greatness

When I was in University, taking the first of a few degrees (don’t ask, I’m still begging forgiveness from my wife), I found out quite quickly that if I wanted to get on in this whole realm I would have to align myself with some pretty influential people. I began to realise that in academia it matters just as much who you know as what you know.

A little cliché that works most places, I know, but I was amazed at how true it was.

I began to work with one of my professors, doing grading and other things for him. Then I worked a summer for him and helped with analysis of a pretty major research project. As a result I got my name put on the final project which was submitted to the Canadian International Development Agency. We also spun off a paper which was presented (by yours truly) at the Canadian Agricultural Economists Annual Meeting. I was invited to the banquet, which was much more formal than I had planned. I sat at the table with my prof, who was a Fellow of the association, and one of his friends who was made a Fellow that evening.

I felt like I was being welcomed into the upper echelons of power within the Canadian Agricultural Economics realm. All right, so it is not that big of a step up, but it is amazing how vivid that evening sticks out for me. I was actually approached by a couple of representatives from different schools that night asking me if I were going to attend their graduate program.

It felt great.

I felt great.

I felt as though I had some value, some worth. I began to think that there was something important that I had to contribute to what was going on around me.

I have met some people who still talk about when they meant to that meeting with the Premier way back in ‘72. Or when they were present when the Prime Minister found out he had won the election. Or …

See, I think we all associate how great we are by who welcomes us. If we are welcomed to the table of a Fellow, we feel important. If we are welcomed to a meeting with the Premier, we feel special. If we are part of the privileged few to see the first reaction of a person to becoming Prime Minister, we feel great.

For Jesus, however, greatness is not about who welcomes you, but who you welcome.

It is not about what tables you sit at, but who sits at your table. It is not about building up your own reputation so that others think you are important, it is about taking the very thing that God has given you, yourself, and giving it to others freely and without expectation.

This is one of the reasons he says that when we welcome a little child we welcome him. A child in that society is someone who is considered an outsider, someone who has no real say in what goes on in society, someone who is tolerated at best, but most often ignored, someone like the homeless man sleeping in that stairwell downtown, or that girl who sleeps in the park because of her internal torment, or the homosexual who is ostracised from her community because they cannot see past the label to the person underneath.

Can we be this kind of great?

shaped by family

And then there were three (228 of 365) EXPLORED! on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

There are times when we forget the power of a family. We forget what it is like to be shaped and moulded by a relationship of giving and forgiving. We forget the power we have in our hands, all of our hands.

It takes all of these hands to make a family.

It takes all of us to make a community, a church.

The church is not the building, it is about the people. It is not about trying to cram as many bodies as we can into a certain space for an hour once a week. The church is a familial relationship. We may not like our family, we may even hate them sometimes, but they are still our family.

We are shaped by every member of that family.

The biggest change in my life happened when we had our first child. Suddenly, there were three of us. Suddenly we had a little life that we had to nurture and love. Suddenly, we were being shaped by this little thing that had no voice.

Shaped in ways we could never imagine.

And now we are four, and I continue to be shaped. My rough edges are slowly being worn smooth by the constant rubbing of three other members of the family. I am constantly being taught patience, persistence, trust, and how to forgive.

Imagine what it would be like if we allowed ourselves to be changed by our church family like we are shaped by our biological family. Imagine what it would be like if instead of nursing that chip on our shoulder, we allowed it to be work away by constant contact with those around us.

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difficult conversation

Since I am a pastor I met a lot of different people. Since I am a pastor on a island that is one of the most gorgeous places to be in summer, I meet a lot of new people. This is a treat for me, as I love to get to know people.

There are times, however, when it becomes very difficult to have a conversation with someone new. Sometimes I just have nothing in common with a person and that makes it difficult, but usually it is quite easy to get someone to talk about themselves so a few key questions have often resulted in rather interesting discussion.

I was talking with this person the other day (not a visitor to the church) who I had just met. I began to ask a few questions and was getting one or two word answers. After the person answered, they would just stand there and look at me. I really had to work to carry the conversation.

It felt like the other person was a passive person in an audience than someone I was talking to.

Strangely enough, this is how it feels to preach sometimes. Preaching is a dialogue, whether the other people speak or not. Both the preacher and the congregation participate in an encounter with the Word.

It is not a performance with an audience.

In Luke 8 Jesus spends a lot of time talking about the importance of listening, or hearing the word. He tells the parable of the sower, and talks about how each soil represents people who respond to the Word differently after they hear it. He even gives this warning.

“Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.” ” (Luke 8:18, ESV)

As a preacher I am well aware of the weight of responsibility placed on me by the office God has called me to. I am well aware that James tells me I will be judged more severly because I have been called to be a teacher.

But are we aware that we bear a large responsibility when we listen?

Do we realise that it takes as much work to listen as it does to preach/teach?

We think that we can come to our places of worship, sit back and be changed. We expect others to do things to us to grab our attention, keep us focussed, and impact us. However, when we sit and listen to God’s Word being preached, we have a responsibility to open our hearts and actively listen.

It is amazing how hard it is to have a conversation when the person you are talking to acts more like an audience member than a participant.

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• listening (crcpastorchad.wordpress.com)

entering the story

I have been taking a class for some continuing education over the past week and a bit called “Imagination in Teaching and Preaching.” We have been looking at some very interesting ideas, and really trying to determine what the role of the imagination of the people listening to us is.

“A belief, if it is to touch the heart, must be made credible to the imagination.” — Bob DeVries

This is the claim that we have been exploring, and trying to think about as we plan sermons or teaching outlines. Before I made my way out here, there were a number of people who were struck by the topic and immediately that it would mean more sensual (as in using all the senses) description of certain events or Biblical stories.

This is, however, not really what we are talking about. We are trying to figure out ways to engage the imagination of those we are trying to reach, rather than simply feed them things to keep them entertained.

Thomas, over at Everyday Liturgy, wrote an intriguing post today about this topic, chastising parisioners for being too passive in worship, and for pastors for spoon feeding them too much.

Our worship should be about story.  We sing new songs as a way to add to the story of God’s people, praising him for things that have happened both long ago and recently.  We read Scripture to invoke God’s story into our present lives.  We preach to imagine the impact of God’s story today.  And we come to the Lord’s table to re-enact the wondrous death and resurrection of Christ.

Most often pastors do this.  I think they do too much of it.  We expect them to paint the picture while preaching, to set up the story, color all the characters, interpret the whole story for us, all so that the crowd can be limp, unthinking, and unchallenged.   We expect worship leaders to interpret songs for us.  We expect the Lord’s supper to be iradicated of mystery so that it just becomes an ordinance.  We don’t want three dimensions because that is too hard.  We just want the two dimensions, plain and simple, and for leaders and pastors to add the extra dimension and imagination.

So how do we overcome this impass? How do we get everyone more involved in the worship experience so that we are not just hearing the story but entering it?

[W]e first need to disciple our communities so that they begin to enter into the story themselves.  Second, we need to begin to dream of ways to allow congregations to be active in the dynamics of worship, in the entering into God’s story.  The worship of God is not an idle activity.  We need to be aware of the three dimensions all around us, the reality all around us, and then enter into the wonderful story of God and his creation.

How can we do this?

from eternity to here: a review

Image by Andrew B47 via Flickr

There has been a recent interest in trying to explain the over arching story of the scriptures again. It seems that the verse by verse exposition that so many of us grew up with has caused us to loose sight of the whole and left us stranded in a world of short aphorisms and moral snipets.

This, however, causes a major problem in a post-modern society that thrives on story and narrative. I have found this movement extremely helpful and was really looking forward to digging into Frank Viola’s new book From Eternity to Here: Rediscovering the Ageless Purpose of God.

Viola structures the book in three parts, examining three different over arching themes from the Bible: the Bride of Christ, The House of God, and the Body of Christ/Family of God.

The first theme is the bride of Christ. Viola makes a connection between the creation of Eve from the side of Adam in the garden on the eighth day, and the creation of the church from the side of Christ when we rose on the eighth day. From a Reformed perspective the church was not started by Christ but redeemed. The church began with Adam and Eve, because the church is a group of people loved by God and loving him, saved by the blood of Jesus (the Bible portrays Jesus as the lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world, i.e. before Adam and Eve were created). It was in this section that I had the most issues. Viola sometimes goes too far in describing Jesus as a lovesick fool drooling over his bride to be, he seems to pick up on our Western view of marriage as something done in the heat of romantic passion, rather than something which comes out of deep commitment to each other. I did appreciate his exposition of the church as Christ’s bride, but since he assumed the church was created by Christ he missed the aspect of lovingly restoring a bride who had been unfaithful (the image often given of the Israelites).

The second theme Viola explores is the House of God. In this section he does a wonderful job of tracing the theme of building a house for God all the way from Adam through Jacob, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus, to John and the book of Revelation. Here he shows how the temple and city in Jerusalem were foreshadows of Jesus and then the final kingdom.

The third theme was the Body of Christ and the Family of God. Viola lumps these two together because they seem to be used interchangeably throughout the New Testament. I appreciated his constant efforts in this section to remind us of the corporate nature of the Christian faith, how the church is not a building where individuals gather, but is a collection of people who follow Christ. He describes the church as a “new species” which I am not sure is quite accurate. We are not entirely new, something never seen before, but are redeemed, made holy, remade into the people we were before humans fell into sin. Viola also argues for a certain structure to worship gatherings which I am not sure is necessary. He argues for an “open” or “participatory” meeting where everyone (in an orderly manner of course) is free to express words of grace and challenge to the others assembled there. While I agree that many of our churches have become spectator focussed, I am not sure that the scriptures advocated one certain structure.

Viola’s book is a rough and dirty over view of a few of the common themes of the Bible. He brings the whole story together in a way that makes it more readily accessible to a general audience. I sense in the book too much of a contrast between the Old and New Testaments. The continued emphasis on the church being made at the time of Christ, and Christians being something entirely new is not quite accurate. Aside from those concerns this is a provocative read and something which will help increase our awareness of the unity of the scriptures.