Trish is on a roll. Read her stuff for the past few days and be blessed... As for me, I am doing life and school right now....

Our little gathering had a barbecue last night. Good times! A little beer, a lot of laughs, and friendships growing.... plus, our kids had a great time together.

+Thank you Lord for being faithful and trustworthy!+

I haven't blogged about this, but I took a job with our "latchkey" program at the church. We have about 90 kids that we take care of after school until their parents can get them. I'm the only guy working with 5 other women. See what a college education can get you! :-)

I see so many things that break my heart. The other day a little girl in my class was crying and I asked her what was wrong. Her mom never gives her money for soda, and the little girl had finally talked her into it. She was waiting all day to buy the soda. The bell rings and she runs to the soda machine, inserts her money.....and an older boy steals her soda, runs off, throws it on the ground, breaks it and runs off laughing (Good thing I didn't see him do it!). So, after the class had snack I snuck off and spent 50 cents to buy her another one. When I came walking onto the playground with that Mountain Dew you would have thought her whole world had changed. 50 stinking cents. Sometimes that's all it costs to change someone's day.

I've got a lot of stuff running through my head regarding leadership etc....but no time to write. School is almost complete! Three more weeks and I'll have Bachelor's Degree at 36 years old! Better late than never....

My sweet daughter Abbie turned 9 years-old yesterday! My, how 9-years flies! The most beautiful days of my life were being able to participate in the birth of my kids! I got to catch Abbie and Hannah coming out of Trish because we had them at a birth center. What priviledge! It seems just like yesterday!

We had a party for her Saturday. A small party with our family and three of her friends. I am so grateful for the friends she has this year. Everyone of them is sweeter than the next. It was so fun to watch them play "freeze dance" and pop balloons by sitting on them, to hear their giggles... It was so great to get her a guitar this year! She has been wanting to play for sometime now....

I love Abbie! She is growing up to be such an awesome kid! Sweet, sensitive, creative, loving... I am reminded to take advantage of the time we have to build relationships, both with our children and each other. Time is a commodity that is so precious! Once it is gone you can't get it back...

Thanks for the comments! Your thoughts help me clarify and put into words what I'm trying to say. In keeping with the discussion going on VC, I'll post some more of my thoughts. These are new, to me, and still forming. Feel free to challenge them. I think discussion about these issues are healthy and needed in the Body...

Regarding individuals and community. Jesus created the church made up of individuals who relate to Him. When those individuals gather, a local expression of church happens. The local expression of the Church will only be as healthy as the individuals in it. She will only be able to carry out God’s mission as individuals learn to know, hear, and follow Him. God works through individuals to form communities, AND God works through communities to form individuals. The church cannot do one without the other. You can’t have a forest without trees, and you can’t have a local expression of church without having individuals.

So, I hope that we agree that the individual and the community need each other to exist. So, the question is, Where do we put our emphasis? You have said that you put it on the community.
I see it like a balanced see-saw. Tipped toward the individual you get individualism, relativism, strange interpretations of Scripture....Tipped toward the community you get conformity, commitment, accountability, and trust becoming the major issues, and you get self-appointed leaders “caring” for the community at the expense of the individual. The problem is that when the scale is tipped neither side is ends up loving God and each other. I think that a delicate balance must be maintained between the individual and the community.

When community is the main focus, the organization will become more important than the individual. Good intentioned leaders will make decisions that benefit the organization, at the expense of the individual. Often the leaders believe that God’s will and their will are the same and wind up destroying individual Christians. I’ve seen and experienced this, as many people have in the various new expressions of the Church. That is why many of us sought new expressions of church in the first place. The problem is that an emphasis on community demands that self-appointed, or elected leaders act on behalf of the community to manage, create, act as gatekeepers etc. to perpetuate the organization/community. 2000 years of Christianity has produced thousands of denominations, institutions and models doing just that.

In this delicate balance trust becomes the major issue. In your model you are asking people to trust you because you view yourself as a leader. Yet, Jesus did not trust men because He knew what was in them (John 2:24-25). Why would he ask us to trust each other? The language of institutions is “committment, accountability, and trust”, yet Biblically, those words are never directed toward other believers, only God. I find that interesting.... Accountability, and trust are reserved for the Father alone. I know it sounds crazy. It did when I first heard it too. Check it out for yourself.

To put it another way: If I look to you (a leader) to fulfill my needs will I wind up disappointed, hurt and frustrated? If I look to the community to fulfill my needs will I wind up disappointed, hurt and frustrated? In the end, we will fail each other because of our own flesh, and the leaders will become disappointed, hurt and frustrated when the individuals do not live up to their expectations, and fulfill their obligations. All I’m suggesting is that we were never meant to look to people and/or community for what God, and God alone, can deliver.

I believe that I can trust God to correct fellow believers in their journey. When we devise systems to “correct” other believers, we are really saying that we don’t trust God to do His job. It is when we don't really trust Jesus to be the head of his church, that we devise systems to keep it under man's control on his behalf. Which means much of our structures for body life today are actually built on unbelief. As you know, organizations take a lot longer to accept corrections, and can do tremendous damage to individuals in the meantime.

We could go even further and ask if it is “loving each other” to put expectations and obligations on each other at all. What happens when I don’t meet your expectations? Because you know that eventually I won’t. What happens when I fail to fulfill my obligations? You know, at some time I will fail. And, where does God tell us to put expectations and obligations on each other? When you ask me to meet the expectations and obligations of your idea of spirituality/leadership how is that not a form of bondage? I can’t help but think of the book of Galatians in this discussion, but I won’t waste the space here.

I will agree with Wayne Jacobsen when he says, “Life in God is a dynamic relationship. You can't mass produce it by behavioral objectives. You can't find it in religious tradition or embrace it vicariously through a charismatic leader. Life in God has to be lived in our own hearts.” To that point, the Christian life is individualistic. It is when we share the life in God together that community exists.

I simply think that we are headed in the wrong direction if we think that we can contain or sustain God’s movement by relying on people, no matter how wise or gifted. There is a myriad of ways to live together in community. God is a community, and wherever His presence is manifested community is built. The church is simply God expressing Himself through individuals that freely (yes, I believe freedom is good) choose to meet together. As God expresses Himself through us, a local expression of the church is created as we gather together.

The only two real directives that Jesus gave the Church is: Love Me and love each other. Could it really be that simple?

My friends at Vineyard Central are discussing some changes that have really caused me to think through some issues about leadership, form, and structure in the local church. I wanted to post some excerpts of what I wrote as a response to those changes. I have great respect for them, and I think God is doing some awesome things through them. I am certainly still a work-in-progress, and I don't claim to know everything, but these are some of the fundamental things God has been showing me in the past few months. As always, let me know what you think....

Regardless of the good intentions of “leaders”, the nature of religious institutions and organizations (networks included), tends toward a subtle shift from listening and responding to God, to attempting to manage what God is doing. It is the nature of an organizational system to produce this shift. History is rife with such examples. The institution then requires some form of hierarchy to create boundaries and act as the gatekeepers of the institution. At best, a “pecking order” will arise that gives preference to the input of some at the expense of others. The questions change from “How can we listen to and follow God together?” to questions like “Who is more spiritual? Who is most gifted? Who can contribute? Who is allowed to participate as a leader?” Ultimately, there is an exchange of spiritual authority for institutional power.

I believe, in spiritual terms, there is a cost to trying to be effective. It is the cost of freedom in exchange for conformity to standards, rules and obligations (the language of institutions).

Basing our identity on a network, institution, or movement gives us a vested interest in such to succeed, and causes us to sacrifice simple relational connectedness for management, boundaries and hierarchy. It becomes increasingly easy for leaders to confuse serving and managing. Putting restrictions on what is simply “sharing Christ’s life” takes the focus off of Christ and puts it on the uniqueness of our methods, or the voices of self-appointed experts. I know that you want to see people partake in wholeness, freedom, and life. But, I don’t think that rules, regulations, methods etc. mean that people will experience that. It does not follow that if we “do Church right” that people will “act right.” We don’t need influence, money, or programs that can be managed or exploited to release the Body to do as God leads them.

Perhaps what God started, God will make effective. What God birthed, God will grow. When it is time, God will let it die, and something else will take its place.

Later I wrote:

I guess my point is that the "rules" become increasingly important when the organization/network/institution is the focus, as opposed to being focused on helping individuals know, hear, and follow Jesus, and letting the networking happen as a natural result. When the network is the focus I am not sure there can be true "equality and consensus." It is not the nature of organizations to allow that to take place. So, maybe the question is, do you really want to become a formal organization/network? I think there are other options...

Trish is asking some good questions about form too....check it out!

I intend to do some more writing about this stuff....gotta finish my final project for school though....almost college edumucated!!!

Our Preoccupation With Form

I’ve been thinking about church for the past few days. Like, what else is new? Ever since Alan’s and Aaron’s posts about the importance of form for the local church, I’ve been trying to clarify why I bristle at the preoccupation we have with form. I was focusing on form a lot in the past few years, but my thoughts are beginning to change. So, I’m not trying to slam anyone, just trying to clarify my own thoughts about the matter....Please hang-in-there with me this is stream of conciousness stuff....

I see at least four questionable beliefs of a preoccupation with the form of our gatherings: 1) We believe that if we “get church right” that individuals will “get right.” In other words, we believe that the form needs to be relevant, exciting, transformative, etc. for individuals to be saved, transformed, relational etc. 2) We need to “come to church”/gather to be transformed, or to experience the context for transformation. 3) We believe that it is our job to see that people get transformed into Christ-likeness. 4) Form winds up being used as an excuse to separate ourselves from each other in the family of God.

In my few years of following Jesus I’ve seen traditional, contemporary, Willow Creek, Purpose Driven, pragmatic church, cell church, house church and emerging church. Each one has been touted as the latest and greatest, but in the end has failed to fulfill “high calling.” For example, those of us who remember when Willow Creek was all the rage can look back and see just how far off the mark we were in thinking that church needed to be entertaining. In the end we merely produced consumers of religious goods and services. We thought we had the form right, but in the end the individuals didn’t “get it right.” It doesn't follow, nor has it ever, that if we do the right things at "church" that individuals will do the right things in their daily lives. Getting the mechanics right, or leading in the proper manner, does not necessarily mean we are sharing the life of Jesus together.

“We've taught for years the mistaken notion that we need to go to church to fill up on the life of God. Not true! We can only fill up on God's life through a transforming relationship with the Father through his Son. We were never meant to come to fill ourselves with church, but to live full of him and then share his life together with God's people. Here is the problem with most of what passes for church life today, including many house churches: Rather than teaching people how to live dependent on Jesus Christ, it supplants that dependency by its misguided attempt to take the place of Jesus in people's lives. Instead of teaching them how to live in him, they make them dependent on the structures and gatherings of what we call church. Our expressions of church life just become another thing to stand in the way of people living deeply and fully in him.” (Jacobsen)

There is a big difference between gathering together to share our common life in Jesus, and coming to church to be transformed. When we share our common life, we bring what Jesus has already given us to share with others. When we go to church looking for transformation we are not relying on God, we are relying on the form of church, the personalities of the leaders, the way the music makes us feel, the relationships we have to transform us. God may choose to use those in our transformation, but he may also use countless other ways too. I see no reason to focus on tools of the Christian subculture over and above those of the everyday life.

I submit that it is possible that the forms of our Christian activities may even hinder us from having a dynamic relationship with our living God. By nature, a relationship with any living thing is dynamic and unpredictable. Yet, we desire to reduce our relationship to fixed forms. I believe our goal is to live in the life of the Father everyday, allowing Him to transform us through/in our everyday activities, relating to Him in more intimate ways that lead to authentic trust, and sharing that life with others. If our gatherings are causing people, in anyway, to rely on our forms/structures in the place of God we need to seriously step back and question why we are preoccupied with those forms and structures.

We have sought new expressions of the Church for many different reasons. Many of us have left the IC becuase we didn't believe the form was appropriate, biblical, or helpful in our relationship with God, or each other. Maybe the problem wasn't with the particular form, maybe the problem is the preoccupation with any form. Perhaps what we are tryin to re-"form" is the problem. Maybe we should look at our gatherings as individuals sharing the life of Jesus in them, rather than a place for people to come to be transformed....?

So, if the forms of our gatherings are not of primary importance, how does transformation take place? Please don’t misunderstand me here. Gatherings are important, but I do not believe that the gathering is the impetus for transformation. If, as Wayne Jacobsen says, “Jesus’ life in people doesn’t flow out of church life, Jesus’ life in His people flows into church life,” then transformation begins with the individual and flows into the community. I see transformation happening not as I respond to well done music, participate in liturgy, participate in corporate disciplines, or listen to a sermon, but when I trust in Jesus in the everyday occurences of my life...when I learn to let Him love me, and am filled with His love, then I have something to share with the community.

I'll try to address the other issues I mentioned at a later date...I'm all typed out...
Feel free to challenge my conclusions. I' m still trying to flesh it all out...