How the World Sees the Church

The title link points to a BusinessWeek Online section entitled God, Inc. and serving up a number of stories about evangelical churches. I understand that a secular business oriented news source would speak about the church using the same terms and success measures it uses about business. What bothers me somehow is that so much of the so-called "Christian" reporting on the same subjects uses almost identical language and success measures.

Are we really the vanguard of the Kingdom of God, or are we more accurately described in the terms of the title of the feature article: Earthly Empires?

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Trusting the First Love

From The Road to Daybreak by Henri J.M. Nouwen:
Tuesday, July 1

Coming "home" to Trosly has not been easy for me. After the long trip, I felt a need to be truly welcomed back. But with so many people coming and going, the permanent members of the community often cannot pay attention to everyone's needs. What I have learned is that God's unlimited love often expresses itself through the limited love of God's people. This means concretely that we broken, sinful people need to confess and forgive day in and day out, and thus continue to reveal a love that we ourselves cannot make true. Over and over again we experience moments of disappointment and disillusionment which can lead to resentment and feelings of anger unless we keep confessing our unfulfilled needs and forgiving each other for not being God for each other.

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In a Prison Without Walls

From The Road to Daybreak by Henri J.M. Nouwen:
Thursday, July 3

A very intense day. Many people came by for the Sacrament of Reconciliation or just to talk about their pains and fears. As I listened to their feelings of loneliness, rejection, guilt and shame, I became overwhelmed by the sense of isolation we human beings can feel. While our sufferings are so similar and our struggles so much a part of our shared humanity, we often live as if we are the only ones who experience the pain that paralyzes us! At one point during the day I felt a desire to bring together all those who had spoken to me this day. I wanted to ask them to share their stories with one another so that they could discover how much they had in common and in this way become a source of consolation and comfort to each other.

Why do we keep hiding our deepest feelings from each other? We suffer much, but we also have great gifts of healing for each other. The mystery is that by hiding our pain we also hide our ability to heal. Even in such a loving and caring community as this, there is more loneliness than necessary. We are called to confess to each other and forgive each other, and thus to discover the abundant mercy of God. But at the same time, we are so terribly afraid of being hurt more than we already are. This fear keeps us prisoners, even when the prison has no walls! I see better every day how radical Jesus' message of love really is.

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Reflections on Worship

Our modern English word worship derives from the Old English worth-schip, a piece of information that leads us naturally to realize that the primary motivation for worshipping God is that He is worth it! If we were to ask "How much is God worth?", we would quickly respond, at least intellectually, that God is worth all that we have, all that we are, and more -- infinitely more.

Now that leaves us with a bit of a dilemma: "If God is worth infinitely more than all we have and all we are, how can our worship ever reflect the worth of God?" Fortunately for us, Jesus does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. It is Jesus who offers to God the perfect delight, the perfect obedience, the perfect sacrifice that alone represents the worship that God is worth.

We are invited to join into the perfect worship that the Son offers to the Father. And every worshipping community begins by worshipping as it can, and not as it cannot -- which is good news indeed, as it offers us a freedom in worship that we otherwise could never presume to have.

As freeing as that is to know that we can approach God worshipping just as we can, we should never think that it is sufficient just to stay there. Rather, every truly worshipping community ought to be striving to reflect the worth of God in its worship in ever new ways -- ways that stretch its worship longer and wider and higher and deeper. To fail to do so would be to cease to worship the God that is truly worth all that we have, all that we are, and more.

This, I think, has powerful implications for our tendency to engage in Worship Wars in our churches. To speak of needing to worship in the style we prefer seems to be changing the focus of worship from God to something else: the feelings we get when we worship, perhaps, or maybe the theological ideas we have about worship. As a result, our expression of worship becomes narrower and shallower, rather than broader and more expansive.

And if it is true that we are formed by our worship, then a shrinking worship will form us into less rather than more, and a worship that migrates from God to anything else will form us into idolators rather than Christ followers.

What a challenge this is then for worship pastors, and for all who lead a community in worship even if only by their own participation! We must be gracious enough to allow the community to begin worshipping as it can, from the place from which it finds itself. But we must also be challenging both the community and ourselves to expand our expression of worship as befits a God who is worth all that we have, all that we are, and much, much more.

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An Oasis in the Desert

Yesterday, my wife and I arrived home from a four day excursion to Vancouver, where we attended the 2005 Pastors' Conference sponsored by Regent College. The conference theme was The Worshipping Life: Spirituality for the Desert and Other Tough Places and featured plenary speakers Roberta Hestenes and Robert Webber, along with workshop leaders Mark Davies, Donna Dinsmore, Edna Grenz and Bruce Hindmarsh.

The opening worship included the reading of a Psalm, from The Message, out of which one phrase caught my attention: Like great draughts of water poured down a parched throat. Indeed, the whole conference was as if the mercies of God were great draughts of water poured down a parched throat.

Now, I have had wonderful experiences before, where I went feeling very dry, gulped down great draughts of blessing, and left feeling rather greedy for more, and somewhat critical of the place my path went thereafter for not being more like what I had just experienced.

This time, however, I knew from the very beginning that these great draughts of refreshment were pure gift from God, to be enjoyed to the fullest now. For a few days I would be camped at the same oasis in the desert that the people of Israel camped at for a time. A place with twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. But like them, I knew that the oasis was not home, but just a place to rest and prepare for the next phase of journey along the dry path ahead.

I will have other reflections to record that emanate from the retreat at the oasis, but one clear message I received came from the text of a song we repeated in four of the five worship events

We will take what you offer.
We will live by your Word.
We will love one another,
and be led by you, Lord.

For now, I am content to take whatever it is that God offers -- in terms of community life, in terms of corporate worship, in terms of opportunities for service -- and to be led by Him wherever the path ahead leads.

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