We just got back from a great vacation down in Sanibel, FL.  My parents spend some time down their every year, and they invited us to join them for a little while.  Mary spent about a week down there, and I was down there for about three days.  Not as long as I would have liked, but still extremely restful and relaxing.  

Some of the highlights:

• Spending time with family. I got to spend a lot of time playing with my kids, and we had some extended family down there that we got to enjoy as well.  My uncle took us out on a boat, and Josiah got to play with his (sort of) cousin, Jackson, who he idolizes.  He’s the one in the picture above–they’re playing in the cabin of the boat.
• Taking a boat ride.  We went out for a two hour boat ride around the island.  It was a beautiful day.  We were able to take in the scenery and see some dolphins.
• A morning at the beach.  I’m not really a beach person.  The combination of salt, sand, and sun really does my skin in.  But, I enjoyed seeing Josiah and Jackson playing in the water and building sand castles together.
• Randomly meeting up with my roommate from seminary.  One of my closest friends from seminary is a missionary in Mexico City, and he also has parents who visit Sanibel.  They just happened to be visiting them at the same time as us!  I had a blast spending a few hours getting together with his family and mine.  We had fun reconnecting after not seeing each other for a year and a half.

In all, it was a great few days, and I was reminded how good rest is for the soul.  I look forward to the next time we get to visit Sanibel.  It is truly a special place.

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Sometimes I get soul ache.  I start to feel disconnected from Christ.  I feel far from God.  I don’t like it, but I struggle to know how to solve it.  Greg Boyd recently blogged about just such an experience.  In his post he recommends leaning into Jesus more.

I’ve found his advice to be right on.  It’s not about greater guilt.  That never helps.  I’ve found that the best course of action is to engage in a more consistent discipline of being close to God.  This book by Phyllis Tickle is an excellent resource in this pursuit.  

She provides a multitude of prayers to be prayed throughout your day.  Some are scripture references, some are prayers from saints through church history, and some are hymns.  I’ve found them to be excellent.  It helps me stay connected to God throughout my day.  Here’s an example from a prayer I read yesterday:

Out of my bondage, sorrow, and night,
     Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come;
Into Your freedom, gladness, and light,
       Jesus, I come to You;
Out of my sickness into your health,
Out of my want and into Your wealth,
Out of my sin and into Yourself,
      Jesus, I come to You.

Out of my shameful failure and loss,
     Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come;
Into the glorious gain of Your cross,
     Jesus, I come to You;
Out of earth’s sorrows into Your balm,
Out of life’s storm and into Your calm,
Out of distress to jubilant psalm,
     Jesus, I come to You;

Out of unrest and arrogant pride,
     Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come;
Into Your blessed will to abide,
     Jesus, I come to You;
Out of myself to dwell in Your love,
Out of despair into raptures above,
Upward for ever on wings like a dove,
     Jesus, I come to You;

Out of the fear and dread of the tomb,
     Jesus, I come, Jesus, I come;
Into the joy and light of Your home,
     Jesus, I come to You;
Out of the depths of ruin untold,
Into the peace of Your sheltering fold,
Ever Your glorious face to behold,
     Jesus, I come to You;

William Sleeper

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A little while ago, I blogged about an unfortunate experience my wife had to go through (see here).  We decided that it was important for Mary to write a complaint letter.  We didn’t do it because we needed for it to happen in order to feel vindicated, but rather because we think that the best way to move forward as a society is by talking about these things openly.  You can read the letter by clicking this link:

Complaint Letter

NOTE: I’ve blacked out our address and the offending Deputy’s name.  I’m posting this so that we can continue to tell the story, not because we want to smear his name.

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A new survey is about religion in America is out and here’s the summary from a CNN article:

America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found.

 there has been an increase in the number of people expressing no religious affiliation.

it is now more socially acceptable than it once was to admit having no religion.

“You’re not declaring yourself a total pariah. The culture has changed in a way that makes it easier to say, ‘No, I don’t have a religion. Even in the past year, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama feel obliged to talk about ‘those of no faith,’ ” he pointed out. Obama mentioned people without faith in his inaugural address in January, making him the first president to do so.

Church attendance is dropping and more and more people feel comfortable in our culture having no religious affiliation…why is that good news for the church?  I believe it is good news.  I believe this is a time of great potential growth for the church.  I believe this could be a time when the church could be the radically counter-cultural witness that it’s meant to be.  

Whenever you are expected to be a Christian in the culture, the meaning of what a Christian is becomes lost.  When everyone is a Christian no one is.  Or maybe not ‘no one’, but being a Christian ceases to mean much.  I hope people go to church and call themselves Christians because they love Jesus not because it’s what the neighbors are doing.

Additionally, Christianity is best observed in contrast to culture–when Christians are willing to take stands against the abusive and oppressive systems that inevitably arise in our world.  If everyone goes to church, then there is no clear distinction between the church and the world around it.  The church becomes complicit in these systems of sin.  The result is a tepid and un-compelling corporate witness that fails to be the prophetic, future-oriented, hope-filled community the church is meant to be.

So the fact that people no longer feel like ‘pariahs’ if they don’t go to church is a good thing.  Now, people are free to embrace God and Christianity if they want to, not because they are supposed to.

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If you were at Emmanuel Covenant’s Service this past Sunday, I would appreciate your feedback on the message. You can do so by filling out the form below. Thanks!

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This is a book about becoming water.  It is a call for churches and ministries to become adaptable, flexible, and fluid with their cultural surroundings.  Gibbons points to the increasing globalization occurring as the primary reason driving the need for churches to become this way.  Neighborhoods are becoming more diverse, and the amount of cultural information that is available to us because of new media has created a sort of global village.

The essence of Gibbons’ challenge to the church lays in his definition of neighbor.  For him, neighbor isn’t someone just like you who lives across the street, it is the person who is culturally or socio-economically different from you–the person who lives on the other side of the tracks.  If churches want to thrive in the emerging world, they must be all about meeting the needs of their ‘neighbor’.  

Dave’s church, Newsong in Irvine, CA, has done a lot to reach out to their neighbors, and this book is chalked full of motivating stories.  They’ve planted churches in community centers in Crenshaw, in pubs in London, and in nightclubs in Bangkok.  He shares what being liquid looks like with real stories of gospel fluidity in places where the church has often times failed to exist.  

This book was a of rah-rah-rah sort of motivating book.  I had this feeling of, I want to go out and conquer the world while I was reading it.  He paints a picture that puts the church at a crossroads.  We stand with incredible opportunity to embrace our changing world and have significant impact, or we can retreat from the changes all around us and fail to make a lasting mark.  He shows us what the path forward that embraces the changing world looks like, and it is very hopeful and exciting.

Here is an interview Dave Gibbons did for Christianity Today.  In it, you get a good sense of what this book is about.

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In Dave Gibbons new book, he argues that successful leaders will be third culture leaders–leaders who are liquid and adaptable to the changing cultural landscape that is globalization. Throughout the book he sets out to define what this looks like for the church and her leaders.

One of the attributes of this sort of leader is what he calls the pain principle:

The pain principle grows out of two axioms: (1) For leaders, pain in life has a way of deconstructing us to our most genuine, humble, authentic selves.  It’s part of the leader’s job description. (2) For most people, regardless of culture, it’s easier to connect with a leader’s pain and short-comings and mistakes than her successes and triumphs.

I resonate with this principle.  It’s the essence of Henri Nouwen’s Wounded Healer metaphor, which has been a guiding principle for the way I strive to do ministry.  It doesn’t mean I celebrate brokenness, it just means I’m honest about who I am.  I don’t want to glory in failure, I just want to be open enough about my failures so that everyone around me can see the successes God can bring out of failure.  I don’t want to focus inordinately on my weakness, I just want to point to God’s strength in spite of my weakness.  The pain principle…I like that name.

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This book is written to challenge churches to avoid become places filled with nice people, pastors, and purposes.  Too often in the American church landscape, the church co-opts the language and issues of the day and then simply rephrases them in Christian speak.  They don’t say anything too controversial or counter-cultural.  Willimon and Hauerwas challenge the church to be a community of resident aliens—a colony or outpost of heaven here on earth—not in a way that withdraws from the world, but in a way that is truly unique in its composition.  “The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross” (pg. 47) 

In essence, they call the local church community to be truth-tellers.  We should have the guts to speak and act as God is.  They point to the Sermon on the Mount for a description of God’s vision for his community.  And they point to the story of Anninias and Saphira as an example of what it looks like to be truth-tellers.  Peter valued corporate truthy-ness to individual well-being.  The Christian community is not primarily about making people feel good or meeting felt needs.  It is about being a community that represents and proclaims God’s vision for humanity.

I loved this book, and it is a great reminder to me.  They see profound purpose in the church.  This book reminded me both how important and how powerful the local church can be.

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In this cnn article, Denise Quan shares about her experience trying to get her hands on the new U2 album and her subsequent interview with the band.  U2′s new album launches tomorrow, and there is a lot of buzz about it already.  They are scheduled to play every night this week on Letterman’s show.  In the words of Will Ferrell’s Zoolander character, Mugatu, these guys are ‘so hot right now!’

In her interview, U2 talks about the life of their band as they toured, lived together, and produced their most recent album.  I was struck by how closely their language could be taken to resemble the talk of many trendy pastors these days.  If you swapped out the following words you would get a pastor’s ideal description of the church:

• band or U2 –> church
• music –> God
• album –> mission
• sounds –> reflects

You would get quotes like this:

No mission of ours is ever made in a vacuum. There’s always a huge amount of what’s going on in the culture that informs our work. But when it comes out in the end, it always reflects like church.

and:

 I don’t think the relationships would work if other than for God. The interesting thing is we’re so different, and that’s our strength. We are united in one cause, which is the church…

I think head-butting is something that you do when you’re a young man. As you travel down the road together, you stop thinking about what the church can do for you, and you think much more about what you can do for the church. You start to really appreciate what everyone else does…

U2 is the model ecclesiology.  They are a community with a mission lived in love and forgiveness.  Maybe that’s we all love Bono?

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I’m white and my wife is ethnically Korean.  We live in Edina, MN, the most affluent suburb in the state.  It is 94.28% white.  Today my wife experienced the sad reality of being Korean in a predominantly white city.

A couple months ago she received a speeding ticket.  She was coasting down a hill near our house and her speed drifted well above the limit.  She wanted to protest the ticket in court—not because she felt she didn’t deserve the ticket, but because she wanted to plead for mercy in the form of having the ticket remain absent from her record.

Today was her court appointment.  She took both of our kids with her.  For those of you who have never been to court, here’s how it works.  You arrive for your scheduled appointment with a large group of other perpetrators.  They have a list and they rattle through the list in order.  The judge quickly hears your case particulars, passes a judgment, and moves along.

Mary arrived with our two kids and waited for her turn.  While she waited, the bailiff became frustrated with the noise our kids were making and said, “You are going to have to leave the courtroom.  You cannot have those kids in here.  They are too loud.”  Mary expressed concern that she would be skipped over since she wouldn’t be able to hear her name called from outside the courtroom.  He assured her that he would get her when it was her turn.

As Mary waited holding our kids in the hallway outside the courtroom for almost hour, the bailiff finally came out and approached Mary.  However instead of calling her into the courtroom for her case, he had come out to chastise her for having children that were making too much noise.  “Quiet your kids!  I can hear them inside the courtroom.  If you don’t, you’ll have to leave or you’ll be fined for contempt!”  Mary was taken aback.  She was shocked.  She started to tremble as tears streamed down her face.  Our kids looked at their mom with confusion and concern.  People walked by and wondered what had just happened.  My wife stood humiliated in the hallway awaiting her turn with deep sadness and embarrassment.

Finally a sympathetic bystander, who could identify with Mary’s experience because she too was not white, asked, “Can I help in some way?”  Mary said, “Would you be willing find out for me when I am next in line?”  The bystander returned and told Mary that her name had already been called.  They had passed over her. The bailiff failed to tell her when her name was called.

Why had this man treated Mary this way? Were my kids really acting in a way that was worthy of being charged with contempt of court?  Why did he single out Mary, when there was another woman there with a child who incurred none of his wrath? She was white.  Was that why he overlooked her child?  Was Mary subject to this harassment because she is Asian? 

This is the question that I never have to ask.  I never have to wonder if I’m being treated differently because of the color of my skin.  If someone is having a bad day and they take it out on me, I don’t wonder if it’s because of my race.  If I make a mistake and receive criticism, I don’t have to wonder if it was warranted or if I’m the recipient of prejudice.  I never have to ask this question, because I rarely find myself an ethnic minority in any setting. 

For whatever reasons, the bailiff singled Mary out and unleashed hostility on her. The sympathetic bystander who had helped Mary suggested a reason for his behavior.  She said, “I hate Edina!  I always get pulled over in Edina and nowhere else around here.  I think the police racially profile.”  She was convinced Mary was being treated differently because she is an Asian American.

This is the suburb in which I grew up.  I never thought people here were racist, but now I have a different perspective.  Now that I have become one flesh with an ethnic-outsider, I see things differently.  I’m so sad for what Mary had to experience today.  It’s easy for me to see how uncomfortable it can be to live in a place with so few people who look like you.  Experiences like today remind me how difficult it is to be anything but white in Edina.

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