from: http://www.cjcphoto.com/can/
I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots.
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.
Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars—all in the same day.
I stumbled upon this article last week and Sunday had the opportunity to hear the author speak.
The primary focus of the magazine article is "Worship As Evangelism," however it veers off into the unchurched and current trends in the American church.
Some of the pieces that resonated with me were:
• what churches need to have is a strong consistent presence in the community, rather than a culture of “it’s all about us”
• churches distracting their members from the world outside (rather than connecting to it)
• churches being “for the perfect. The already arrived. The good-looking, inoffensive, and nice. No wonder the unchurched aren’t interested.”
• let our deepened, honest worship be the overflow of what God does through us beyond our walls
• some newfangled worship service isn’t going to save the church, and it isn’t going to build God’s kingdom
• convinced that the primary meeting place with our unchurched friends is now outside the church building
• transform our congregations from destinations to conversations, from services to service, and from organizations to organisms
• can the W-word [worship] be saved? Saved from the definition that it’s just what goes on inside the tent? From the lie that worship is a place you go, not what you do or who you are?
• Jesus did not make the building—or corporate worship—the destination. His destination was the people God wanted to touch, and those were, with few exceptions, people who wouldn’t have spent much time in holy places
A missional church is incarnational: Rather than creating holy places inside the church building it penetrates people where they already are. Rather than invite people in, a missional church goes out.
We like things boxed. Cereal, candy, soap, gifts, and corpses. They seem safe when boxed, as are we. As is God and other potential dangers. So we sleep in a box, awake in a box, shower in a box, refrigerate food, store knives, drive to work, work for hours, where we stare each day at boxes, in boxed lives. Boxed-in we live. Through boxed windows we look out, in. God, once boxed, broke out, broke free. But we keep pushing God back, our Jack, popping out on cue, to music, though it’s not fair. Nests have birds. Dens have foxes. God will have none of our small boxes. God is free, and we are too.
From: The Last Word and the Word after That: A Tale of Faith, Doubt, and a New Kind of Christianity, Brian D. McLaren, 2005
Mystery. Paradox. Wonder. Awe. Call it what you want, but it is missing from most of our teaching and congregations.
It is such a letdown to rise from the dead and have your friends not recognize you.
To grab a few lines of Jesus and drop them down on someone 2,000 years later without first entering into the world in which they first appeared is lethal to the life and vitality and truth of the Bible.
Real people, in real places, at real times, writing and telling stories about their experiences and their growing understanding of who they are. This does not in any way discount the power of reading the Bible with no background knowledge at all, which is why these words are so powerful. We can enter into them at any level and they speak to us. Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.
In the mid-1980s a missionary family serving overseas came home on furlough, needing a little R&R. Through the graciousness of friends, they’d been provided with the use of a summer home on a beautiful lake. For these tired, front-line warriors, it was like a piece of Eden.
One bright summer morning, Mom was in the kitchen fussing with the baby and preparing a lunch for the family. Dad was in the boathouse puttering with something that needed some puttering. And the three children present were out on the lawn between the home and the edge of the lake. Three-year-old “little Billy” was under the care of a five-year-old sister and a twelve-year-old cousin.
When Sister and Cousin became distracted with some mutual interest, little Billy decided it would be an opportune time to wander down to the water and check out that shiny little aluminum boat that had been bobbing so temptingly beside the dock. The trouble is, three-year-olds have limited experience in getting from a stable dock to a bobbing boat. With one foot on the dock and the other stretching toward the boat, Little Billy lost his balance and fell into five or six feet of water beside the dock.
[lit-er-jee]
-noun, plural -gies
1. a form of public worship; ritual.
2. a collection of formularies for public worship.
3. a particular arrangement of services.
The word liturgy means something like the work of the saints. Every church is liturgical. Even if it is totally free flowing. Every church has its own kind of customs and traditions.
How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?
As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.