The television show Friends remains one of the most watched shows ever on television. Running for 238 episodes over 10 full seasons the show is one of the few over recent history to have such longevity. I’ve often wondered what sets apart certain television shows from the other. What made Friends such a raving success compared to other shows of its time?

In Friends we see a community of otherwise unlike people (though not really diverse either, I admit) come together in order to share life with each other. Outside of the show being fairly funny (admit it, Joey and Chandler made you laugh), I believe its success comes from an interior desire of all of us to be able to share life in a similar, intimate way. I’d argue that on the deepest of levels we were made for life in this way. Lost in the recent debate of relationship vs. religion is that truth that relationship with God thrusts us into religious community for the sake of our faith journey.

It’s common today for people to say they are “spiritual but not religious.” Being religious has a stigma that goes with it today. Much of this is due to the crimes of religion in the past. Christians often have a relationship with Christ but do not practice religion, or so they say. Let’s consider for a moment how a relationship with God IS a religious practice due to the communal nature of the relationship.

Read the rest of the post over on Preston’s blog. I’m taking part in the At the Lord’s Table blog series and conversation, and I hope you’ll engage with it as well.

Here’s how Preston describes the series:

“The essential idea is that while we all have different perspectives on the Eucharist, on Communion, we all recognize it as the gathering of the one Body of Christ. Our myriad and differing voices come to the same table of the Lord and there we meet, discuss, and marvel at the beauty of the Church, warts and all.”

After about a half-hour of talking about life and some of their latest pursuits it became pretty clear to me that he had zero intention of getting to know me. Somehow in his mind he had come to the conclusion that I had nothing to offer in terms of getting the business venture one step further down the road toward success. Walking away from our time together was disheartening for me. I prefer to think of myself as valuable and important enough to be given an opportunity to be heard. Being marginalized as not important enough was an awful feeling.

I have the same tendency in my own life. Too often I place extra worth and make an extra effort to value and get to know the people at my church who can benefit and help the ministries I coordinate.

While my whole family was together over Christmas (a rare thing these days) we shared which of the fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) we had grown in the past year and which ones we wanted to grow in this coming year. I shared that I wanted to grow in kindness and love because I tend to use people as cogs in my machine that must be extremely efficient or I try to replace them.

Our entrepreneurial society tells us to value only those who can help us take the next step toward significance and success.

God tells us to love all people.

Somewhere along the line we must learn the lesson of laying down our own desires for the good of all people. Somehow we must counter-culturally show love and kindness to all people despite our true nature pushing us to do the opposite.

As long as we are most concerned about keeping ourselves #1, Christlikeness will never be an attribute of ours.

Don’t use people, love them.

While I had to be at church on January 1st this year I wonder if I would have made the effort to come if I had no obligation to be there. Who in their right mind really *wants* to get up early on New Year’s Day to go to church to sing songs and listen to someone talk for half an hour?

In reality I could put in my favorite Gungor album and hear a lot better music than most any church in town. I could find a podcast sermon that would probably be a lot better than anything I could hear at my church. What’s the point of making such a sacrifice to attend church?

I’ve sat with these thoughts over the past week because the reality is I doubt I would have gone to church. I’d like to think that I would but most often I choose the path of least resistance for myself before I think about those around me. Church, for most of us, is a place where we desire to “fill up our spiritual tanks” on great music and great teaching. But we can’t get those fillings in a lot of different places?

I write all this as a fairly conflicted person: Wanting to care so much about the community of believers that I choose to continually sacrifice my wants and needs for them, but at the same time desiring that I get what I want and need first.

I fear that my generation is growing up in a time where church (or the components of our program driven churches) has become so accessible that it’s diluted to the point where we don’t even understand why we *need* it. Why should we go to church early in the morning on New Year’s Day? Because it’s about the people we gather with.

Two quotes that have been a source of great conviction and encouragement for me this past week are from Lauren Winner and Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

God’s Trinitarian being suggests that we are not to simply invite people into our homes but to invite them into our lives as well. (Lauren Winner)

Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ. (Bonhoeffer)

On Sunday mornings I most often attend My Selfish Church where I value community so long as it values and benefits me. I never attend or get involved in church when it would involve me sacrificing more than I would prefer.

I believe we’re teaching the wrong message about church attendance and membership. We don’t do it because God commands it or people before us have done it that way (though those are valid reasons for church attendance and membership). We do it because we need each other. This is not some pithy statement, but the harsh reality.

The community of God’s gathered people is an instrument of His presence infiltrating our lives with skin and bones.

Much more than music and teaching, we need our brothers and sisters.

Agree? Disagree?

In our culture it’s never enough to just have a great thing, you must have the next big thing. Otherwise you’re just obsolete.

The next big thing always guarantees us more happiness, more efficiency, and more friends. When people see us with the next big thing they’ll begin to realize how forward thinking we are, and they’ll respect us for it. Or so we think.

I watched a TED talk from the one of the great thinkers of our time, Malcolm Gladwell. His first TED talk several years ago is one of the most viewed TED talks ever. In this short talk he discusses bombs, culture, and the next big thing. I found it all very intriguing as it relates to our culture.

As you could tell, Gladwell’s talk was about wars, bombs, and the Norden bomb-sight, but it wasn’t really about any of those things.

“This is the problem with our infatuation over the things we make: We think the things we make can solve our problems.”

I say his talk was about the Norden bomb-sight, but really it wasn’t, because the talk was really about how we view the next big thing as our next step toward a better, more fulfilling life. And the problem in that is that life never got more or less fulfilling through a thing. I might have become more efficient or been able to stay in contact with more people or been able to stay more connected to the global world or been able to create wonderful things on my own through all these next big things, but none of them ever helped me have a truly better and more fulfilling life. In fact, many of these things have probably pushed me away from a more fulfilling life.

When it comes to the next big thing, we always look at and discuss all the new things we’ll be able to do and much more efficiently we’ll be able to live our lives, but we rarely (maybe never) evaluate all we’re going to give up in order to be slave to this next big thing. While I’m not advocating for never changing or adapting, our lives and our churches could sure stand for some contentment found not in things but in God and His goodness to us.

There’s always a catch when it comes to the next big thing. Don’t fall in the trap.

(For a great take on this very subject check out John Dyer’s book From the Garden to the City. John has a good understanding of how technology might not be as neutral to us as we often assume.)

But I always have this question in the back of my head…

Do we really care?

Especially in the millennial generation, activism, justice ministries, and serving others is now a “popular” or “cool” thing to do. The reasons for why people serve is as wide as the sea, and many do it for reasons beyond their relationship with God. When we serve for reasons other than an outpouring of love from God, I think we miss the point of serving.

This is where many people will say that Christians just serve out of selfish reasons, or that Christians serve in order to make themselves feel better about their relationship with God.

In a class I’m taking, we’ve adopted this question when considering serving and loving people who do not know Jesus:

Would we still love the person if they never came to saving faith in Jesus?

If the answer is no (and let’s be honest, it probably is for many of us), then we can be sure we have wrong motives that come from somewhere other than simply loving a person. If the answer is yes, then God might actually be able to use us to love. Too often our desire to “love” someone is really just a masked way of presenting the Gospel until we move onto the person. I don’t really think this is what God has in mind when he tells us to love others.

Loving others out of the overwhelming love of a relationship with our God allows us to love people with no strings attached. It allows us to truly love, not love until we see an opening to rope them into coming to our church.

When considering all of the options available to serve and love others at your church or in your area leading up to Christmas and beyond, try asking yourself, do you really care?

I hope we care enough to make our love for people more than a Christmas memory.

A few weeks ago the search firm was in town conducting interviews to get an understanding of what staff members and congregation members are looking for in a teaching pastor, as well as figuring out what the church is like. Some staff members were given a chance to meet one on one with a representative from the firm, but I was not one of those people.

To be honest, at first I was pretty hacked off by this. To me it communicated that my opinion was only valuable enough to be mixed in with the rest of my co-workers whose opinions weren’t valued much. I spent a few days complaining to myself and a few others I’m close to.

My reaction is quite normal for a millennial. It’s common knowledge that millennials are known for having some sort of entitlement complex. Just last week Stephanie even wrote about the positive role entitlement has in millennials who are paving and creating their own way in our world. My frustration came directly out of this desire for entitlement.

But something changed in my demeanor after a few days of frustration and the desire for entitlement wore off. I view entitlement sort of like a trap. It lures us into thinking we deserve something others don’t want to give us and then it tells us to create our own path (often at the expense of others) when we don’t get it.

Entitlement is often the opposite from service. Entitlement looks for a pat on the back after doing something well. Entitlement says that we deserve something before we’ve earned it. Entitlement believes we deserve something better than we have without being a part of the solution. Entitlement is internally focused. Entitlement is the selfish mindset that we’re the most important person in the room.

Entitlement is the trap that makes us think everything going on around us, revolves around us. But I believe God desires something more from us. Not that entitlement is all bad. It has pushed millennials to create a whole new world. Entitlement, though, often gets distorted when it is the motivating force behind our lives.

We must seek to be faithful in the present before we can ever be truly open to the future. This was the lesson I took away from my frustration. Entitlement looks into the future and says that a far off goal is something we deserve now. The reality is we can only be faithful in the present otherwise we are pursuing the future in an unhealthy way.

My role in the world is to always faithfully serve. While I’ll always have a bit of entitlement in me, I must not let it trap me into living into that before I choose to faithfully serve.

Has the entitlement trap ever gotten you?

A Fox News article I read described seasonal depression in this way:

“The symptoms of seasonal affective disorder include low mood, inability to concentrate, changes in sleep patterns (with people sometimes sleeping much more), changes in appetite (with appetite actually increased, in some cases), low energy and tearfulness. But they can also include low self-esteem, loss of interest in activities that one had found pleasurable and even suicidal ideation.”

The line so many have heard from the church regarding depression of any sort is the comforting “pray more” or “pray harder” line. That line, which I’ve heard said to people close to me, essentially tells a person their depression comes from lack of closeness with God. That is awful.

Given that people have this experience with people in the church regarding depression, I can’t help but think we can do more to support those who are struggling.

How can churches support and give space for people dealing with seasonal depression?

I’d love to hear some of your feedback.

Remember when Pat Robertson talked about Haiti’s earthquake as punishment from God? Remember when Obama ignored the National Day of Prayer? Remember when Pastor Mark Driscoll said God hates people? People went ballistic on each of them, calling them awful and horrible things.

Part of me wants to join in the fray during those moments, certainly they deserve a little backlash for their actions. But then another part of me realizes, I’m no different.

I’m just as prone to say and do something that does not honor my God. And so are you.

Instead of pushing people off a cliff when they say or do something we deem to be less than what our God would want, we should beg for forgiveness. Their sin is our sin. We’re in this together, as witnesses to the greatest story in the world.

Banishing them to the hell we think they deserve doesn’t help the body of Christ. Coming to the foot of the cross in humility, recognizing our own faults in the midst of the mess of our world does serve our God and our world.

God wants to use those who are willing to humble themselves, the world will recognize us by our love for one another.

We’re in this together. For better or for worse.

Today we eat meals to get fed and to be full, when in the past eating was first about relational connection, more than food consumption.

Cultural realities often manage to make subtle changes within the church. We can’t pinpoint these large shifts in the week by week of going to church, but if we take a look at the big picture changes in our cultural, we can often see changes within the church as well.

No question, fast food has changed the church. Each week, most churches celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus through the taking of Communion. The first celebration of Communion was done with a group of men centered around the eating of a meal together. Even in the midst of this focus on Christ, we see the importance of shared space and community in the taking of Communion.

Today in most churches, Communion is a somber celebration of remembrance done individually over the course of 5 to 10 minutes. Certainly there is still shared space involved because we’re in the same room together, but very little relational connection is involved.

In the past 5 years the most meaningful time of Communion I’ve had has been at a Lutheran church where I was able to take Communion with my family. Every evangelical church I’ve been in during my marriage has always turned Communion into something I do as an individual isolated from the others around me.

We only learned to eat in isolation from one another through fast food. We only learned to eat in order to fill our hunger needs before our relational needs from fast food.

How we take Communion can easily become how we relate to church. When Communion is about individual consumption, church becomes similar, a place we need to cater to our tastes. When Communion is truly about common unity through Jesus, church becomes a place of truer community than we’ve ever known.

Some cultural shifts are helpful for the church to take part in, others are not. No question, this shift toward food consumption in isolation from community is not how God desired for the church to exist.

Communion isn’t about consumption.

Communion is about relational connection, with God and each other.

I decided to enroll in seminary, knowing I needed the formation and experience a good seminary could offer. And I also wanted to get a job at a church. Even though the economy was stronger then, it will still near impossible to get a ministry position within my area of experience (music and worship) at a church in my area. I had very few connections to local area pastors and my resume wasn’t anything to scream about.

I’ve been in many, many conversations since then with people wanting a job at a church and I think we’re going about this completely wrong. Based on the last 4 and a half years of my life, working and serving at the same church while attending seminary, I thought I’d share a few pieces of advice for those who are looking to get employed at a church.

• Church ministry happens in paid and unpaid roles. I know a handful of people who serve diligently at my church week after week, who probably do as much as some full time employees. It’s no knock on any co-workers of mine, it’s a testament to how much these “volunteers” (a truly awful word that diminishes how these people give of themselves) serve the bride of Christ. This idea that true ministry happens when employed at a church is so completely false.
• Don’t take the first opportunity to come your way. I’ve been in plenty of conversations with men and women who regretted taking a job at the first church that made them an offer. Go to a church you feel called to, and to a church where God can use you and grow you, not the first one to want your presence.
• Go to a church where you’ll be different. I realize that some of this is just my own personal preference but partially this just saddens me as I look at many my age make decisions about joining/working at churches. I made an intentional decision to attend and volunteer at a church that had very few people my age. I had been previously attending a church with hundreds, maybe thousands, of people my age. There’s certainly a role for churches who reach specific ages well, but I think we often want to hang out with out with people like us more than we want to serve the whole church (lots of people not like us).

And last but easily the most important:

• SERVE! When going to a church is about building a resume, gaining a specific skill set, or about collecting a paycheck before it’s ever about serving the body of Christ, we’ve completely misunderstood what vocation in the church should be.

 What would you add to this list?