Missio Dei Suburbia

Christians and Politics

This will show up sometime in The Oconee Leader. I'm channeling two semesters as a political science major, involvement in two presidential campaigns on a local level, pastoring in the Bible Belt and thoughts from Charlie Drew's book, A Public Faith.

Christians are lousy at politics.

Thirty years of organized evangelicalism as a political entity has failed to bring about the kingdom of God or better days for all or much else besides the centaurian cross-breeding of conservative social policy and the Republican party. Evangelicals have become a constituency to be pandered to and for the most part we have taken the bit. Walk into almost any church in Oconee County this Sunday (including mine) and political conversation will sound like talking points from Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly or any number of conservative pundits.

I believe that followers of Jesus Christ can and absolutely must walk down a new political road and become the kind of people who provide the resources for hope and change and unity that politicians of all stripes promise but simply cannot deliver. There are deep divisions in our country and in this county – to ignore them or to attempt to wish them away is both naïve and the height of tomfoolery. This is not a call to ignore our differences, only to put down the guns, knives, ninja stars and other rhetorical weaponry that so often accompanies political dialogue.

Heaven or Hell: Proposed New Shopping Center in Oconee

The Board of Commissioners in Oconee County is voting this Tuesday on a proposed rezone that would enable the proposed development of a rather large shopping and entertainment complex off of Epps Bridge Parkway. Lee Becker reports...

Living Outside the Bubble

Earlier this summer, I wrote an article about the opportunity that followers of Jesus have to live outside of the bubble that Christianity creates in places like Oconee County. Instead of living as though the church is a place of safety, refuge and protection from a dangerous, hostile and nasty world, the Scriptures teach us that the church is the people that God has gathered together in Jesus Christ to join Him in putting broken people and a broken world back together.

That shouldn’t negate what goes on in our worship gatherings, Sunday School classes and smaller groups that meet throughout the week around town – but it does mean that even those gatherings need to constantly have their gaze turned upward and outward. The church with the healthiest relationships among its members is the church that lives outside of the bubble. Churches implode because the energy that should be directed towards the kind of worship that spills into everyday life and the people around us gets expended on trivial internal matters.

Because Jesus left heaven to come to earth and further his mission to renew and restore all that was wrecked and ruined in the universe, those of us who follow him should be the kind of people whose lives add value to the community around us. That’s what it looks like to live outside of the bubble – to make Oconee County a better place so that all of us might know that there is a God who is true and good and all-satisfying.

To live outside the bubble, we need to breathe in the fresh air of the gospel. I’m not sure how it happens but Christians pick up this nasty addiction called religion – a carcinogen that pollutes our lives and the air around us by leading us to think that God won’t love us unless we’re good people. So we try hard to be better than other people and because God can’t see how good I am unless I’m better than you, I’m going to find intentional and inadvertent ways to make it obvious to God and everyone else that I grade out better than you and therefore deserve whatever good God has stored in his prize closet far more than you do.

Are we addicted to religion? We might be if we think the biggest problems in the community resides anywhere outside of our own heart. While we might get our kicks broadcasting the failures of others and launching verbal tirades against people who aren’t like us, the Scriptures teach that failure is universal and that we’ve all vandalized God’s perfect world. I know that owning up to our own junk isn’t all that popular – who wants to run around feeling bad about who we are and what we’ve done? Actually, that’s another symptom of religion addiction – thinking that our identity is determined by how well we’re living. Religion says that the Christian life is about what we do today but the gospel declares that the Christian life is always about what Jesus did for us on the cross.

Does that mean that it doesn’t matter how we live? Of course not – our life is a reflection on who God is and what he’s about in this world. But we don’t always look like Jesus. Only the gospel humbles us with that reality without crushing us, freeing us without allowing us to float off into a life of our own design. Because we are already loved, our failures don’t destroy us and our success isn’t some kind of badge we use to wield our moral authority in the community.

Only the gospel transforms us from mercenaries to missionaries. We’re don’t have to hunt for pagans or hide from the world – we’re free to love our neighbor and co-worker and classmates by listening well and learning each others’ stories and laughing at our own mistakes. The reformation that Oconee County desperately needs begins with a simple, radical love that flows from a bleeding Savior. Only when we see Jesus bleed out for us will we bleed out for others by inviting them into our home, giving the glory and taking the blame at work, carving out time for a cup of coffee and a conversation that connects their world to Jesus.

Missional Environmental Action (AKA Why Taking Care of Creation Wasn't Al Gore's Idea)

From Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, 419-420:

Truly Christian environmental action is in fact also evangelistically fruitful, not because it is any kind of cover for 'real mission' but simply because is declares in word and deed the Creator's limitless love for the whole of his creation (which of course includes his love for his human creatures) and makes no secret of the biblical story of the cost that the Creator paid to redeem both. Such action is a missional embodiment of the biblical truths that the Lord  is loving toward all that he has made, and that this same God so loved the world that he gave his only Son not only so that believers should not perish but ultimately so that  all things in heaven and on earth should be reconciled to God through the blood of the cross. For was in Christ  reconciling the world to himself. 

2008 - The Year of Discipleship

So I've been thinking and talking with some of our people in Christ Church about what God might be doing in and through us as we walk into 2008. The attempt to be on mission in the suburbs is challenging - a number of factors work to pull us individually and corporately away from our calling to make God known and put broken people and things back together. So coming out of these conversations, here are a few things I believe we'll be working for this year.

1. Tweaking our definition of church. In the American Southern Suburbs, 'church' usually is only thought of in terms of our large group, Sunday morning worship gathering. I'm thankful that 2007 saw small groups become a critical part of our life together. In 2008, we need to continue to work so that one-one meetings between individuals and couples becomes a more regular part of life. We'll never toss aside Sunday mornings (and it's unfortunate that some missional churches are doing so) but church is bigger than Sundays.
2. Suburban compassion, mercy and justice. I'm hoping we see a movement of churches and individuals towards missional pathways that address issues like marriage and parenting, addictions, and functional poverty.
3. Leadership development. This has not been a strength in the 18 year history of Christ Church and we just now feel like we're getting a process in place that can help us come alongside leaders in the church and the community and equip them to be who God has called them to be.
4. Decentralize leadership/ownership. In most churches, power and decision-making lies in the hands of a few. While we wholeheartedly and passionately affirm the biblical and ecclesiastical imperative to have elders oversee the church, we've started a conversation about how we reshape what our elders do and how we function in order to get all of the giftedness in the church engaged in where God is sending us in Watkinsville and Athens.
5. Learn how to take care of our business. We want to minimize the amount of time spent maintaining the 'machine' of church in order to free everyone up to be on mission. Infrastructure is necessary and critical - healthy bodies have strong bones, muscles, tendons, etc.  But it  is very easy for leaders and entire churches to exhaust all their energies on  tidying up the house without ever thinking and praying and acting in conjunction with Jesus' mission.
6. Value-driven leadership. This fits in with a couple of things previously said...our elders must spend their time guarding the values-practices of our church, embedding those values in new areas for gospel and community to happen, and creating environments that equip people to be on mission in ways the church cannot and should not. One of the things this means is that when elders and our staff meet, the big question is not 'how do we do this' but 'what is God doing?'
7. Less time trying to please Christians - particularly those who have little inclination to join in mission. This does not mean that we ignore people who are hurting. At the heart of mission is incarnating Jesus in the lives of hurting people. What I mean is that we simply cannot spend inordinate amounts of time trying to explain ourselves to those who don't share our core values and work off of other agendas. Thankfully, this hasn't been a huge issue in 2007 - part of that is because we've worked hard to be clear about who we are and what we're about.
8. Continue to talk about who we are, not who we are not. Work hard to help people see the big picture of what we're about rather than getting bogged down in secondary issues and bizarre theological questions. We want to foster genuine discussion and dialogue without getting caught in missional quicksand.
9. Quit worrying about numbers. Notice that I didn't say quit paying attention to numbers - healthy things grow so you'd expect more people to be connected to the church. But to worry about that - particularly if it drives us away from a regular life of repentance and faith - does no one any good.
10. Get better at breathing. It's very easy for Christians to hold their breath - we spend little time taking in good deep breaths of grace and even less time breathing out in lives that love people in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and communities. How do we improve our breathing? There are certainly techniques that we can learn in order to breathe in and breathe out in more healthy ways. We're thinking through ways to help people do that. But what we can never miss is that breathing is the natural way of life for healthy people - grace and the gospel should create breathing in and breathing out as the way we do life. We take in love and grace from God and give it away to others.

When I read all of those things, the word discipleship comes to mind. My guess is that most of us have heard that word and maybe even use it a lot. I've spent the past few weeks thinking and reading and talking to people about discipleship and trying to pull it apart and understand it.

For me discipleship is simply learning to become who you already are. As Christians, God has done something objectively permanent in our lives on the cross. He has chosen us, redeemed us, restored us, and brought us into a binding covenant relationship of love with himself. He has adopted us as children - that is our identity. My life today is learning how to live in response to all of that - sin is my failure to believe that any or all of that is true. So discipleship is God's work of teaching me to be who I already am.

And who am I? I'm someone created and re-created by God to join Him in his mission of making Himself known as He puts broken people and a broken world back together. That's my identity and when I understand that I was created for mission then I'll see discipleship as the process of joining Jesus in the mission I was made for.

So here's to the next 366 days (we have a leap year!) of learning to be who we already are as missionaries to the places God has placed us. May this kind of missional discipleship become part of the fabric at Christ Church in 2008.

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?

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.

How Big Is Your Life?

Paul Tripp wraps up his excellent book, A Quest For More: Living For Something Bigger Than You with this - I hope it encourages you to wrestle with the realities of the life we live between two kingdoms.

What kingdom shapes your decisions and sets your schedule? Have you shrunk your life to the size of your life, or have you expanded everything you are doing to the size of God's kingdom? These final questions are designed to help you accurately evaluate your lifestyle, and my hope is that they will produce in you a quest for more.

1. Are you doing the concrete things in your life regularly because you are living for something bigger than your own personal definition of happiness?
2. Do you live aware of the deceptive nature of the kingdom of self (remember, it really is a costume kingdom), regularly examining your motives and how you are investing your time and energy?
3. Are you living that form-and-freedom jazz life that God has called you to? Are you committed to staying within the boundaries of what he has written, yet enjoying the freedom to improvise in the situations and relationships where he has placed you?
4. Are you dissatisfied with the broken world that you live and work in every day? And do you work for its restoration to wholeness in any way you can?
5. Have you allowed yourself to be so busy with work on earth that you do not have time to long for heaven? Or is everything you do done with one eye on the present and one eye on eternity? Are you able to deal with the pain and disappointment of today because you really have embraced the promise of a day when this world and everything in it will be made completely new?
6. Do you hold loosely to your plans, your schedule, your agenda, your expectations? Are you always looking for way to be part of what God is doing wherever you are, no matter how mundane the moment is?
7. Do you live with a deep appreciation for the Lord Jesus Christ and the gift of grace that has fundamentally changed you and the course of your life? Do you work to keep your love and worship of him fresh and new? Do you live with a sense of humble privilege that not only have you been chosen to be a citizen of his kingdom, but his ambassador as well?

We were never made or remade to live for ourselves. We were created for transcendence. The borders of our lives were always meant to be way bigger than the borders of our lives. When we live this way, by his grace, we not only become part of the most important work in the universe, but we are given back to our humanity.

Evangelism In the 'Burbs

I had lunch with a friend today and we ended up talking a bit about evangelism. I don't think it happens a ton in the American Southern Suburbs - we tend to assume everyone around us knows Jesus and strangely enough, people in the South aren't very friendly after you get past they 'Hey y'all' bit. So we've got some work to do here.

So I was glad when Joe Thorn posted this today. Among the things he said that I wholeheartedly agree with:

The evangescript is perceived as invasive and fake.
The unchurched can spot the evangelistic script before you finish that diagnostic question. If not because they are religiously savvy, it is at least because living in a consumer culture allows them to detect a sales pitch with little effort.

Mission and Busy People

Because living in the suburbs means having too much on our plates, one of the questions we have to wrestle with is how to keep our involvement in Jesus' mission more than just another ball to juggle in our busy schedules.

This might help:

Life itself, in all its fullness and eternity, lies in knowing and loving God (cf. Deuteronomy 30:19-20; John 17:3). For this we were created, and anything less short of the glory of God. 'The chief end of man,' as the Westminster Confession so succinctly and biblically expressed it, 'is to glorify God and enjoy him forever' - which encapsulates the supreme task and blessing of what it means to know God, and thereby to be fully human. Accordingly, insofar as our missional engagement is a matter of making God known, it is by that very fact also a matter of bringing blessing and good to people, for 'the LORD is good.' Mission is not the imposition of yet another religious bondage upon an already overburdened humanity. It is the sharing of the liberating knowledge of the one true living God, 'in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life.' (Christopher Wright, The Mission of God, 128)