Missio Dei Suburbia

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)

The 'Burbs Aren't Becoming Cool, Are They?

David Hochman wonders in print over at Details whether it's time to move out of the cities and into the suburbs. Quite the interesting read and although the 'burbs that Hochman is talking about bear little resemblance to American Southern Suburbs like Watkinsville, it's worth noting the slow, creeping movement of cool back towards the suburbs, not to mention that our work of shaping the message of the gospel to our culture is a regularly evolving proposition as the shape of our culture continues to change.

(HT: Joe Thorn)

So Jesus and Politics Don't Mix?

I spend alot of my time tossing grenades at the way that suburban Christianity has whored itself out to the Republican party but that doesn't mean that I don't think that following Jesus should inform one's politics or that being a Christian should be disconnected to how one leads and governs.

JT has a helpful post that links to a couple of articles on Mike Huckabee's candidacy as well as a link to a couple of articles on how Christians should respond to the unfair characterization that our faith will receive in the public square.

Mission to Suburbia

Steve McCoy has started a new page on his blog (which is one of my favorites) entitled Mission to Suburbia - should provide lots of great resources on doing ministry in suburbia.

The only problem I can see is that he's put this blog up as the first resource. God help us all.

When Jesus Doesn't Make A Difference

What are suburban Christian parents doing to guarantee their kids will end up in counseling? Find out here.

Affordable Housing Not An Easy Sell

This article on the difficulties of providing affordable housing was in yesterday's Athens Banner-Herald. This is a massive issue in places like Oconee County where a desire for safety and security trumps a lot of things - like leveraging resources for the sake of others. We've created a socio-economic cocoon but I'm wondering where we ever find the Scriptures talking about this 'quality of life' that many in our county seem to be consumed with pursuing...

Suburban Justice

I'm in the middle of a four-week preaching series on compassion, mercy and justice in the suburbs and figured I'd use that as the reason for this month's article in The Oconee Leader. The print version won't be out for a week or two, but I'll go ahead and end the suspense by posting the article here:

I wonder sometimes if I actually believe the Bible. Not because I don’t think it’s true but because the true stuff in there really bothers me sometimes. I don’t mind hearing that God loves me (on my terms, of course) but I have to admit that I really don’t like all this talk about doing justice that you find in the Scriptures.

Maybe you’re not much for reading the Bible or maybe this one slipped by you, but God regularly and routinely tells us that life as a follower of Jesus includes a display of justice. When I think of justice, I think Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the Justice League. I think of legal justice. I think of Buford T. Justice from the Smokey and the Bandit movies. And because life in our quiet hamlet of Watkinsville doesn’t really require superheroes or Jackie Gleason, justice isn’t much on my radar.

But God keeps talking about it. A lot. So much that you have to quit listening in order to avoid it. I’ve thought about it – not listening – but have opted instead to just ignore God and worry about the really important stuff like if selling beer in the County will lead to strip clubs and whether getting a tattoo means I have the mark of Satan on me. But I have a hard time finding anything in the Bible that puts the kibosh on drinking and body art unless you completely ignore stuff like context, so I’m back to this whole issue of justice.

The Cure for the Prosperity Gospel

From the Old Testament book of Ruth...

In the days when the judges ruled there was a famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. They lived there about ten years, and both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband. (1:1-5)

From Ralph Davis' The Word Became Fresh (page 25):

You can tally up the mathematics of trouble: one famine, three deaths, three widows, ten years, five verses. That is the opening block of the Book of Ruth. It is sudden and sobering and instructive. Is it not telling us that one's whole life can fall apart in five verses? That such stuff can actually happen to the people of God? Five tightly-packed verses ought to cure us of falling for the 'Prosperity Gospel.'

Amen.

Delight When All Is Dark

In Psalm 35:27 we read, 'Great is the LORD, who delights in the welfare of his servant!' I was sitting here thinking about the tendency among people who look at life through a Calvinistic lens to struggle to make sense of language that has God delighting in his people because of theological convictions about our natural condition and God's involvement in our lives.

Because we see the scriptures portray people as 'weak, ungodly and sinners' (Romans 5:6,8) and because we describe God as One who is holy and cannot bear to be in the presence of sin, we seem to be left with the conclusion that God is always out to get us, barely tolerating our existence and possibly guilty of passive aggression by using us as bowling pins in his own little cosmic game.

It's also possible to conclude that God can't be too particularly concerned for our good, given that life seems to be filled with pain, heartache, disappointment and frustration more often than we'd care to remember. If God delights in my welfare and if he is all-powerful and if he is intimately involved in the particulars of my life (the historic, biblical teaching of God's providence), then why does life keep knocking me around?

Perhaps this helps. I'm also reading through the Old Testament book of Lamentations, which paints a rather dark and disturbing picture of life in Jerusalem in the days leading up to their exile. It is ugly and brutal and void of hope. The city is destroyed, the economy and infrastructure is decimated, people have lost all civility - to the point where mothers boil their own children just to keep themselves alive.

Yet in the midst of that darkness, the smallest beam of light appears as the writer can't shake this hope-filled reality (Lamentations 3:22-23):

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases/his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Some of us have found ourselves singing Thomas Chisholm's hymn, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, which includes the line, 'all I have needed, thy hand hath provided.' More than once, I've found myself struggling to believe that, particularly when I watch friends walk through hell. I often thank God for the fact that his mercies are new every morning but some mornings provide a lot of cloud cover that keeps me from seeing the light of those mercies.

Because life is hard and cruel at times, words like this ring hollow until we understand that what lies at the center of God's mercies and what we experience as the essence of God's delight in us is not a safe, secure, and comfortable life free from anything that threatens the serenity of that life. If God's care and concern for us is limited to life going smoothly, then disappointment and disillusionment will reign.

As is the case so often, if we would simply keep reading and listening, the apparent incongruity between God's promises and our reality gets shored up. Instead of defining the content of God's mercies ourselves, God provides a picture of what he gives us time and time again in never-ending supply in the very next verse (Lamentations 3:24):

'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him.'

Our hope is not found (ultimately) in the details of life - what God provides us in even the most hopeless of circumstances is both the knowledge and experience of himself. Our experience of delight in this life is far more stable than anything or anyone found in this world - what God intends to thrill us with are the contours of his character, seen in the pages of the scriptures and experienced in strangely powerful ways on even the darkest of days.

Thou lovely source of true delight
              Whom I unseen adore
              Unveil Thy beauties to my sight
              That I might love Thee more,
              Oh that I might love Thee more.

Finding Community in the Suburbs

Given that the architecture and cultural structures of the suburbs encourage isolation rather than community, how do we live in such a way that doing life together is recovered?