Beer with Jesus at North End Cafe!
Come join us for Beer with Jesus at the North End Cafe (across from the church) on the patio tonight at 6:00.
The Resurrection Moment (Acts 9:36-43)
And that’s the thing: The world, as chaotic and torn as it is right now, needs a little resurrection—needs people like you and me to get up and bring new life to folks who feel like everybody else has given up on them.
LGBT kids are dying, waiting for someone to care about them. Traumatized refugees are languishing in camps, waiting for someone to notice them. African Americans are literally dying in jail, waiting for someone to realize that we seem to live in a system designed not to deliver but to thwart justice. Single parents are trapped in low paying jobs, waiting for a few people to stand up with them and say that you can’t live on $7.25 an hour. Muslims, who live right next to us in fear, are waiting for people like you and me to wrap our arms around them and treat them like sisters and brothers.
Sometimes They Do (Acts 9:1-20)
Too often I settle for a cheap, painless version of Christianity. As long as my faith doesn’t cost me anything, I’m cool with sticking it out. But as soon as I’m called to stand up and begin to love the people I’ve always been so sure God doesn’t approve of, it’s easier to fade away.
Our lives, our words mean something . . . and not just for one light-filled moment on the Damascus road. How can we remain the same after the lives we thought we lost have been given back to us?
Judgmentalism: The New Heresy
By Derek Penwell
Judgmentalism. It's one of the things Christians do best according to those outside the church.
Unfortunately for the church, emerging generations find any kind of judgmentalism off-putting. Consequently, they tend to seek the broadest possible parameters for what previous generations would call orthodoxy.
Now, let me just say that some of what passes for non-judgmentalism is simply an unspoken social contract in which I promise to keep my nose out of your business if you agree to keep your nose out of mine. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting Christians should approach faith and morality as a laissez-faire proposition—in which the church, to avoid appearing judgmental, agrees to keep its mouth shut about important matters.
What I am suggesting, however, is that no matter how the church feels about being labeled judgmental, it would benefit mainline churches to think carefully about the way they come across.
Growing up as a religious conservative (an Evangelical, I would have said) I took it as an article of faith that salvation was like an obstacle course. Once you began to move toward the goal, you couldn’t go back, and every step was a potential hazard, threatening to disqualify you from finishing.
I was convinced that having the right beliefs about God was of equal importance with doing the right thing. In fact, having the wrong belief might be even more problematic than doing something wrong.
If you screwed up and said “Dammit!” because you bent your dad’s driver trying to hit rocks in the back yard, you could always repent and ask forgiveness.
Wrong belief, on the other hand, assumed a kind of intentionality, a willfulness that was much more difficult to recover from. You couldn’t accidentally believe in evolution or that the Bible might contain some mistakes in it.
Additionally, I believed that among the barriers Christians must negotiate on the obstacle course of salvation the need to “save” other people was a high priority:
If you observe a toddler wandering into the middle of a busy intersection, you have a responsibility to try to protect the child from being hit by a bus. Looking the other way is sin of omission. In the same way, if you see someone boarding the express train to perdition, you have a responsibility to help jerk them back onto the platform. Not to do so is to have saddled yourself with the responsibility for someone else’s damnation. You get enough of those lost souls in your column and the sheer weight of them might just drag you down, too.
Now, I’m willing to admit that my description of my childhood beliefs doesn’t necessarily represent all of Evangelical Christianity. However, they were my beliefs, and they are often the same things I hear people describe as “what Christians believe.” It’s important to name the reality that “Evangelical Christianity” has largely become a placeholder for “Christianity” in our culture.
That Christianity has become known by many people more for its beliefs than for what it actually does is problematic for the church in an emerging world. Part of the way I read the common charge against the church as “judgmental” has to do with the conviction on the part of emerging generations that Christians tend to believe more than they actually live.
That fact, turned back upon the individual is hypocrisy (another post) —that is, “I believe this, but I don’t think that means I actually have to make it a part of my life.”
Turned outward, however, that conviction about believing more than you’re willing to live, often expresses itself as judgmentalism—that is, “I believe this (and I’m right); and therefore, I’m holding you responsible for living up to my expectations.”
Hint: The combination of hypocrisy and judgmentalism is deadly for the church, since it communicates an inordinately high opinion of oneself and one’s abilities to determine what’s right—an opinion of oneself that isn’t mapped onto reality, and therefore, need not be taken seriously by the individual.
At the heart of the criticism of judgmentalism lies an accusation that Christians feel themselves superior. In other words, when people look at the church what they see is a collection of overweening know-it-alls who assume that everyone is breathlessly awaiting a word about how to improve themselves. Any deviation from “Christian expectations,” these observers believe, cannot but be met with moralizing opprobrium from those who “know the mind of God.” Christians, on this reading, have nothing better to do than to think up rules for everybody else to follow—then set about in earnest being exceedingly disappointed in everyone else when the moral revival doesn’t take shape.
“That’s not fair. I think people ought to live right, but I’m not the judgmental person you so sarcastically describe.”
In the absence of information to the contrary, I’m perfectly willing to concede that that’s not a fair description of you. I don’t even know you, after all. That’s not the point, though. The people who believe you’re judgmental, probably don’t know you either. As far as they’re concerned, if you’re a Christian, they already know as much as they need to know about you.
Among emerging generations, “Christian” is metonymous with “judgmental.” That is to say, for many people the sentence, “Derek is a Christian,” is a shorthand way of communicating that “Derek is judgmental,” since “Christian” is merely a placeholder for “judgmental.” Whether it’s true or not, the perception is, for my purposes, what matters.
Why is it the perception that matters? Because, as a very wise man once told me: “The difference between reality and perception is that reality changes.” If you want perception to change, you must work not only on the reality, but also on the perception.
Not only must the church adopt a positive understanding that it is called to be something for the world not just believe something about the world, but it must do so in a way that communicates its own humility.
After all, in our culture judgmentalism is the new heresy.
And for Christians used to occupying the role of heresy hunters, being the target of the new hunters of heresy is going to be extraordinarily uncomfortable.
We're Christians, and technically we don't believe in karma . . . but, dang!
Throw Open the Doors (John 20:19-31)
Having shalom be the first word uttered to the disciples in the locked room puts a name to the kind of reign God established on Easter.
Shalom foresees a world in which violence is no longer a reality, to be sure. But what's more shalom offers a vision of a world in which just systems ensure that everyone has enough—enough food, enough to care for their families—where all people, have access to the goodness of God’s blessings; in other words, a world in which the need for violence has been obviated.
How Will They Know about Jesus? (Acts 10:34-43)
Rev. Derek Penwell
We talk a lot around here about how the faithfulness of just of few people can change the world. Most of the time it can sound like high blown rhetoric from a bunch of misty-eyed idealists. But what if it’s not?
What if there’s a whole world out there just waiting to see a glimpse of the world they hear Jesus talking about? What if part of what Easter means is Jesus raised to life in us for the whole world to see? The way you and I live our lives—full of peace and justice and love—may just be the only way they ever have of truly knowing about Jesus.
Sustaining the Weary (Isaiah 50:4-9a)
Tradition is remembering and experiencing a living history. It’s the way we enter and become a part of a vast commonwealth of pilgrims—past and present who’ve gone before us.
It’s becoming fellow travelers with the millions of those who’ve chosen to try to follow Jesus, and who’ve decided against the promptings of the world and—perhaps even their better judgment—to live by faith.
It’s becoming a part of a community that promises to sustain us with stories and poetry and words when we’re too weary anymore even to shake our heads.
A New Thing (Isaiah 43:16-21)
Rev. Derek Penwell
God isn’t saying that the past isn’t important. Quite to the contrary, what God is saying is that the only way to honor the past is to believe that God is moving with us into the future. If the church says that God can’t reenact the miracles of the past again in the present, the church believes in a different God from the one who worked in the lives of our forebears in the faith.
So the question is not, will God do a new thing among us, but rather, when God does what God has promised, will we have eyes capable of seeing it, minds capable of comprehending it, hearts capable of embracing it? Do we have a big enough imagination to dream the dreams God dreams?
Why Betraying Your Instincts Might Be the Best Thing You Could Do for the Work You Care About
By Derek Penwell
I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
—Michael Jordan.
I’ve been thinking about this Michael Jordan quote a lot lately. That’s a lot of failure.
There are so many things to hate about failure—that feeling in the pit of your stomach you get when you realize that once again you didn’t do what you set out to do, that voice in your head that says, “I told you you could never do this,” the realization that if you’re going to succeed, you’re going to have to risk failing all over again.
But the thing I hate most about failing is being embarrassed. Missing 26 game-winning shots means that you have to stand before the world, and admit that—at least at that moment—you’re the one everyone counted on to come through … and you didn’t. I hate, hate, hate being embarrassed. But according to Seth Godin, not wanting to be embarrassed is encoded in our DNA.
Actually, it’s not just the avoidance of embarrassment that is buried deep within us; it’s the fear of standing out from the crowd.
Why?
Evolutionarily, we’ve developed an extraordinarily sensitive threat-detection system, which in the past used to protect us from predators. And in a predatory environment, the ones who get eaten are the ones who stray too far from the herd. Sticking with the pack is the safest place to be, since the pack is much more difficult to attack than the lone individual. Wander too far from the safety of the group and you’re a prime target.
Unfortunately for us, the finely honed survival instincts calibrated to keep us safe from lions and tigers are much less practical now that we live in environments without those kinds of predatory threats. We still have these threat detection systems that continually tell us to keep our heads down, not to stand out, not to get too far ahead of the herd. Only now, the threats come more in the form of disapproving looks in a meeting, or the more subtle but no less devastating “no-that-was-fine-really-it-wasn’t-that-bad” consolation from people who are trying to be nice, or the now ubiquitous public shaming and unconstructive criticism on social media.
Consequently, nowadays most of us live our lives afraid of saying something that will draw negative attention to ourselves. In our world what many of fear most on a daily basis isn’t being eaten by a hungry tiger, but being eaten alive by an angry troll. And so we hedge our bets in an attempt to remain safely hidden in the pack.
Of course, what suffers when we hew too close to the middle for fear of drawing attention to ourselves is creativity. The impulse to remain invulnerable from attack, which Steven Pressfield calls the resistance, is what keeps most of us from doing the creative work we were put on earth to do. The resistance is that voice in our heads telling us not to put ourselves out there, not to do anything too new, too dramatically different. Because when we separate ourselves from the conventional, from the ordinary, from the expected—that’s when we’re most vulnerable.
But as both Godin and Pressfield point out, the resistance, if we’re brave enough, can become our friend. Because art is always a risk, the resistance can act as a barometer or a compass for creativity, which tells us when we’re getting close to our most important work. The louder that voice in our head warning us about embarrassment is, the more likely it is that we’re closing in on something important.
In other words, when it comes to creative work, the more insistent the voice in your head is about telling you not to put yourself out there, not to risk failure—if you can manage to listen to it in a different way—the better the chance that you’re headed in exactly the direction necessary for accomplishing what you have it inside you to accomplish.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza reflects that his instincts have always led him astray, caused him to make bad choices. So, he figures he’ll try something different: he decides to do exactly the opposite of what his instincts tell him to do. If his instincts are so bad, then, he reasons, doing the opposite of what they encourage should lead to success.
Crazy proposal for creativity: When it comes to the work you love, the passion that drives your endeavors, what if you started, like George Costanza, to do exactly the opposite of what your instincts tell you?
What if, when the resistance tells you to slow down, that becomes a cue for you to step on it?
What if, when the resistance tells you to shut up, that’s the signal for you to speak more loudly?
What if, when the resistance tells you that you don’t have any business doing something that risks public embarrassment, you embrace the risk and do it anyway?
Chances are good that you could fail.
But if you don’t, chances are excellent that you’ll never do anything interesting.
And here’s the thing: We need you to do something interesting. The world is a better place when you’re doing the creative work you’ve been put here to do.
Look at Michael Jordan.
Bad Parenting (Luke 15:1-3, 11-32)
And if we’re ever going to be like the parent who waits for us, our job isn’t deciding who should be on the guest list. Our job is popping champagne corks when another one comes home.
And even more than that, we’ve got to figure out how stop looking out the window waiting for them to find their way home. Instead, we need to go out into the street and find them while they’re 'still a long way off.' And we need to run to them, and offer an embrace … before they ever promise to get their acts together and start being responsible—like we’re pretty sure we already are.
Why Can't God Just Do Us All a Favor and Ask My Advice? (Isaiah 55:1-9)
Derek and his son, Dominic.
No, God, throwing parties is nice—we like parties—you just have to be more selective about who you invite. If you need any help with the guest list, let us know. In fact, why not just do us all a favor and ask my advice? It’d make things so much easier.
But God’s not having it. God throws open the doors and says, 'Y’all come! And all means all.' The only requirement is that you’re hungry and thirsty. All that can exclude you is insisting that there’s some place you’d rather be.
There it is. God puts out a spread, and people stay away in droves because they want to control the menu, they want a line-item veto on the guest list. I mean, let's be honest, everybody knows you can’t just invite every knucklehead with a pulse and opposable thumbs! Lord have mercy, you start doing that and pretty soon you’re gonna have all kinds of undesirables knocking on the door wanting to be let in.
You who were far off (Ephesians 2:11-22)
Derek and his son, Dominic
When I can finally see into the eyes of the stranger, when I can see people from close at hand, rather than from afar, I can begin to see the contours of the face of God.
Because in the face of God I see one who prefers to tear down walls, rather than maintain them, in the God who calls to us from near at hand, rather than keeping us far off.
In the face of God I can see one who is not satisfied with the gap that separates us, the distance that keeps us suspicious of and hostile toward one another—but who seeks to reconcile us, to stand among us, to bring us near enough to see one another's faces.
What Does a Desperate World Need? (Luke 4:1-13)
Congregations are just as prone to hunger, just as prone to believe that if they’re going to survive they’re going to have to take the easy fruit, the quick bread that’s in front of them, rather than trust that God will offer a way forward.
So, congregations tend to be reactive. We’re anxious. We need to change. Just tell us who to be and we’ll bend over backwards to accommodate.
But what if God’s got bigger plans than can be pictured in our limited imaginations?
What if Jesus is counting on us to trust that God’s new age will be unveiled in us … those who seek justice, those committed to welcoming the stranger, those who sow peace in a world devouring itself from a hunger that no amount of bread, no amount of power, no amount of spectacle can satisfy?
Ash Wednesday Service Tonight at 6:00
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Just a reminder that Ash Wednesday service is still on tonight at 6:00. Brave the snow and ice and come out to join us!
Since We Have Such a Hope (2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2)
Derek and his son, Dominic.
The reign of God is first a decidedly earthbound affair. It’s not primarily about getting the rituals all correct, or about managing institutions, or about figuring out a new set of laws carved in new stone tablets to follow, but about unambiguously unglamorous things like doing justice, practicing mercy, and walking humbly with God.
It’s about feeding the hungry, visiting the prisoner, giving voice to the oppressed.
It’s about embracing the refugee, the foreigner, and those who’ve been turned away because they’re not “like us.”
It’s about unmasking the hypocrisy of power structures that allow the wealthy and powerful to keep the poor and powerless under heel.
It’s about choosing peace over violence, about doing the hard work of forgiving the enemy.
What Does "Grow Your Church" Even Mean?
By Derek Penwell
There’s a phrase that church people throw around all the time that works on my last nerve. I can’t even tell you.
Oh, and it’s popular. I hear it all the time on the lips of those scared that their congregations are dying, and of course on the lips of those gurus whose financial health depends on the fear of dying congregations, and the belief by those congregations that a magic program/strategy/personality-type exists to answer once and for all the problems this phrase points up.
Every pulpit committee I’ve ever worked with wants candidates to have a ready answer for the questions prompted by this stupid phrase. Rural congregations. Small town congregations. Suburban and urban congregations. They all seem unreasonably confident that there is something out there—which they haven’t happened upon yet—that will allow them to escape with their lives and their budgets still intact—if someone will just tell them how to … Grow. The. Church!
It’s usually phrased in a question or as the subject of an action item list:
“How are you going to grow the church?”
“11 Things Your Pastor Should Be Doing to Grow Your Church.”
Vomit.
Grow your church. What does that even mean?
If you happen to substitute something else for “church,” maybe you see what I mean.
“How are you going to grow your child?”
“11 things you should be doing to grow your lazy friends.”
See what I mean? It supposes a kind of agency that is not only presumptuous and self-defeating, it’s literally impossible. On what planet is it practicable for a human being to insert herself in the genetic driver seat, such that “growing” a living organism is a reasonable expectation?
But somebody might say, “Well, okay, fine. You can’t 'grow' a human being, but we talk about growing plants all the time.”
Ah, but see, that’s a figure of speech, isn’t it? When a farmer says, “I think I’ll grow soybeans this year,” nobody believes the farmer is going to be working the levers and pulleys on each seed, manipulating the DNA, controlling water absorption rates, optimizing photosynthesis.
When we talk about “growing plants,” we’re talking about helping to foster an environment hospitable to plant growth. Good farmers know about preparing the soil, about planting at the right times and under the right conditions, about making sure that all the factors controllable by the farmer are taken care of.
But that’s the rub, isn’t it? Not all the factors that contribute to the growth of a plant are controllable by the farmer. The farmer can’t make it rain, or stop raining. The farmer can’t heat things up if it’s unseasonably cold, or cool things off if it’s unseasonably warm. The farmer cannot, just by force of will, increase the yield.
So, to say, “I think I’ll grow wheat this year,” is a commitment to doing the work necessary to help make the environment as accommodating as possible to wheat growing.
But here’s a trick that farmers know, which is apparently unknown to people who continue to talk about “growing the church”: If you’re in the wrong environment to grow wheat, it doesn’t matter how skillful a farmer you are; you ain’t gettin’ no wheat.
Plant wheat in the desert, sow some wheat in the middle of the ocean, broadcast wheat seeds in Antarctica and you’ve just bought yourself a heaping helping of “Holy-crap-I-can’t-believe-that-didn’t-work.” You may be the best farmer in the history of farming, and you’re still not going to make that work.
Congregations face the same kind of harsh realities when thinking about “growing the church.” There are plenty of congregations that aren’t going to be “megachurches,” no matter how much pressure they apply to their pastors and lay leaders in an attempt to control their own growth. It’s not happening.
People will react with indignation: “Are you saying God can’t perform a miracle in these barren lands? Can’t God raise up another Joel Osteen in South Dakota?”
Sure. God, by definition, can do whatever God wants. You also might win the lottery, but that doesn’t seem like—given what we know about economics and probability—very sound financial planning.
And even if that were the extent of your financial planning, would you hold the liquor store cashier who sold you the ticket responsible when your Power-Ball dreams don’t materialize?
But here’s my problem: People who talk about “growing the church” actually know in some deep place they generally keep hidden from themselves that they’re employing a figure of speech. These would-be church-growers (kinda, sorta) know that nobody can “grow a church.” But they want so badly to believe that somebody out there has the magic formula, that they keep clinging to the hope that it’s possible (if we could, for the love of God already, find the right minister) to engineer their own survival. And so they keep alive the fantasy that if they look hard enough and/or make their ministers miserable enough, they’ll finally stumble across the secret they’re pretty sure somebody has been keeping from them all these years.
But it rarely ever works. It just doesn’t—at least not in the way most people are apparently programmed to think.
So, how about this?
How about we seek an immediate moratorium on the phrase, “grow our church,” and just get busy (like the farmer) working on the things we can control?
How about we quit saddling our ministers and lay leaders with unrealistic expectations, quit projecting onto them our own fears about our inadequacies?
How about we celebrate the church we are right now and the church we actually have the potential to be in the future, instead of bitterly clinging to an image of the church we’re convinced we could be if only we could find the magic formula?
How about if we just bloom where we’re planted, instead of where we wish God had planted us?
The Perils of Going Home (Luke 4:21-30)
Going home and opening the doors has its dangers. You never know who just might wander in and make themselves comfortable at the table.
Indeed, it may be more dangerous when the people sitting around the table look up and see who’ve let in. That can cause a big stink.
Just ask Jesus. Open the doors too wide and you might just get done to death.
The Spirit of the Lord (Luke 4:14-21)
Derek and Dominic.
Jesus stood up in the company of a handful of the faithful and said a few words . . . words that suggest that the world is about to change. And if the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed are to get a taste of 'the year of the Lord’s favor,' it will be in large part because those who claim to follow Jesus aren’t preoccupied either with being dismissed as hypocrites and dolts or only with saving their own souls; it will require those who claim to take Jesus seriously to help create the space in which the reign of God may unfold.
What 5 Cities Are Doing to Change the Way America Eats
Looks like our friends at New Roots are getting some love.
Greater Things than These (John 2:1-11)
And what about us? What about those of us who claim to follow Jesus? Are we prepared to follow him into the temple, where he’s sure to start kicking over other people’s lemonade stands?
And what tables are we prepared to see Jesus overturn? What injustices are we willing to take action against? Which systemic inequities are we primed to get on our feet and march into the seat of power to seek change for? Because Jesus always seems to be heading into places it would be a lot more convenient for us to avoid.
But following Jesus requires us to ask about who needs to hear our voices? What problems should we be up to our elbows in? If we’re to be faithful, we don’t really have a choice about wandering into dark alleys after Jesus—as much as it would make our lives easier.