Tag: The Church

A Timely Invitation

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Happy New Year! As we get started on this brand-new adventure, we are going to spend a couple of weeks taking a look at what God has been doing in our midst and how we can experience more of that together. Part of experiencing more of that means honestly addressing the cultural situation we are facing. If we are going to grow God’s work in this culture, there is something specific we will need to commit ourselves to doing. Let’s talk about that today.

A Timely Invitation

The culture around us is changing. That’s a pretty bland start for a sermon, so let me explain what I mean. I mean, the culture around us is changing. Clearer now? In a sense, that’s always true no matter when or where we live. Culture is not a static thing. It is constantly moving and morphing and mutating from one thing to another. It ebbs and flows like the tides. Because of this, if you look at it in just the right light, it always appears we are on the precipice of a great shift even if in reality, we are sitting squarely in the middle of a movement. Of course, you can’t see that until long after the fact, so that’s not a terribly helpful observation in a given moment. 

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Morning Musing: Acts 2:46

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“Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts…” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It’s that time of year again. We are now fully into Thanksgiving week. My guess is that you are already planning your third or fourth trip to the grocery store. You’ve spent most of one paycheck on just the necessities and are working on a second. You’re busy, harried, and tried. And you’re doing all of that for the chance to sit and enjoy some time with family you might want to see…or maybe not. But you do it because tradition – not to mention nostalgia – demands it. Yet lost in the hustle and bustle of this week is often what the day is supposed to be about. Wise leaders of the past called on the country and even established this particular day as one to be set aside for giving our attention to matters of gratitude. That gratitude was specifically intended to be directed toward God, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that I think that’s the best direction for it, but gratitude of any kind is good for the soul. So, this week, instead of our regularly scheduled programming, we’re going to take a bit of time each day to do just that. And today, to get us started, I’m thankful for a noisy room.

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Digging in Deeper: Galatians 6:7-10

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“Don’t be deceived: God is not mocked. For whatever a person sows he will also reap, because the one who sows to his flesh will reap destruction from the flesh, but the one who sows to the Spirit will reap eternal life from the Spirit. Let us not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us work for the good of all, especially for those who belong to the household of faith.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the best ways to grow a church is to invite new people to come. That sounds like it should be obvious, but perhaps not as much as you would think. Inviting people to church is such an old-fashioned idea. Surely there are more modern, seeker-sensitive methods of getting them to come. I mean, if that’s all it really takes to grow a church, how is anybody going to make money off of gimmicky approaches that guarantee successful church growth campaigns for only $199? Don’t you worry. Those will still be there. In any event, the trouble with this is that it feels awkward to invite someone to church. So we don’t do it. Especially if you are an introvert like me. After all, they may not come in response to our invitation. That’s true, but they almost certainly won’t come without one. Well, the other day, I invited someone to church. What I got in response was a bad church story. The invitation may yet play out, but if it doesn’t, that bad church story will have a lot to do with it. The whole thing got me thinking about why people have those and what we can do about it.

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Do Your Job

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As we wrap up our series, Nuts and Bolts, today, we are zooming back out from the little nuts and bolts of making the church work to reflect one more time on the big thing that it is we are doing together. What is the church’s mission. Sometimes we confuse that with our mission as individual followers of Jesus. That’s an understandable error, but one that can set us off the track of what we should be doing as a group. Let’s talk about that today through the lens of Jesus’ great commissioning of the disciples at the end of Matthew’s Gospel.

Do Your Job

Do you remember getting a syllabus when you were in school? In college and seminary, that document was like the Bible in all my various classes. A really well-written syllabus told you not only what to expect to learn throughout the semester, but also what the assignments were going to be. A really industrious student could technically go ahead and get all the work done for the semester in the first few weeks with that help. But there’s even more. A really, really good syllabus told you not only what the various assignments were going to be, but also what the big projects were for the semester along with the grading rubrics by which they were going to be evaluated. In other words, they laid out all the parameters for success for you right at the beginning. You had the ability to know at any given point during the year just what you were supposed to be doing along with how to do it in such a way as to meet with the teacher’s expectations for success. You knew out of the gate that if you did this much work, you’d get this many points, but if you did this much more work, you’d get this many more points. A good syllabus like this serves as a kind of set of mission parameters for the course. If you pay attention to it, you’ll always know where you stand when it comes to the line between success and failure. 

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Digging in Deeper: John 8:10-11

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“When Jesus stood up, he said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ ‘No one, Lord,’ she answered. ‘Neither do I condemn you,’ said Jesus. ‘Go, and from now on do not sin anymore.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The apostle John probably did not write those words. You would be hard-pressed to find a translation that doesn’t include them in at least a footnote in his Gospel, but they were probably written sometime after he died by someone else. Still, this particular story from Jesus’ life probably really did happen. The conclusion of the story here is powerful, and in one moment captures both sides of a tension that our church culture struggles to balance. Some folks fall pretty firmly on one side and Jesus’ refusal to condemn to death this sinful woman; some on the other, when Jesus commanded her not to sin anymore. In the last couple of weeks, our culture has been treated to a bit of a high level debate mostly between two of the highest profile Christian leaders in the country, Albert Mohler and Andy Stanley. I’ve had a chance to read or listen to their reactions and responses to a conference Andy’s church recently hosted that aimed to give support to Christian parents of kids who have come out as somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum. To say it created a bit of a stir in the Christian world would be a bit of an understatement. As someone who has a fair bit of respect for both men, here are a few of my thoughts.

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