Missio Dei Suburbia

Doubting Your Doubts

'...it seemed good to me...to write an orderly account...that you may have certainty...' (Luke 1:3-4)

Everyone struggles with doubt. No one should want to stay there. Because of Christ, no one has to stay there.

May that hope make us compassionate and courageous in 2009.

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello

So 2008 has about thirteen hours left before it becomes history and the blogosphere is rife with posts on resolutions and reflections. Here are a few worth your time:

Bible Reading Plans: JT and Tim Chester (this is the one we'll be plugging at Christ Church for '09)

Becoming a Better Man in 2009A New Year's Prayer for 2009

The Top Lists - Jonathan Dodson

What Should We Pray For? - John Piper

Gospel-Centered Praying

The Resolution Solution

Tim Brister's Top 25 Christian Books of 2008

NT Wright on Human Flourishing

Books of 2008 (Leadership) - Todd Hiestand

Putting the Happy Back Into Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is miserable for those who spend the day feeling judged by family who barely knows us. Our hope and delight and joy and happiness is recovered and experienced when it sinks in that the Judge who knows us better than we know ourselves finds delight and joy and happiness in us.

'There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.' (Romans 8:1)

The Middle

Hey y'all - greetings from Room 228 at the Red Roof Inn in The Hill neighborhood of St. Louis. I've been up here for the LEAD Conference hosted by Acts 29 and it's gonna take me awhile to grab hold of the words to describe how good it was for me. I came up here to encourage our A29 planters and to help assess 25 new planters and there's no way they'll get more out of these past few days then I have.

Now that doesn't mean I'm not ready to get home to Lindsey and my boys and to all of you. I did want to check in with you and talk for a minute about something I've noticed over 12 years of ministry.

Something happens somewhere around the end of October and early November that I call 'The Middle' because it usually hits around midterms for students and is kind of a breather for people out of school before the holidays hit full force. Basically, The Middle is kind of a break, a respite, a siesta, a time out from the normal routine of life.

Now The Middle is a good thing - God created us to rest and for many of us, we've burned the candle at both ends long enough to feel like we're getting to the end of our wick. So I'm glad that we get to take a break, get away for a few days, recharge and get ready to finish 2008 on a sprint and not a crawl.

But something else happens during The Middle that jacks people up every year. For lack of a better image, we throw out the baby with the bathwater and in our attempt to take a break end up fracturing our own soul.

Here's how it goes down - you get a few days or a couple of weekends away and in your desire to mix up your routine, you drop everything including your life with God. So it's not uncommon for you to go days without time in the Scriptures and prayer and weeks without being part of a worship gathering. I have yet to meet a single person where that ends well for them.

So I know you need a break - I'm taking a week off from preaching in November to recharge - but I want to encourage and warn you with all the love I've got to not take a break from the rhythm of your life with Jesus. So if you're out of town the next couple of weeks, insist on showing up at a worship gathering on a Sunday morning wherever you're at - I know that's weird and nobody else does that but you're different. You belong to the King and he has a standing appointment to meet with you every week.

And if you think you can replace gathered worship with throwing on your favorite CD or listening to somebody preach on a podcast, I'm telling you that you can't. Personal worship or worship with a couple of friends is a good thing during the week but not on Sunday morning. The God of the Universe has set that day aside as time for you to gather with other believers to renew our vows to each other and to God as he reminds us of his love for us.

What I'm saying is that in ways we don't entirely get, we need that time together - to be with other Christians and to be with God. This is part of a normal rhythm of life and rhythmic irregularities are never good - especially when they can be avoided.

I've gotta pack and assess church planters from Regina, Saskatchewan and Columbus, Ohio so let's shuck the corn down to the cob - if The Middle takes you out of town this year, take five minutes to find a gospel-saturated church near where you'll wake up on Sunday morning (if you have a hard time deciding on somewhere, let me know and I'll help you out). Coordinate your travel schedule so you'll have time to gather for worship. Show up expecting to bless and be blessed in ways you can't imagine.

Will God love you if you don't show up? Yep - but you'll miss an opportunity he created just for you to hear and see his love for you.

Because I love you more than you'll ever know-
Matt

Before You Head Out To Best Buy This Morning...

Apologies if this dampens anyone's Christmas spirit - but Bob Herbert's column in this morning's New York Times sure sounds al ot like the suburban world I'm living in:

What seems to be happening now is that working Americans, and that includes the middle class, have exhausted much of their capacity to tread water. Wives and mothers are already working. Mortgages have been refinanced and tremendous amounts of home equity drained. And families have taken on debt loads — for cars, for college tuition, for medical treatment — that would buckle the knees of the strongest pack animals.

According to Demos, a policy research group in New York, “American families are using credit cards to bridge the gaps created by stagnant wages and higher costs of living.” Americans owe nearly $900 billion on their credit cards.

We’re running out of smoke and mirrors.

Now debate will rage on about what to do about all of this. But one wonders if all of our economic ingenuity isn't merely an attempt to put a band-aid on a bad case of hemorrhoids - those of us in debt aren't there only because of economic forces gathered against us. The contents of the ever-elusive American Dream get more lavish by the year and we've done little to question the madness that surrounds how we handle money.

This issue of functional poverty is one of, if not the biggest mercy and justice issues in the suburbs. Any ideas on what the Church should be doing about it?

So About These Blessings That Flow

Our Advent series at Christ Church this year is entitled 'He Comes To Make His Blessings Flow' - a line from Isaac Watts' 'Joy to the World.'

If you're wondering what these blessings are - consider this brief overview on what the Scriptures teach about blessing from Christopher Wright's The Mission of God:

...blessing is initially and strongly connected with creation and all the good gifts that God longs for people to enjoy in his world - abundance, fruitfulness and fertility, long life, peace, and rest. Yet at the same time, these things are to be enjoyed within the context of healthy relationships with God and with others. Yet such relationships have been radically fractured by the events described in Genesis 3-11. How then can such blessing be enjoyed apart from the redemptive intervention of God?

...the combination of command and promise in the text of Genesis 12:3 gave it a strong missional dynamic, while its orientation toward the future made it a programmatic address to history. In a creation spoiled by sin and the curse, history will be a hope-filled story of how God will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him (Genesis 18:18). If that is the mission of God, however, we quickly observed that it also demands the faith and obedience of Abraham, and the subsequent commitment of his people to the ethical demands of the covenant. So the Abrahamic covenant is a moral agenda for God's people as well as a mission statement by God.

Finally, we stand amazed at the universal thrust of the Abrahamic promise - that ultimately people of all nations will find blessing through Abraham. And we confess, with Paul, that it is of the essence of the biblical gospel, first announced to Abraham, that God has indeed made such blessing for all nations available through the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, the seed of Abraham. In Christ alone, through the gospel of his death and his resurrection, stands the hope of blessing for all nations.

So What Do We Do About Santa?

A couple of years ago, after hearing that Lindsey and I aren't making Santa Claus a big deal in our house, one of the mothers in our church emailed me to let me know it would not be appreciated if I encouraged that kind of thinking when I was preaching.

Since I'm not in the anti-Santa business, that wasn't really a problem. But because I'm in the pro-Jesus business, I'll post this from Thabiti Anyabwile:

I'm not arguing a dogmatic causality here. I'm simply asking the question, "Why include Santa Claus at all?" Is the imagined upside of following the culture here worth what we think it's worth? And are our justifications helping us to point our children to Christ or masking the reality that we may be pointing our children away from Him? Personally, I doubt Santa Claus is worth it, and pointing our kids away from Jesus at Christmas may be the worst form of child neglect I can imagine.

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.