to know my sermon. Aside from feeling WAY too tied to manuscript these days, I have this recurring dream lately- I'm about ready to get up in front of the community, and I've forgotten to print off my sermon. I draw a complete blank as to what to say...
I love manuscripting and the feeling of knowing what I'm going to say... I hate the feeling of not knowing what I would say if I lost those stupid pieces of paper. I need to change that.

*Preach less- Last year, I did 75% of the teaching at evergreen. This year, as I have it mapped out, I'll be doing 66%

*Pray more- I really, really mean this one. I've been getting more and more convicted over the past few weeks of the time I spend in prayer not just for our community in general, but for time teaching and leading it.
Oh God, please... I'm dependent on You to give me something worth saying.

advent 1...

We often think that the result of not listening when God speaks to us is that God will stop speaking. Luke 1 tells us just the opposite: When we fail to hear God and listen to what He says to us, it's we who lose the ability to speak. This is especially relevant for communities of people trying to speak hope and challenge to our cities...

We did a lead in/kick off to the Advent season yesterday... okay, a week early, but for some reason this year I'm just eager :)

The Annunciation narratives in Luke are some of my favorites, not only because of their close ties back to the OT, but also because of the juxtaposing going on within the chapter. If you are interested, here's what we did... feel free to steal!

The Empty Pulpit...

(I was actually working on this post this morning and put it in "marinate" mode for finishing later... now I see Slice has posted on the same thing... Man I hate it when we have similar ideas. Few things disturb me more...Ugh... Anyway...)

Drew Goodmanson had some good thoughts on Five Trends for Future Church Planting... you can check them out here.

All good stuff, though I wanted to say a word or two about number 5...

More churches will be planted without the role of a preaching pastor. Many church plant organizations will promote the use of 'best of' or license videos from top preachers across America. Already there have been churches who have licensed Willow Creek material for tens of thousands (I heard $50k) a year. Others will simply pick series that they believe will draw the biggest crowd. There already is one church plant that has grown to over 600 within a couple months using this method. (Someone could probably make some good money by contacting all the 'big name' pastors and create a company that licenses their work to churches.)

The first thing I'd like to say is "Please God, no!" :)

Helpful and not so...

From Driscoll's Confessions...

Helpful:

"I hit a particularly low point one day when a young couple knocked on the door of our home... We considered them friends until they came over to tell us they had left the church. They complained that since the church had grown a bit bigger and things were a bit busier, my wife and I had become less available to them...
We were stunned. We needed couples like this to help the church survive, not jump ship just because my wife could not drop everything to take this woman out to tea whenever was convenient for her. The odd thing was that they transferred to a megachurch in the suburbs, which made no sense because they would get no closer to that pastor and his wife than they had to Grace and me. Yet they knocked on our door unannounced to tell us we were not doing enough for them. It seemed obvious that they wanted us to bend over backward and promise to do anything to make them happy in order to keep them in the church...
In retrospect, this was a hard lesson, one that I have had to learn many times in the various seasons of our church. As a church grows, it also changes. And as a church changes, so does the accesibility of the pastor and his family. As the pastor gets busier with new people and responsibilities, some people are displaced and are not as close to the pastor as they had been. Displaced people are prone to expect the pastor to ensure that their access to him and his family will never change. If the pastor agrees to these demands, he will keep the disgruntled people but not reach any new people because the mission will shift from reaching the new people to pleasing the old people."

A good differentiation to keep in mind, I think...

Not so helpful:

"We continued to meet on Sunday nights until Christmas, when some of the arty types started complaining that there was a preaching monologue instead of an open dialogue, as would become popular with some emerging pastors a few years later. This forced me to think through my theology of preaching, spiritual authority, and the authority of Scripture. I did an intense study of the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament commans regarding preaching and teaching. In the end, I decided not to back off from a preaching monologue but instead work hard at becoming a solid long-winded, old-school Bible preacher that focused on Jesus. My people needed to hear from God's Word and not from each other in collective ignorance like some dumb chat room."

There are so many false antitheses here, I hardly know where to start. How about a quote from DA Carson, well-known critic of the emerging church? What was it he said? Oh yeah... "Damn all false antitheses to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ."

Preach it D.A.!

Let me say this strongly-

Keller on preaching the Gospel.

I've been listening... and listening... and listening... to this message by Tim Keller on preaching the Gospel.

Absolutely amazing.

I think much I ever heard in homiletics class could have been (and should have been) replaced by this 40 minute message.

What I love about this guy is that he can tell you how to preach in an incredibly humble way... and so you listen. Keller has got a serious brain on him... :)

preaching uphill...

I found myself preaching uphill yesterday...

We're walking through a brief (3 weeks) time in Haggai, and yesterday was part one of chapter 2. The people have been told to consider their ways, to ponder whether it was right to work so hard on their own houses while God's House, the Temple, still lay in ruins. They have repented, and made a decision to start (re-start) the rebuilding...

But there's still a hold up. Some disappointment, maybe, in how small and how simple the new Temple will be compared to the old.

And so God tells them, "Get to work."

Yeah.

That's a feel good message right there.

Actually, it is, because He reiterates- "I am with you."

So I got to talk to our people about risking more, trying more things, exploring more avenues in our service to the city of Portland. It was a message I wanted to deliver, was excited to hash out with our people on a beautiful Sunday morning, it's just...

It was uphill all the way.

Was it the people? I don't know... Was it me? Probably- I was up at 3:30am the night before, in part I think, because of some allergy medicine I took that wound me up. So I was a bit... dazed. I think I preached most of the message with my eyes closed.

But more- it was one of those mornings- lots of noise and distractions- the phone in the kitchen of the pub we meet in kept ringing, the bread delivery guy made his usual 11:05am delivery, lots of beautiful kids (LOTS) doing the cool but sometimes noisy things kids do... none of those things by themselves a bad thing, but all together...

I love Glad's take on it all, though. She and Scott told me it's those very things which make them feel at home on a Sunday morning. She says that she's excited that the bread delivery guy gets to hear the Gospel from the door to the kitchen and from the kitchen back to the door every Sunday.

Glad rocks :)

Anyway, no profound observations on the whole thing... just a general feeling of preaching against the wind yesterday, trying to encourage our community (including and especially myself) to grow in their worship of God and their service to the each other and the city of Portland.

And today I am tired.

How to preach... badly.

From Holy Office, a very, very funny take on the "bad homily." All you ex-catholics will love it... :)

Be Nervous and Easily Distracted
In any kind of public speaking, bearing is important, and to give a truly bad homily, your posture, mannerisms, and countenance should reflect this. Ideally, you should adopt the bearing of a nervous homeschooler sweating beneath the lights of a major spelling bee after getting stuck on the word "cthonic." Fidget. Hide behind the lectern. Speak directly into the Bible. Never, under any circumstances, look at the congregation.

A major boon to any bad homilist is distractions from the pews. Remember: a crying baby is a key ally in your effort to seem hopelessly outside your depth. At the first sound of a wailing youngster, you should freeze in place, as if the bishop has just entered the sanctuary tailed by the police, pointing at you and shouting, "Fraud!" Once this is done, it's important to lose your train of thought and mumble disconsolately for several moments, as if you have never seen an infant before, and the sight has left you terribly unsettled.

I was actually once at a Mass where the priest - who was nearing retirement, in fairness - responded to a crying baby by snarling, "Shut that kid up!" I doubt Chrysostom would have handled it that way, but in delivering a bad homily, that's kind of the point.

Inflection is a Tool of the Devil
When delivering a bad homily you will, like Phil Spector, want to go "back to mono" - monotone, that is. Your voice should be as calm and affectless as the Sargasso Sea; if at all possible, you should read the words of your homily the way 3rd graders read book reports when standing in front of the class. Never give any indication that one word or other should be emphasized in the endless gray slurry of diction you pour forth. Raymond Chandler once wrote that the American accent is "flat, toneless, and tiresome," and you should do your part to prove him right.

From God's Lips to Your Parish Bulletin
A homily is technically supposed to relate the message of Christ's salvation to a particular community, so why not spend the first 10 minutes announcing minutiae from that week's parish newsletter? Hey, salvation is important and all, but so is the fact that the Tuesday Teen Coffee Hour has been moved to 7:30 p.m. This approach has the double effect of making the homily unutterably dull and rendering the bulletin redundant, and is thus highly commended to bad homilists.

I once attended Mass at a parish in which the priest delivered a five-minute homily, four minutes of which were devoted to gripes about the difficulties of getting a zoning permit to install a new elevator. Then he ended with a variation of "God is good." Well said, Father!

Reach The Young People
Do popular songs on the radio remind you of Biblical passages? Is there some way a blockbuster summer movie can be said to show God's forgiveness? Is Jesus maybe a little bit like Spider-Man?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you're well on your way to developing one of the most popular techniques for delivering a bad homily: tailoring it to young worshipers by dumbing it down with a plethora of poorly thought out pop culture references.

When doing so, though, you'll want to remember to keep those references vaguely out of date, so that anyone in the pews who might possibly be reached by such a tactic will instead focus on their mirth at your use of "X-Files" terminology.

You'll also want to keep the metaphors as tortured as possible. Popular culture, like all Western culture, is indeed filled with allusions and references - sometimes self-aware, sometimes not - to Christianity. Instead of going for the obvious ones, though, you'll want to instead explain how Jesus is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the vampires are sins and they're not really being slain so much as forgiven, and of course Jesus is not a woman.

Read the rest!

the dangers of preaching...

I've been reflecting this last week a bit on some of the dangers of preaching...

If there's a ditch on both sides of every road (and there is) the twin dangers on either side of the preacher each and every week are preaching for the nod and preaching for your critics.

habakkuk...

We started Habakkuk today... for the next three weeks we'll walk through this short little book that contains the deepest questions of human existence.

We kind of stirred the pot today- I think some of the concepts here were really challenging for some evergreeners-

1. Habakkuk tells God the Babylonians are "less righteous" than the Jewish people. Some felt this arrogant, and wrong. I agree and disagree- we're ALL pretty unrighteous, yes- and in many ways no better/worse than anyone else. But if I were forced to choose between supporting Nazi Germany and supporting Britain in WWII, I know which side I'd pick. Sometimes, some nations are more wicked and downright evil than others. Habakkuk recognized this, I think.

2. Habakkuk recognizes God is going to bring disaster on Israel to punish them, to teach them, to turn them around. I said this was the exception rather than the rule, that we shouldn't think all disaster in our lives was discipline/God trying to get our attention... but that sometimes... the sticking point was "how do we know?"

Here's a bit of it:

"He drops this wild, pandora’s box of a statement right in the middle: You have sent these Babylonians to correct us, to punish us for our many sins.” Here’s one of the reasons why bad things happen. Now, before you go thinking I’m going all Pat Robertson on you, let me finish.

Sermon excerpt Friday...

(my best Mark Driscoll impression...)

Luke 24:44-48

Then he said, "When I was with you before, I told you that everything written about me by Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must all come true." Then he opened their minds to understand these many Scriptures. And he said, "Yes, it was written long ago that the Messiah must suffer and die and rise again from the dead on the third day. With my authority, take this message of repentance to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem: `There is forgiveness of sins for all who turn to me.' You are witnesses of all these things.

He tells them that the whole OT pointed to Him- “Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms… that’s a way of referring to all the categories of books in the OT- He’s saying, “The whole thing- it’s about Me, about this, about what you are witnessing right here, right now.”

He tells them, again, that this message of forgiveness and restoration wasn’t just for the Jewish people, but for all people… the word for “nations” here is “ethnos”, where we get “ethnic” from. You see, Jesus’ message from the very beginning- and what almost got Him killed at the very beginning of the Book of Luke, is that the Gospel, the Good News, is for all people- all kinds of people from all kinds of places. Jesus is not a cultural God. He’s not the deity of certain nationalities or certain ethnicities. He’s not the God of white Europeans only… how could a movement started by an Aramaic speaking Jewish Rabbi in the Middle East and propagated first by Jewish and Greek men and women all over the Latin Roman empire be something just for White Europeans? Jesus says, No- this is for all people, everywhere.

God offers this forgiveness, this new life, this chance to turn around and start over to the Dutch, to the Germans, even to the French. And He offers it to Native Americans, Italian Americans, African Americans, and undocumented Americans- Why? Because Americans need Jesus.
And more than just Americans… North Americans need Jesus. South Americans need Jesus. Canadians really need Jesus. Asians need Jesus, and Indians need Jesus and Russians and Slavs, and Turks need Jesus. And while it’s a dicey thing to say these days, I’ll say it- Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims need Jesus. And just as much and sometimes more than them, Episcopalians and Lutherans and Baptists need Jesus. Man oh man, do the Baptists need Jesus.

And hear this: Even people who meet in weird little pub churches need Jesus. All of us, regardless of where we were born, what color our skin might be, what religion we might claim… we need the forgiveness of God. We need Jesus.

He offers it to the rich, He offers it to the poor. He offers it to men, to women, to heterosexuals and to homosexuals. To children and adults, to the educated and to the illiterate, to those who know they need Him and to those who are sure they don’t.

He offers it to me, and He offers it to you.
Yes?

What is Jesus doing here? Well, He’s not starting a new religion, that’s for sure, just another way that man tries to reach up to God. Jesus is the end of religion. He’s saying- this is it- the kingdom of God come to all people, to all nations. This is a movement, not another institution, another religion, and God forgive us for ever turning it into that.

This a movement built around the person of Jesus, His life, His death, His resurrection- and this pretty simple message: “There is forgiveness of sins for all those who repent.”

sermon excerpt Friday...

"While Jesus was in the Temple, he watched the rich people putting their gifts into the collection box. Then a poor widow came by and dropped in two pennies."I assure you," he said, "this poor widow has given more than all the rest of them. For they have given a tiny part of their surplus, but she, poor as she is, has given everything she has."

This incident comes right on the heels of what Jesus said in the last chapter: “Beware of these teachers of religious law! For they love to parade in flowing robes and to have everyone bow to them as they walk in the marketplaces. And how they love the seats of honor in the synagogues and at banquets. But they shamelessly cheat widows out of their property, and then, to cover up the kind of people they really are, they make long prayers in public. Because of this, their punishment will be the greater.”
There, in the events of chp 20, Jesus calls out the Pharisees, but here in chpt 21, he praises, he points out, he lifts up the widow, one of the very people they were cheating…

What do you see here? What is happening? What is your reaction?

Can I just say that this is part of why I follow Jesus, why I find Him so compelling… From the moment we started Luke, reading about the very beginning of His public ministry, Jesus has been clear: this is why I came- to preach Good News to the poor, to proclaim freedom for those in captivity, sight for the blind, freedom from oppression. And this is the character of Jesus- He takes the side of the poor over the powerful, He sees through all the religious BS and down to our very hearts. And He cares what is going on in those hearts- He offers peace, and healing and acceptance of who we are but change into who we could and even should be. And that’s why I love Jesus… for what He taught, for what He did and for what He does… in and to and through me. For seeing value in two coins worth half a penny from a poor widow, and for seeing value in me. For loving people like her, and for even loving people like me.

Now, Jesus is praising the widow, but this story is not (regardless of how this may have been presented to you previously) a lesson on tithing… We always read this as though Jesus is giving the disciples a lesson on giving- but it’s not and the placement between his condemnation of the Pharisees and then what He says in the rest of this chapter confirms that. I think Jesus said what He said here through clenched teeth, His heart breaking over what He saw. Like nearly everything in this section, this is an indictment on the religion he saw all around Him- religion that put perception over reality, and law over people and worse… cheated widows out of their property and then pretended to be pious. He’s not saying- “Look how cool she is for sacrificing the little she has”- He’s saying “Look how corrupt this religion, this society has become- all that this beautiful, giving widowed woman has to give is 2 pennies. And the reason why is because of the very people who should be caring for her, the very system that should make sure her needs are met!” Can you see that?

distractions...

Ahhh... Thanks Lord.

It's Sunday night/Monday morning... I'm processing a Sunday I didn't like too much (see earlier post) and so of course I'm up at 3:30.
One of the things about yesterday was the number of distractions.

You know how when you become a parent you develop a certain amount of deafness to baby crying and noise? It's not that you don't hear it- it's just that you hear the sound so much and at such volume that out of necessity, your brain filters it a bit to keep you from going stark raving mad...

Our Sunday environment is a bit like that. We meet in this pub... And the employees are in the kitchen (which is separated from where we meet by a thin wall of nothing) prepping food for the day, often there's someone in the brewing area operating the equipment. There's a load of bread that gets delivered through the middle of every gathering, right around 10:45 or so. Guy just walks right on through.

I think if someone is going to hang with us, they have to develop a certain deafness, the ability to tune out all the background noise and just focus on the community, our interaction, what God is saying to us. But some weeks that's harder than others.... just plain louder. The past two have been tough.

But not as tough as this. This guy has a fire alarm go off while he's preaching. And not just an alarm, but a strobe light, right on stage, right behind him.

Keeps preaching. Even works it in to the message.

Rock on :)

(Thanks Lord for helping me put my little mic glitches and bread deliveries in perspective...)

odd sunday...

Can I just be honest and say I'm kind of glad it's nearly over?
so tired...
:)

Yesterday, we had our first "extended" elder meeting. Making it two years without having an 8 hour elder meeting is an accomplishment. Making it through our first 8 hour elder meeting? Bigger accomplishment :)
Actually, it was kind of cool. We were all toast at the end, but our elder team works like evergreen in general (and that I love that). I'm not exactly sure how, but we get where we need to get. No votes, just talking, discussion, concensus... friends.

But, I still got home at 10:30pm.

Scratch that. With the time change, it was 11:30pm. In bed at 12. Up at 5:15am.

ugh.

Today was odd... not very interactive (my fault), kind of tough (Jesus' fault). We're at the end of a number of chapters in Luke where Jesus

lays the smack down

on the pharisees, the religious people and the religious system around Him, and leading into Good Friday... if our people don't get why they killed Him after the last few weeks, well...
Today, we started with the widow putting her pennies in the Temple treasury (not about tithing, so please don't preach it that way), moved through Luke 21 to the destruction of Jerusalem, and ultimately to the end of everything and the second coming of Jesus.
It was a hard passage to teach, a hard passage to make interactive. Scratch that. It was a hard passage, but I didn't try hard enough to make it interactive. If I were to be perfectly honest, I'm looking forward to finishing Luke. The thing about the Gospels is the way the same themes run through every story, every chapter, every line... After spending this long in it, and refusing the impulse to get topical with the Gospel (the story about Jesus calming the sea? NOT about Jesus calming the storms of your life. Jesus feeding the five thousand? NOT about God multiplying the little you give Him, etc.) I'm feeling kind of... in a rut. Saying much the same thing every week...

All this to say, I'm just looking forward to switching gears, hitting some different concepts, singing some different songs...
Preaching some SHORTER passages (and all the people said Amen!)

And I feel like I did crappy today. Just so you know. :)

Prayer for Humility

Here's a prayer I think we'll use tomorrow... I adapted it from here.

From the desire to be esteemed,

Deliver us, Jesus.

From the desire of being loved by all...

From the desire to be honored ...

From the desire to be praised ...

Deliver us, Jesus.

From the desire of being preferred to others...

From the desire of being consulted ...

From the desire of being approved ...

Deliver us, Jesus.

From the fear of being humiliated ...

From the fear of being despised...

From the fear of suffering rebukes ...

Deliver us, Jesus.

From the fear of being forgotten, ridiculed and wronged...

Deliver us, Jesus.

 

That I out of my riches may give to others in their poverty,

Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.

 

That I may know the depth of my own poverty

Jesus, grant me the grace to understand it.

 

That others may increase and I may decrease...

Jesus may it be.

preaching... It's kind of like...

How many sermons do you really remember?

I'm sitting in my second Starbucks today, and my old friend Johnny V walks in. Johnny is the Cable Guy, pushing quality digital entertainment all over Southwest PDX.

Anyway, we got to chatting for a minute and he asked me how the whole sermon thing was going...

"Ehhh..." I said. The last few weeks have been tough for me. I'm not sure I've had anything revolutionary or even memorable to say about the passages we've been walking through. 2 weeks ago, it seems like God did something cool in spite of my "ehhh...-ness". Last week, a little less so. This week? I guess we'll see.

Johnny's comment to that was "That's okay. No one remembers what you preach anyway."

Thanks Johnny.

But he's totally right.

And as we talked, I realized that "No one remembers what you preach" is basically what I think too. Preaching (and listening to it) is like taking vitamins. It has a cumulative effect. Few of us remember many of the sermons we have heard, but over a long period of time, we are taught. Few of us remember many of the gatherings we're a part of, but over a long period of time, we are formed.

Johnny told me about hearing Jack Hayford talk about this once (on TBN!). Hayford likened reading God's Word, listening to others teach us, etc to eating. Novel, eh? But keep reading.

He said that every once in awhile, we have a really memorable meal. But most of the time, when we are hungry, we eat. It's not earthshaking, it's just what we do to keep our bodies functioning. We don't really remember what we had for lunch two saturdays ago, two months ago, two years ago. But somehow, eating every day keeps us alive. It would be silly to expect it to rock our world every time.

Same with reading God's Word, with "going to church", with discussing Scripture with other people... Every once in awhile, something amazing jumps out at us and changes us. But mostly, it's the every day discipline of coming to God's Word, it's the every week submission of putting ourselves under God's Word... that's what keeps us alive.

That's good news to those teaching a community... we don't have to hit one out of the park every time at bat. It's enough to put together the singles, the doubles, the occasional strike out and the occasional home run. And when the whole community is practicing the discipline of bringing themselves to God's Word regularly... I guess the Holy Spirit can take it from there.

Are ya with me?

Leave it to Jesus to have everyone scratching their heads...

In preaching through Luke we come across two statements by Jesus, potentially at odds, but certainly tough to grasp.
The first is in Luke 9 where the disciples ask Jesus about other followers, not part of the 12, who are using the name of Jesus in casting out demons. His answer? ""Don't stop him! Anyone who is not against you is for you."

But in Luke 11, Jesus seems to turn it around and declares: "Whoever is not for me is against me."

I didn't have to preach the last one since this week one of our elders took Luke 11, but I've been thinking about these two phrases for weeks now... I was making a concerted effort to crack it last night while I was driving, knowing that next week I'll probably address this as I review/ work through Luke 12... Something clicked for me last night and I think I get it...

But I want to know what you all think-
How do we understand these two statements? What's Jesus getting at? How would you preach this?
You all share your answers, and then I'll post what I come up with...

(By the way- thanks to those of you who have helped out with the last of the Seven Questions- we'll come back to that this week!)

video Venues... follow up 7

Geoff asked:
"4. Why is church planting superior to opening campuses? At Seacoast we do both. If a we have a leader who has a unique vision and a call to preach we help him plant an autonomous church. (We've helped plant almost 25 new churches in the past few years) If a leader resonates with the vision God has given Seacoast and does not feel a call to preach we help him plant a new Seacoast campus."

First. Very cool. I appreciate churches that plant churches and really, seriously desire for us to be that kind of church and plant that kind of church. I can't wait to see our first "grand-daughter" church... the first church planted by a church we plant out of evergreen.

However, where I find myself feeling some friction here is "If a leader resonates with the vision God has given Seacoast and does not feel a call to preach we help him plant a new Seacoast campus."

I think in general I have a problem with one body, one local church, being overly connected to another. It seems two seperate buildings on one campus is one church. One building on one side of the street and another on the other... maybe that's one church.

But when you start talking about across town or two hours away? Regardless of common branding and similar vision, it's different people and a different church community.

And to me, that means some things.

I've already told you why I think a church should have it's own teacher(s). While I believe in the unity of the Church as whole, I also believe churches should have their own elders... and vision... and mission... and control over their own community.

The main reason I believe planting churches is superior to planting campuses is that what you are really doing (if I am understanding the model correctly) when you plant a campus is planting a church that has had it's leadership outsourced to somehwere else. It's not just that the teaching is done remotely, but also (it seems) the leadership is done so as well.

Now, I'm sure that a "campus" church can still, as a body, listen to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and develop as their own unique body... the problem is that they can only take that so far. Their vision/mission, etc is determined by a group of people relationally and geographically distant. Thus, it seems that long term, there is some leadership development that cannot take place in this local church.

My contention is this: This makes for good short term, church planting results but probably for not-as-good long term body maturity results. Not only do I see this model having a problem developing competent preachers and teachers, but elders and leaders as well... It seems as though part of the maturity process for a church body is going through the steps of re-inventing certain wheels for themselves, learning certain leadership lessons over and developing their own unique community, people growing to maturity and into real leadership in a body, and that body as a whole, listening to what God is saying to them and having the freedom to work that out as a local, organic entity.

My big fear is that with the proliferation of churches with no control over their destiny as a body is not a healthy thing in the long run, for the church in America.

I'll wrap this up tomorrow with some more thoughts along this line...

Video Venues... follow up 6

Geoff asked:
3. Would Paul have used video if it had been available? I'm not sure I understand the difference between watching a video and listening to a letter being read at a church service. (Obviously Paul's video would have divinely inspired, we don't have that advantage at Seacoast. :)

Would Paul have used video? Sure. But that's a different question than whether Paul would have been in favor of setting up a congregation in Ephesus that was taught primarily by a video feed from Corinth. :)
It seems as though Paul not only had a heart for seeing leadership and gifts developed within the local church, but saw teaching by the local elders as being an integral part of the local church gathering. When he wrote letters to them, and asked them to be read aloud, I'm fairly sure that he did not mean for that to completely replace teaching by the elders of the church, otherwise, he would not have made teaching a requirement to be an elder. His encouragement to Timothy was to "preach the Word." He said "Elders who do their work well should be paid well, especially those who work hard at both preaching and teaching." This is part of the job of the elders of a local church community. In 1 Cor 14, one of the things we do when we come together is that "When you meet, one will sing, another will teach... etc."

So even though he could have commanded that when they met, the early Christians would have nothing but letters from Apostles read to them, he seemed to steer them in a different direction.

But... the question is, "Couldn't a local church teacher just do it from another building by video?"
I think that the answer (for me) is a qualified maybe. :)

Sure, overflow rooms are one thing. Differently themed Video Venues start walking down an odd road (to me), but at least they are all in the same place being taught by someone they know and could meet after coffee in the central area, etc.

It's when we begin talking about placing venues miles and miles (and even hours) away that it begins to fall apart for me, and in large part because of what I have talked about here (and in the last entry on this) in terms of leadership being developed from within, people being allowed and encouraged to teach, a body being able to interact with those teaching them, the teachers knowing those they are teaching, etc...

I'll say more about the importance of local leadership and control and teaching in the next couple of entries...

Video Venues... follow up 5

Geoff asked:
2. Are there people called to lead congregations who don't have the gift of teaching? One of our most effective campus pastors at Seacoast is a former farmer who has no formal theological training, can't spell expository, but is incredible at helping people to grow in their faith. If he planted a church on his own he would be able to minister to very few people; because he doesn't have to preach he is able to pastor a congregation of over 600 people.

Are there people called to lead congregations who don't have the gift of teaching?
Well... no.
There are no people called to lead congregations who don't have the gift of teaching.

Now, before everyone spits out their morning coffee and writes me an angry comment, let's remember: One of the qualifications of an elder/overseer (a word used interchangeably in Scripture with "pastor") is that that person "be able to teach." (1 Tim 3)

I know what you mean when you say "gift of teaching", though. At least, I can infer (maybe wrongly) that you mean someone who is good at it... good enough to draw a crowd.

And here again is where our models may differ. I certainly don't want people who teach poorly to lead our discussions on Sunday... but biblically, I can't allow people who can't teach to lead our community as elders/pastors. My duty then is to make sure that those who are called to lead are given the opportunity to develop in this area.
Make sense?

I'm not advocating that one person be the only teacher in a community, though I can definitely see a role for one person being the one who ends up teaching a good chunk of the time (In our community, this is me... Statistically I have spoken at just over 75% of our gatherings since we started. But my strong desire is that this number decrease to somewhere around 60%... I want when we are able to get Chris, our associate pastor on board half-time- and eventually full-time- that he begin to share more of this load with me and bring more of his unique self/perspective/gifts to the community. This is something I haven't put on him too much since he's been working full time and to do this well it takes preparation... Rich (our worship pastor) as well and whoever plants out of evergreen and people who are elders and potential elders and so on...) I think it's possible that in a group of elders one person becomes more of the shepherd, one more of the teacher, one more the administrator, etc.

But it's a biblical qualification- can't teach? Shouldn't be a pastor.

We could go into a lot of the reasons why that might be... But suffice it to say that if someone feels called to lead, but can't captivate a thousand people with his or her speaking gifts, rather than sending them out with a video tape of someone who can I'd like to think we could re-work a couple of our expectations and do some things which make it a workable scenario without resorting to video feeds.

1. Rework our definition of numbers success. I have no idea if my speaking could captivate thousands. The most I have ever spoken to was four services of about 700 a piece. I did okay. :) But at evergreen, I don't have to worry about it. We've set an upper limit on our growth (somewhere under 200). We grow, and then we plant. We grow more- we plant more. I don't need to find people who can preach like Spurgeon! I just need to find men and women who love God, love people, can teach in a somewhat larger than home-group setting and set them loose. That's makes it a whole lot easier because for every person who can speak to thousands, there are literally multitudes who can lead a dialogical teaching time with between 30 and 150 people. I'll bet with some experience and some coaching, Goeff's former farmer would do just fine!

2. Rework our method of training. "Pastoring" has always been on the job training. We (should) send people to seminary for formal theological education- not to learn how to shepherd and teach people. Rather than in the classroom learning to shepherd and teach people should be done in the context of... shepherding and teaching people! I know the pressure that exists as a community gets larger... as we grow, it's harder and harder to turn the "pulpit" over to those who might not teach as well. But it's a necessity. So the solution? This seems easy to me- Through planting other communities, keep your community from growing to a size where you can't let a college-aged student or seminary aged man or woman teach, where you can't let someone who feels they may be called to be an elder someday (or now) not only lead and love people, but teach them as well.
(I knew this would be a temptation for me... to not do this... so right off the bat, shortly after we planted, we did about a month and a half of people other than me speaking. We did it again last Jan/Feb... We're now re-tooling that a bit. Rather than a block of time where others speak (say for a month or more) I'm trying to schedule others in once a month or so to speak.)

3. Rework our planting model... pair those who teach well with those who can teach, but don't want to do it all the time or who don't feel it is their main gift.

I know that there is more to "teaching" than taking the pulpit on Sunday mornings. But, one of my main concerns about Video Venues is this:
If we plant a community led by a person who can't preach, and taught by a video feed from elsewhere, aren't we making it nearly impossible for that community itself to equip, train and develop people who can preach? How would they do that? And even if they can and do, why make it harder?

Comments/thoughts/pushback?

video Venues... follow up 4

Geoff asked: ". Does an effective preacher always make an effective pastor? I've seen excellent preachers who IMHO do a very poor job of shepherding their flock and lousy speakers who are great pastors."

I totally agree. My beef with Video Venues is not that they disconnect one aspect of pastoring from another, but rather that they disconnect the one teaching the people from the people being teached...err... taught.

But this is my beef not just with Video Venues, but with large church in general. When, because of the size of a community, those taking the lead in teaching the community become inaccesible to that community, I think we've moved into an unhealthy place. I'm coming from a paradigm that says it's best if we keep things at a size where we can all know each other, particularly where those leading can know those being led and vice versa.
I know the model of getting "smaller as we get bigger." And though I understand it, I just don't like it. What I see happen, practically speaking, is a huge disconnect between those making decisions and teaching and those affected. I may know the leader of my small group, which is cool... but at a certain point if most of the church is completely unaware of who their elder board is, and unable to get on the calendar of the person/people leading and teaching them, I think something is wrong.

So, again, I feel like Video Venues take us in the opposite direction of what's intended. I know that one of the reasons stated for doing Video Venues is so that as a church grows, it can remain "small" and people can know each other. It probably works fairly well on that count. Where it seems to fall down is the second part of the equation... Allowing leadership and the led to know and access and interact with each other. The best leadership comes from a place of intimate knowledge of those being led- what is needed now, what are our people wondering, struggling with, etc. And the best "being led" comes from a place of knowing and trusting those doing the leading.

So I guess what I'm saying is that while one pastor can primarily shepherd while others primarily teach, disconnecting those functions from one another may be fine, but disconnecting those functions geographically or organizationally from the people seems a move in the wrong direction to me. And it seems as though this is what Video Venues do, by locating the "vision", "mission" and leadership decisions of the church in a place geographically and organizationally removed from the people.

Comments/pushback?

Video Venues... follow up 3

(ed note:I "unpublished" and then reworked this for tone...)
Dave asked:
what if church plants had pastors but used videos of other preachers because:
3. they decided that there are very gifted preachers in the body of Christ and they wanted to learn from those diverse voices as well.

Ahh.. see, now, now you are getting tricky! Using all kinds of good "emergent" sounding words like "diverse"! :)

But again, I think Video Venues actually work in the exact opposite direction of what you are saying here.

It seems as though the Video Venue you have in mind is one where there's a rotation- a community hearing the best taped/broadcast messages from all over, rotating different communicators.
While I'm sure it exists, I've never seen/heard of it. The model we seem to be processing here is one where a single communicator is the one who is (mainly) speaking to the people via the video. (Other pastors may speak, just as in any church, but there's a main teacher).

If I thought videos were a viable long-term solution, your model would be the best. But I have a feeling it's not even on the table. What we're talking about in these satellite campuses, which started as overflow rooms, morphed to overflow buildings and are now complete overflow capuses, sometimes hours away from the main campus, is, in a very real sense, (please excuse the term) franchising.

So, a little thought experiment.

Let's say YourTown Community Church decided to set up a satellite campus an hour and a half from their main campus, showing video of their main guy every week. Now let's say that because of the top quality music and kids programs, YourTown West™ really grew... but it's in a different town, with different kinds of people, people who have heard of YourTown's Teaching Dude, who may even have driven the hour and a half to hear him on special occasions, but don't really have a relationship to him as pastor. And now let's say that YourTown West™ decides that they would like to do a rotation. They are fine with the Dude's teaching and want to keep including him, say every few months, but since there are so many good preaching resources available on video, why not have Bill Hybels speak at YourTown West™ one Sunday, Rick Warren the next, Erwin McManus the next and so forth.

How well would that go over? With the mother church, I mean.

But that thought experiment is more of a tangent than anything...

Here's what I want to see from the church- more pastors/teachers and not less. Video Venues get us less because more and more local churches will be feeding on steady diet of communication from elsewhere rather than developing the teachers among them. Where does a man or woman who feels called to preach get practical experience if their local church is a video venue?

Your question, "they decided that there are very gifted preachers in the body of Christ and they wanted to learn from those diverse voices as well" is the exact reason why Video Venues are a bad idea, I think.

Comments/follow up/pushback?

Video Venues... follow up 2

Dave asked:
what if church plants had pastors but used videos of other preachers because:
2. they decided that allowing their pastor time to shepherd was more imporant than having him prepare to preach every week

I think, not to put too fine a point on it, that's a false dichotomy. Teaching your people is shepherding and shepherding is what a pastor is called to do.

I'm a HUGE believer in pairing down the modern role of pastor. It has come to mean way more than I think the biblical model indicates, mostly due to the size and competitive nature of many modern churches.

But when all the detritus is swept away, when you get down to bare bones, pastorally speaking, you seem to be talking about 2 things- teaching and discipling/counseling.

I know this veers way off into "can't we have pastors that do different thing" and yeah, I think we can. And I know we need to get into this some when I tackle Geoff's great questions/pushback, but...

If I truly want to shepherd my community, a huge part of that is praying, asking God what we as a community need to hear from Him, where He wants us to go, dialoguing that together, seeing what it is my community wants/needs to learn and providing that. Could I do that on other than Sundays? Sure, but... Why would I want to trade that time away?

If I'm shepherding people, I'm hearing their stories, seeing what we as a people are struggling with and that heavily informs my preaching. One of the many ways I shepherd... one of the best ways, is through our Sunday discussions. I wouldn't want to trade that for anything.

The person who is speaking to us via screen doesn't know us, doesn't know our stories, who we are, can't speak to us. That doesn't mean they can't be relevant, but there's a difference between speaking something which may or may not apply to a group of people and actually speaking something to that group of people.

Boy, much the same argument could be used in opposition to overly large churches as well, eh?

Comments/follow up/pushback?

Ahhh.. Thursday afternoon

Someone just found my blog by this search:

"I need a good sermon for the 2nd week of Advent"

I feel ya, Anonymous Panicking Brother or Sister

Here you go

Video Venues... follow up 1

Dave asked:
what if church plants had pastors but used videos of other preachers because:
1. they decided the sermon is just one element of their time together and not the premier thing.

To be honest, I think this is the right reason and the wrong answer. That is, it's good for us to become less sermo-centric (critics: please don't read as less bibliocentric). I tend to think that Video Venues push us in exactly the opposite direction.

Now, I'm not saying that with using Video Venues, you couldn't allow everything in your gathering to preach, but you are by definition adding more focus to the sermon event monologue, not less.

I think the way to do what you are talking about, Dave, is not to watch the sermon on the screen, but rather to cease allowing it to be the climax of the morning. Cease the monological style of communication that doesn't make room for dialogue or hearing God's voice through other speakers or even follow up and clarification questions.

What we've tried to do (and we need to try harder...) is to diffuse the teaching and experiencing and hearing from God throughout the whole morning. You can read about Sunday mornings at evergreen here, but what we've done, in short, is try to do away with the "worship" time and the "sermon" time, diffusing the "point" of the morning rather than distilling it into three points delivered monologically.

Now, I could see the use of something like a Rob Bell Nooma video, where it's short, to the point, and allows plenty of room after for discussion by the people (in fact, I think we need to use one of those occasionally, now that I think about it). But when we are by definition locking our communities into passively watching a 30-40 monologue with someone they can never, ever speak back to...

I know that much of what is shown on Video Venues is top quality, very creative and inspiring preaching. It has to be! :) But if we want to make preaching not the "main point" of what we do, perhaps this is a step in the wrong direction.

But I may have a flawed understanding of this. My experience has been a Video Venue at North Coast and some stabs at it at the mega church I worked at for awhile. Tell me how they can be used, positively, to make preaching not the main event. And tell me if I'm making any sense here at all... been up since 3:30 again, dangit. :)

Comments/follow up/pushback?

more on video venues coming...

Okay... some very good push-back on the ideas of Video Venues (planting churches where the teaching is done strictly through a video feed from another location).

I wanted to quote some of the good questions that were asked in response to what I said here and on Steve McCoy's blog, and then later, after working over a sermon I'm not completely happy with :) I'll do my best to answer...

Dave asked:
what if church plants had pastors but used videos of other preachers because:

1. they decided the sermon is just one element of their time together and not the premier thing.

2. they decided that allowing their pastor time to shepherd was more imporant than having him prepare to preach every week

3. they decided that there are very gifted preachers in the body of Christ and they wanted to learn from those diverse voices as well.

such a model might include using many different videos from different churches...

And Geoff, pastor of one of the innovating churches in this area asked:
1. Does an effective preacher always make an effective pastor? I've seen excellent preachers who IMHO do a very poor job of shepherding their flock and lousy speakers who are great pastors.

2. Are there people called to lead congregations who don't have the gift of teaching? One of our most effective campus pastors at Seacoast is a former farmer who has no formal theological training, can't spell expository, but is incredible at helping people to grow in their faith. If he planted a church on his own he would be able to minister to very few people; because he doesn't have to preach he is able to pastor a congregation of over 600 people.

3. Would Paul have used video if it had been available? I'm not sure I understand the difference between watching a video and listening to a letter being read at a church service. (Obviously Paul's video would have divinely inspired, we don't have that advantage at Seacoast. :)

4. Why is church planting superior to opening campuses? At Seacoast we do both. If a we have a leader who has a unique vision and a call to preach we help him plant an autonomous church. (We've helped plant almost 25 new churches in the past few years) If a leader resonates with the vision God has given Seacoast and does not feel a call to preach we help him plant a new Seacoast campus.

5. If people are committing their lives to Christ and growing in their faith, what difference does it make who preaches, who controls the purse strings, what the name is over the door? I'm not sure God is overly concerned with the forms that we invent for how church is done (house church, mega-church, multi-site, community church) as long as we are obeying the Great Commission.

Messages from the Book of Luke

I've been posting my manuscripts (we don't yet record... anyone want to help make that happen?) as we move through the Book of Luke- you are welcome to take/use/ignore them as you will... here.

A couple words about them, though:

These read oddly. The Scripture references are there, but not the verses (I don't include them in my manuscript since we read them aloud). Some of my notes (like: "Pray here") are there...

The biggest thing that's missing are the discussions. You'll see a question in the notes and some are rhetorical and many are not- these are places where people are talking, discussing, interacting... That doesn't really get captured here, which is too bad- cause evergreen people say some really amazing things.

pain...

I have no idea if our gathering "worked" for anyone but me today... but it worked for me. I got where I needed to go.

We walked through the first part of Luke 7...
Jesus heals someone's servant. He raises a widow's son from the dead... He leaves John in prison.
(by the way... excellent call Scott Lyons, in the comments on my last post on this chapter- you are right... Jesus quotes a messianic passage from Isaiah to John, and conveniently "forgets" the part about releasing the captives- I used that today... way to go with the community sermon prep!)

The things is, I was just about weepy through most of the morning... I felt a little goofy for not being able to get it together...

As we were talking about the widow who lost her only son, and the impact that would have on her, I told how a couple of weeks ago, when Amy's dad died, she called me in absolute hysterics. I couldn't understand anything she was saying to me, other than the word "dead." I heard "he's dead." All I could think was that Jack had been hurt... killed.

For about 30 seconds, the bottom dropped out of my world. I can't even describe the feeling to you. I imagine some people reading this have experienced what I'm talking about, and I'm very, very sorry. The thought that I had lost my child made me weak in the knees, everything was spinning, all I could do was try to push that thought away and get some clarification with Amy as to what had happened...

Talking about that today, putting myself in the place of that widow in the story, just about did me in. Of course, the most beautiful part of the story was the line, "and Jesus gave him back to his mother."

The problem is, what we were talking about this morning is the fact that sometimes God works miracles, and sometimes... He doesn't. Sometimes He says no. Sometimes, it feels like we are praying to a wall.

So, as we read and talked I just kept thinking about all the people who are part of evergreen who are suffering... so many people I know are going through hard times right now- it just seems abnormal.

And as we talked, I choked up, as we prayed I choked up, as we sang, I choked up...

For my wife and her sister who lost their father, for those struggling with infertility, for those going through the worst week of their life...

"Blessed is the person who doesn't get offended by the way I do things... or don't do them."

And blessed is the man who remembers to pray for his community, day in and day out, to ask God to listen, to answer, to act.

John...

"But what was the truth that John was telling? What was the message that was so urgent that he had to get it across even at the risk of his life? It was the news that all would be well at last; that the long night was nearly over, and that the day was about to break; that the God who had apparently abandoned His people was coming back: coming to rule, coming to judge, coming to save, coming to forgive."
-NT Wright, For All God's Worth

I love this picture of John, the man from the priestly family who did not follow in his fathers' footsteps, who first opened the doors to people with the idea that God could work, and they could now worship Him, outside that Temple system.

I love this picture especially in light of how John ends up.

We're looking at Luke 7 this coming Sunday...

Jesus heals the centurian's servant.
He raises a young child from the dead.

John is left, sitting in prison... doubting.

And Jesus says: "Happy is the person who doesn't get offended by the way I chose to do things"

Or not do things, as the case may be...

"How shall I describe this generation?" Jesus asked. "With what will I compare them? They are like a group of children playing a game in the public square. They complain to their friends, `We played wedding songs, and you weren't happy, so we played funeral songs, but you weren't sad.' For John the Baptist didn't drink wine and he often fasted, and you say, `He's demon possessed.' And I, the Son of Man, feast and drink, and you say, `He's a glutton and a drunkard, and a friend of the worst sort of sinners!' But wisdom is shown to be right by the lives of those who follow it."

Sometimes

God

just

won't

...



behave.

Updated prayer of St Francis

My friend Ollie, whom I met in the Netherlands and who is a Vicar in the Church of England, updated the Prayer of St Francis years ago for a service we did together. We used it yesterday in our community and I thought I'd share it. In fact, I think I'll start sharing more stuff we do/use...

Lord, use us to make Your point in the world.
Wherever there is hate, let us bring love;
Wherever someone has been hurt, use us to heal;
Where someone doubts, let us show You;
Where people have given up, use us to bring hope;
Where there is darkness, shine through us;
Wherever there is sadness, use us God, as an agent of joy.

preaching @ evergreen

I guess we'll be talking preaching here at the ol' bob.blog for a little while. I began it this weekend with The Ballad of the Cowardly Preacher... and while I thought I had blogged on our way of doing sundays before, I guess I haven't... or at least I can't find it, so...


The Word of God is central to what we do on Sundays. It's in and through and over the whole thing. Yes, we try to communicate in such a way as to make sense to everyone- church, unchurched, formerly churched... But that doesn't mean we cherry pick it or seeker sensitive it...

A typical morning goes like this:

A welcome by someone (often me, though I'm trying to get more people to do this- other voices are good), wherein we talk about an aspect of the community- one of our core values or something we are trying to do or be. I think this is important as it not only orients the newer folks, but reminds the old hands.

We'll have a few moments of quiet, centering prayer... often accompanied by a reading (usually the whole group, in unison) of a Psalm.

After that, the fun begins.

We generally take passages in large chunks- either whole chapters or half chapters. It's pretty rare (and usually done for contrast) that we do just a couple of verses.

We work verse by verse through the whole passage. And we talk alot. For us, the sermon is (at least this is the ideal) the work of the community. We are teaching each other. Yes, as the "Teacher" I have a role- I keep it on track. I emphasize the correct points, correct the wildly wrong points (if no one else does... often the people do this themselves, lovingly and gently) and move things along when someone says something just kind of odd. I do the majority of the speaking, but I do my darndest to get others talking to each other as well. In this way, as a community, we wrestle with the Scriptures.

It works like this for me: I tend to think of the sermon in thirds. In the first third, it's difficult to get people talking, so we begin with review or intro, orienting ourselves to where we are in the text that day. A few, easier, more closed-ended questions to get people into opening their mouths. (Newer folks really can't believe they are allowed, nay encouraged to talk in church!) The first third ends up being a pretty even balance of me and them.

The second third, I try to bring out more of the them... open ended questions, examples of where they've dealt with or struggled with the subject matter of the text, what they think about any hard, interpretive issues... The second third is less me, more them.

The last third is almost all me. This is where I get on my horse and go... where I preach. I try to get at what I've heard God saying to our community through the week, as we've discussed, as I've studied... I tend, by body language, to discourage too much talking here, as we're usually getting towards the end of our time.

It takes us the whole morning, from right after the welcome to the closing blessing to get through this process.

So where's the worship, you ask?

What a silly question. It's all worship, isn't it?

If you mean, where's the singing though, that's a different story. We don't do the start-off-with-an-upbeat-get-'em-out-of-their-seats type thing... most of our music tends towards the quieter, more contemplative. And we sprinkle it throughout the morning. We'll work through the text until we come to a point where I know "We better stop and respond to God on this, or we're gonna miss it." We may do that once in the morning, at the end or in the middle.. or we may do it two or three times throughout... it just depends.

We really ant the community to be involved, beyond just Sunday morning as well... I try to post the week's passage on our forum during the week before, so people can meditate, process, ask questions, give insights... It's still a discipline we're learning as a community. Yes, I may be "the Teacher" of the community, but it doesn't mean I'm the only one. We teach each other. And while I give the elders and others a chance at the pulpit...err... music stand often, this method allows them to teach the community- through their example of participation, through the discussion on the forum, through commenst and questions in the group on Sundays.

It's not perfect- I did have to learn new skills in facilitating discussion (read: keeping things on track, keeping comments short, handling the very rare fly ball from left field...), and I had to learn how to say less so that others could say more.
I used to walk into the pulpit with four to five pages. Now it's three.

And yeah- I manuscript. It keeps me on track, and it keeps me on time. If I tried to do this without a manuscript, we'd be an hour over every week. I don't know where Mark Driscoll finds people willing to sit through an hour and forty minute sermon, but sheee-ooot... I just don't have that much to say :)

Anyway... more on this jive later. I just wanted to give some background as to where we are at as a community before diving into Doug's books.

For our non-evergreen readers... I'm wondering if any evergreenies or people who have visited would care to comment on our sunday mornings- good, bad, indifferent. Does it work? Props? Shortcomings? What think ye all?