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Church

Last night we had our first house church meeting. It was, in my estimation, incredibly successful. There were seven adults and three kids there. We sang, ate, prayed, and talked about God.

The main subject was church. One of the slides on my PowerPoint quoted George Barna’s book Revolution:

The Revolution is about recognizing that we are not called to go to church. We are called to be the Church.

The main point that I really wanted to share was that church, in all it’s forms, should be open to anyone and everyone. We read from Hans Kung’s On Being a Christian:

The church of Jesus Christ is a home not only for the morally upright but for the moral failures and for those who for a variety of reasons have not been able to honor denominational teaching. The church is a healing community proclaiming the Father’s indiscriminate love and unconditional grace, offering pardon, reconciliation and salvation to the down-trodden and leaving the judgment to God.

A church that will not accept the fact that it consists of sinful men, and exists for sinful men becomes heardhearted, self-righteous, inhuman. It deserves neither God’s mercy nor men’s trust. But if a church with a history of fidelity and infidelity, of knowledge and error, takes seriously the fact that it is only in God’s Kingdom that the wheat is separated from the tares, good fish from bad, sheep from goats, a holiness will be acknowledged in it by grace which it cannot create for itself.

Such a church is then aware that it had no need to present a spectacle of higher morality to society, as if everything in it were ordered to be the best. It is aware that it’s faith is weak, it’s knowledge dim, it’s profession of faith halting, that there is not a single sin or failing which it had not in some way or another been guilty of. And though it is true that the church must always dissociate itself from sin, it can never have any excuse for keeping sinners at a distance. If the church self-righteously remains aloof from failures, irreligious and immoral people, it cannot enter justified into God’s kingdom. But if it is constantly aware of it’s guilt and sin, it can live in joyous awareness of forgiveness. The promise has been given to it that everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.

Technorati Tags : Christianity, house church

Here is Another Reason Why….

…. I am married to the best woman in the world.

An email I received this morning:

Here is a holiday I thought we could do in Sept for our anniversay.

Passenger Type
Adult
Flight 1 – Departing airfare (Tango Plus) 223.99
Flight 2 – Returning airfare (Tango Plus) 254.00

Kansas NASCAR Ticket and Travel Package
Three (3) nights accommodations at Hotel Phillips Downtown Kansas City
Check-in Friday, September 29, 2006
Check-out Monday, October 2, 2006
Reserved ticket for the NASCAR Busch Series race (Saturday, 09/30/06)
Reserved ticket for the NEXTEL Cup Series race (Sunday, 10/01/06)
Saturday and Sunday admission into FanWalk
Motorcoach transportation from the hotel to Kansas Speedway for the
Saturday and Sunday races
Welcome gifts and more
Professional on-site staff for assistance

Double – $795.00
Additional Room Nights by Request Prices are per person

Technorati Tags : NASCAR

The Silence of Bush

The newly released footage of officials briefing George Bush before Hurricane Katrina shows Michael Brown sitting at a laptop computer. Given the caricature of Incapability Brown, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the ex-FEMA director was playing solitaire: “Mr. President, I just can’t find a place for this king of hearts.” Instead, Brown is clear about the hurricane threat. He even anticipates the chaos that would later hit at the Superdome. “I’m concerned about … their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe,” Brown told his bosses.

So, surely during this briefing about an impending natural disaster, the president would have had a few pointed inquiries. The experts assembled in boxes on his screen like guests on Hollywood Squares had just told him the coming hurricane “was the big one” and talked about “the greatest potential for large loss of life.” Yet according to the Associated Press, which is the only press organization that has reviewed the video, Bush didn’t ask a single question in the briefing, but told officials “we are fully prepared.”

You know you’re in trouble when Michael Brown outshines you.

The president has been at pains recently to show the public that he has grown and adapted while in office. When talking about Iraq, he has increased his references to lessons learned. Wednesday night, he responded to ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas’ questions about the slow federal response to Katrina by pointing out that the administration had learned the lessons of its failures. But learning lessons depends on asking questions—the right ones and a lot of them. Let’s hope one of the questions the president asked after the catastrophe was whether he had asked the right questions before it.

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Technorati Tags : Hurricane Katrina, George Bush

Bush’s Katrina Problem

Today’s Associated Press report about videotape of a videoconference in which President Bush was told before Hurricane Katrina’s landfall that the storm would be hugely catastrophic and that there was concern that New Orleans’ levees might fail is a stunning piece of bad news for the White House.

What makes this revelation particularly bad for Bush is that it directly contradicts his by now famous statement on the Good Morning America television show days after the hurricane. “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,” he said.

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Once again it becomes glaringly obvious that the Bush administration was at best incompetent and at worse criminal in their handling of Hurricane Katrina. I believe that history will not be kind to George Bush’s presidency.

Technorati Tags : Hurricane Katrina, George Bush

Time Magazine on House Churches

House churches claim the oldest organizational pedigree in Christianity: the book of Acts records that after Jesus’ death, his Apostles gathered not at the temple but in an “upper room.” House churching has always prospered where resources were scarce or Christianity officially discouraged. In the U.S. its last previous bloom was rooted in the bohemian ethos of the California-bred Jesus People movement of the 1970s. Many of those groups were eventually reabsorbed by larger congregations, and the remnants tend to take a hard line. Frank Viola, a 20-year veteran Florida house churcher and author of Rethinking the Wineskin and other manuals, talks fondly of pilgrims who doctrinairely abjure pastors, sermons or a physical plant; feel that the “modern institutional church does not reflect the early church”; and “don’t believe you are going to see the fullness of Jesus Christ expressed just sitting in a pew listening to one other member of the body of Christ talking for 45 minutes while everyone else is passive.”

Critics fret that small, pastorless groups can become doctrinally or even socially unmoored. Thom Rainer, a Southern Baptist who has written extensively on church growth, says, “I have no problem with where a church meets, [but] I do think that there are some house churches that, in their desire to move in different directions, have perhaps moved from biblical accountability.” In extreme circumstances home churches dominated by magnetic but unorthodox leaders can shade over the line into cults.

Yet the flexibility of simple churches is a huge plus. They can accommodate the demands of a multi-job worker, convene around the bedside of an ailing member and undertake big initiatives with dispatch, as in the case of a group in the Northwest that reportedly yearned to do social outreach but found that every member had heavy credit-card debt. An austerity campaign yielded a balance with which to help the true poor.

Indeed, house churching in itself can be an economically beneficial proposition. Golden Gate Seminary’s Karr reckons that building and staff consume 75% of a standard church’s budget, with little left for good works. House churches can often dedicate up to 90% of their offerings. Karr notes that traditional church is fine “if you like buildings. But I think the reason house churches are becoming more popular is that their resources are going into something more meaningful.”

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Technorati Tags : Christianity

Protestants Do Lent Too

If you grew up, as I did, thinking of Lent as the Time of the Frozen Fish Sticks, you can’t help but be surprised by the expanding enthusiasm for the pre-Easter season of penitence and fasting. Lent, it seems, isn’t just for Catholics anymore. Over the last few years, more Protestant churches have begun daubing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in Western Christianity (March 1 this year). Fasting, long familiar to Catholics as a Lenten fact of life, is increasingly popular with evangelical Christians striving for spiritual awakening. A few mainline Protestant churches even conduct foot-washing services on Maundy Thursday—the traditional commemoration of Jesus’ washing the feet of his disciples—that takes place on the Thursday before Easter. Which seems like a sign that Protestants may be starting to beat Catholics at their own game.

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Technorati Tags : Christianity

How Do I Get Myself Into These Things?

I’ve been nominated to help plant a house church. Which is cool because it’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, however, the nomination came down on Monday and our first meeting is this Sunday. Oh, did I mention that I’m leading it?

How do I get myself into these things?

So I have a short period of time to come up with something. Fortunately, I have a framework in place but I won’t go into it here. That’d be telling. Plus many of the people who are going to be there read this blog and I want it to be interesting to them on Sunday.

I’ve been thinking though, that God’s timing is hilarious.

Hey Paul, it’s time for a new job so you’re going to get fired on Monday for no reason. But by Wednesday you’ll be working again. Hey Paul, you know that house church thing you’ve been wanting to do for a while? Yeah, well that’s this Sunday. Try not suck.

I don’t think God would say that last part, it’s more of a Paulism.

No matter how much we scheme and plan God’s timing is not necessarily the same as ours. For us to be successful in a Godly endeavor our hearts must be in the right place. Which sometimes means we have to wait longer than we’d like.

We also must remember that our standards of success have little, if anything, to do with God’s. That’s why I don’t have any big expectations about what Sunday is going to be. I’m just going to do my best and see what happens.

Technorati Tags : Christianity