Missio Dei Suburbia

How Big Is Your Gospel?

From Jonathan Dodson:

In Seattle [at a recent Acts 29 boot camp] Steve Timmis gave us three sessions on “Total Church”. The first was on the Gospel, the second on Community, the third on practical training for developing gospel-centered communities. One of the things I love about Chester and Timmis is the way they allow biblical theology to drive their ecclesiology, and not in an academic way. Consider the following definition of the gospel which accessibly incorporates the biblical-theological themes of: monotheistic christology, substitutionary atonement, imputed righteousness, christus victor, new creation, inaugurated eschatology, and the gospel of grace:

Jesus, God’s promised Rescuer and Ruler, lived our life, died our death and rose again in triumphant vindication as the first fruits of the new creation to bring forgiven sinners together under his gracious reign.

This is a big gospel. This is not the individualistic, works-based, escapist gospel of much of American evangelicalism. It incorporates the whole world, person, and Jesus. It forces us to move beyond decision-based conversions to following Jesus as Lord. It calls us beyond Christianity as private religion into Christianity as public, communal gospel. It’s not a pocket-sized gospel. The gospel is bigger than we think. Now, if we can just lead our churches into renewal, revival, and repentance towards living out a big gospel, a gospel as big as the city, as the world, as the whole of history.

How is this big gospel impacting your church, your leadership? Are you doing anything differently in your church because of the size of this gospel?

Advent Conspiracy, Week Four

Apparently, this Advent Conspiracy thing is catching on. Tom Krattenmaker mentions AC in his USA Today column this morning.

Here's what is supposed to show up in The Oconee Leader this week. Thanks again to Rob Peecher for running these articles every week.

Pop quiz: what one word will describe Christmas morning for you and your family? Here are the three most likely answers from the good people in Oconee County.

Tradition.

Christmas is about memories. Road trips to visit family. Christmas Eve candlelight services. Reading ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ Not sleeping on the night before Christmas. Leaving milk and cookies for Santa. Dad eating the aforementioned milk and cookies. Little kids with bed head and footie pajamas hyperventilating with excitement and anticipation. Ripping open presents. Christmas music in the background. Playing with new toys. Trying on new clothes. Everyone. Is. Happy.

Or how about this? Family.

Nothing like Christmas to get three brothers who are normally plotting bodily harm against each other to transform into the best of friends. Co-conspirators. Sharing the thrill of hitting the jackpot together. It’s the college freshman returning home to something familiar only to find that life didn’t stop when they headed off to school. Parents adjusting to the new son-in-law. Granddaddy in his red Christmas pants that rest just below his armpits. Grandma kissing everyone including crazy Cousin Eddie from Eastaboga. Everyone passing the new baby around like a bucket of chicken. Group pictures where everyone smiles and will later wonder why they ever thought wearing that outfit was a good idea.

But then if we’re being honest. Presents.

Loot. Bling. Stuff. Dare I say – booty. The hopes and fears of the last three months since we made our list are realized in those critical moments where we wonder why Mom uses an entire roll of scotch tape to wrap every present. The frantic destruction of perfectly good bows and boxes when we’re kids gives way to a veneer of patience and an air of something close to indifference in adults as we unwrap what we hope and pray to whatever gods are out there that this is a touch iPod and not a solar calculator.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what I’m wondering – as good as your Christmas is going to be, what if there’s something we’re missing that would make it even better. Better than the fruit cake from Aunt Gertie? Surprisingly, yes.

For the past three weeks, I’ve encouraged you to consider becoming part of Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), an international movement of churches and individuals who have joined together to spend less on gifts for family and friends, choosing to give relational gifts and use the money saved to help some of the 1.1 billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean water. Nothing like a call to compassion to dampen the wildfires of consumerism that marks Christmas in pretty much every home in our neighborhood.

But at the end of the day, trading in consumerism for compassion rings a bit hollow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to give than to receive, right? Right? But what if there’s something more revolutionary to this conspiracy than clean water? What if Christmas is ultimately about living water that came to earth as a baby born to peasants who would bring hope, peace, love and joy by being poured out so that thirsty people like you and me and crazy Cousin Eddie from Eastaboga would never be thirsty again? What if making sure that everyone gets clean water is part of helping those same people find their deepest thirst quenched by an all-satisfying, infinitely-valuable Jesus?

Want to do something radical this Christmas? Worship Christ. You’ll find him buried beneath the Santa wrapping paper in your living room on Christmas morning. At last that’s where he tends to end up at my house.

Advent Conspiracy. Love All. Spend Less. Give More. All in the name of Worshipping More.

Advent Conspiracy, Week Three

Here's this week's article in The Oconee Leader:

So when did Christianity lose its soul?

It’s one thing for a band to sell out and lose their edge in order to sell a few more records. I get that – it’s hard to resist the money that is reserved for artists that can craft their sound to the plastic, vanilla melodies that attract the masses. But when did following Jesus become this polyester cliché that ends up trying to find life in days gone by or in the values of the world we live in? And when did Christmas stop being about Jesus and his conspiracy to change the world through compassion?

I know that those of us who do church are going to hear a lot about Jesus over the next couple of weeks. In an effort to counter the increasingly consumeristic message of Christmas in our culture, we’ll program the Christmas season to death – children’s musicals and Sunday School Christmas parties and special sermon series. And the focus will be on the story of Jesus’ birth and if we’re lucky we won’t be subjected to vapid reminders that ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’ – especially if the season is going to continue to look like it does for most Christians.

What has Christmas become for the followers of Jesus? Not the weeks leading up to Christmas – but the actual day itself. Has anyone noticed that for all of our talk about Jesus in the days and nights before Christmas, he somehow gets lost underneath the piles of presents and ripped-apart wrapping paper? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m pretty sure that my thirty-two Christmases to date have had little to do with Jesus and a lot to do with what this Santa character dropped down the chimney for me.

What would it look like if December 25th took on the heartbeat of Jesus when he came to earth? Certainly there would still be gifts since giving is at the heart of God’s mission in our world. But it shouldn’t be lost on us that when God wanted to show his love for us, he didn’t send stuff, he sent Jesus. He sent a person, not a present.

What I think this means for us here in Oconee County is that our gifts never get detached from the gifts of time and self. It’s not about the money – relational giving can include a day out taking pictures or a weekend in Chicago. Maybe it’s a new guitar strap and an afternoon playing vintage guitars at Musician’s Warehouse in Athens. Maybe it’s the college guy who drives back to Marietta to spend an afternoon with his mom and at the end hands her a scrapbook of pictures of the two of them throughout his life. The possibilities are as wide as our interests – what do they like to do and how can you give yourself to do it with them.

I’ll be the first to tell you that this won’t be easy – it’s hard to give this way because it asks us to give our time and energy which we really don’t have to do when we hand over a gift card to Best Buy on Christmas morning. And let’s be honest, if someone gave us the choice between the Best Buy gift card and something ‘homemade,’ we might think we’re getting ripped off if we don’t choose the gift card. What we’ve come to value at Christmas are not the people around us but the stuff that their money can buy us; instead of loving one another, could it be that we’re using each other to get what we want?

I know that more than a few of us have already bought all our presents for this year. Maybe all that happens this Christmas is that conversations begin to happen. It might take more than a few weeks for your family to catch up with where you are in re-imagining a Christmas that looks more like the relational gift named Jesus that God gave to the world 2,000 years ago. So would we all remember that conspiracies are about creating freedom, not new rules – and would we remember that the process of change is usually rather slow as God chooses to work in lifetimes, not days.

Advent Conspiracy. Worship More. Spend Less. Give More. Love All.

Advent Conspiracy, Week Two

This week's article in The Oconee Leader:

I’m pretty sure slavery doesn’t come to mind when we think about Christmas, but the world Jesus walked into 2,000 years ago was a world enslaved not just to a foreign empire but to that kingdom’s values of greed and self-promotion. One of the reasons that Jesus’ life of humility, poverty and self-sacrifice drew in so many people was because of the contrast between Jesus’ kingdom and the Roman kingdom.

I’m wondering what it would look like to enter into the story of Christmas, the story of a God who breaks into our world to free people from slavery to the values of a world in rebellion. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look like $475 billion dollars, which is the amount of money that the National Retail Federation estimates will be spent in November and December on Christmas in the United States. Just to put this in perspective, one million seconds comes out to around 11 days. A billion seconds is somewhere in the neighborhood of 32 years. 475 billion seconds? About 15,200 years – or just two years shorter than Georgia’s winning streak over Tech in football.

$475 billion. That averages out to $923.36 per person that will be spent on Christmas. We might not live in the shadow of the Roman Empire but it’s hard to ignore the reality that there is another empire of consumerism and materialism that threatens our faithfulness to Jesus.

That’s what worries me about Christmas in Oconee County. To the degree that Christmas for followers of Jesus looks like Christmas for everyone else, we have to wonder whose kingdom we belong to? Could it be that our hunger for Christmas to be different – more meaningful and less hectic – begins with something as simple as rejecting cultural trends towards overspending and over-consumption?

The truth is that many of us don’t have that much money available to spend on Christmas for everyone around us and so we’ll spend months trying to get out of debt, only to find that the presents we bought in the name of Jesus have only furthered an addiction and slavery to consumerism and materialism in both ourselves and our children. And so our spending on Christmas this year will move us further and further away from Jesus next year as we give into a culture that tells us what to buy, wear, and spend with no regard to making much of Christ.

So we’re asking you to be part of Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), a movement of people and churches around the world that invites people to recover the scandalous hope of Christmas by worshiping Jesus through giving less expensive, relational gifts for the purpose of giving the money saved towards meeting real needs in the world around us. We’re not looking to get rid of Christmas; we’re looking to save it from being hijacked by our self-driven agendas.

At the end of the day, Advent Conspiracy isn’t ultimately about money. It’s about creating an opportunity to upend the false hopes of how we do Christmas by giving gifts that give people more than just what our money can buy them. By using our time, creativity and talents, we’re not only relieving ourselves of the stress of stretching our budget to fit our Christmas list, we’re entering into the story of Christ who with simple and humble means battled the evils of greed and selfishness in his own culture.

Advent Conspiracy – Worship More. Spend Less. Give More. Love All.

Simplifying Christmas

One element of Advent Conspiracy is to spend less on Christmas in order to redirect financial resources to meet real need as well as to give gifts driven more by relationship than price tags. I'll be writing more on this for next week's edition of The Oconee Leader but for now take a look at Amy Ard's piece on 'A Simple Christmas.'

Advent Conspiracy, Week One

This year, Christ Church has joined Advent Conspiracy, an international movement restoring the scandal of Christmas by worshiping Jesus through compassion, not consumption. You can read more about AC here.

In conjunction with our hope that the days leading up to Christmas become a time where we worship more, spend less, give more, and love all - The Oconee Leader is running a series of articles written by me in an effort to see Christmas become something different in Oconee County.

Here's the first article: