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13
May

My Beautiful Idol

By Tyler 3 Comments
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I just recently finished reading My Beautiful Idol by Pete Gall. The book is in the same vein as Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. This makes it tough, because Miller’s book is one of the most popular Christian books of the last 10 years. So Gall’s book will be compared to a book that is simply something untouchable. So let me start with this…Gall’s book is not Blue Like Jazz.

They call this genre “spiritual memoir.” I don’t love this genre, but it does make for a solid read. Pete has lived a full life, even at his young age, and this really comes through in the book. I was grabbed from the beginning because I could relate with Pete’s feelings of purposelessness while he was making lots of money in the business world of Chicago. After leaving that scene, Pete heads into the world of uncertainty in Colorado, while working for various churches and organizations, and even attending seminary for a while. I would say the whole book flows out of Pete’s lack of purpose for life during his time in Chicago. That is a message and a feeling we can all relate to.

A theme that permeates the entire book is what “idols” are. We often think of idols as material possessions but I love where Gall goes with this. The idol is never an object, it is always something behind the thing. He calls his idols comfort, a relationship, and many other feelings and ideological attachments.

This book wasn’t easy for me to flow with. That is just part of the nature of books within the memoir genre. They are as disjointed as anyone’s life, including mine. I think this style really jives with non-linear thinkers. Me, being a very linear thinking person, had a hard time with him going all over the place (believe me, he does). However, I this can be a good read for those scattered thinkers. Gall says things that force you to think and does it the lens of his life, which is just as confusing as yours.

Many of you might question Pete’s message but his honesty and true authenticity ring true in each chapter. Pete says that to achieve authenticity we must forsake “our deepest sin and our love for our most beautiful idol: to be our own god.”

Pete seems to have discovered something by the end of the book because he says: “We all want to be loved, and we all want to be seen, and we all hate being made invisible by the agendas and social regulations of people and structures that don’t see us for who we are. We want to express who we are, and to be loved through those definitions…”

05
May

Who Stole My Church? .5

By Tyler 10 Comments
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Part One, Two, Three, and Four.

Who Stole My Church? by Gordon MacDonald

This will be my last post on this book and also my post for Creative Chaos. If you are totally confused with what I wrote here, head back to post one, it has a lot of the book’s background info.

I want to end with a part of the book that allowed the discovery group to see that changing can make a difference in reaching younger people. Ben is the nephew of one of the ladies in the discovery group. He is 28, divorced and jobless and just started going to the church.

All of you are expecting that Ben kept coming back to the church because he liked the style…you would be wrong. While Ben did like the way church was “done” on Sundays, he didn’t keep going because of the style of music or because the pastor dressed in “normal” clothes (I will say that it was important that everything about the church was different than his childhood. If it would have been the same he would have even been more closed off). He kept going because he made relationships. A few of the men in the discovery group reached out to Ben and began to invest in him. It was these relationships that not only turned Ben’s life around but also helped him establish roots at the church. I think Ben is a great example for us to see what is important for churches to focus on.

In light of the story of Ben and the earlier posts, here are some things I take away from the book:

  • Relationships are always the key to growing and fulfillment within a church.
  • Change will happen, but it doesn’t have to be negative.
  • You can either welcome change and reach out to the next generation or you can be against it and by doing so reject the next generation.
  • Young people are dying for someone older to care about them. To enter into their world and invest in them. More and more, kids come from broken homes and are looking for the parents they never had.
  • Program should never trump people.

Thoughts?

02
May

Who Stole My Church? .4

By Tyler 5 Comments
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Parts One, Two, and Three.

Who Stole My Church? by Gordon MacDonald.

As I think back on the book, there are a couple of moments that stick out to me as huge turning points for the group. One was diving through the Scripture I talked about in part 3, and another is when the youth band joins the group for a discussion on music. Let me remind you that the youth band is full of high schoolers and they are going to meet with 50 and 60 year olds (not easy for either group to do).

A few weeks before this meeting Gordon had talked about Isaac Watts, a famous writer of a lot of hymns (Jesus Shall Reign, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Joy to the World). Everyone in the older group proclaimed their love for a number of the songs written by him. Gordon told about how Watts was frustrated with the music in church during the early 1700s and how his father supported the vision he had for a new kind of music in the church. Watts introduced instruments to church music, they were previously considered worldly and many churches in New England would not sing his music and it tore many congregations a part. Most of the people in the group could not imagine it. The music they loved, was once the theme for a worship war. I think establishing this helped the discovery group to be open to what the youth band had to say.

As the meeting began with the youth team began, they shared some of the things they didn’t understand about the way the older generation does music in church.

  • Why were they so serious and never happy?
  • They are always too busy being frustrated with the music that they never worshiped.
  • There is no excitement in the singing.
  • A lot of the words in the songs don’t make sense.
  • The style of music is nothing close to what people listen to during the week.

Both groups talked about these things for a while. It forced the older group to think about why their favorite music wouldn’t make sense to someone younger. It also forced the younger group to think about how they could incorporate some “traditional” songs in their sets in a fresh way (a week after the meeting, the youth band led Come Thou Fount with a more upbeat feel).

That meeting ended with an embrace between the generations. I have to doubt whether that is really realistic, but the fact that two totally different age groups were able to share their music frustrations with one another is a step that most churches don’t ever take. I wonder whose job it is to reach out…should older or younger people reach out to the other first? I struggle with this a lot.

I’ve been a part of music in church for a while at different churches. I have never, ever had someone older than 50 reach out to me to discuss worship and my thoughts on music in church. The older generation loves to complain about us young people and I love to complain about how stubborn older people are with music…BUT neither side ever reaches out to the other. Until this changes, the divide between the two groups will continue to grow.

01
May

Who Stole My Church? .3

By Tyler 3 Comments
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Parts One and Two

Pastor Gordon is left with a sticky situation. He has upset long time members and somehow needs to reach out to them. I love how he does this. He could have argued about style or just told them they were wrong, but instead he goes to the Scriptures. No one can argue the Scriptures (unless you don’t hold them in high regard, Scot McKnight has an interesting post on this today).

He starts with Acts 20:28. The church was bought with Christ’s blood. To give up on the church, is to give up on part of the sacrifice Jesus made, and something that is highly valued by God. We are also called to be “shepherds” of the church.

The next Scripture he refers to is Matthew 23:37-24:1. Clearly Jesus is disgusted with His people who do not want to hear His voice. He wants to engage with His people in a mother-like love. Essentially, He is condemning the Temple because it is promoting dead religion.

So Jesus is walking out of the Temple with His disciples and the disciples bring His attention back to the buildings. Clearly they are confused. Jesus must be misunderstanding how important the Temple is. The Temple was everything to them, Jesus was going to cause a lot of problems with what He had said.

Jesus finishes this discussion with this emphatic statement in Matt. 24:2. He refers to the Temple buildings as things and stones and they will come down. The point Gordon is making is that the buildings meant nothing to Jesus, His church was built on His people and it was an organism he gave His life for.

I think this was the turning point for the group. Jesus is not interested in dead religion: Tradition without purpose, tradition without life, church as a building instead of a body. All of these things Jesus has no interest in.

From here Gordon keeps going through chapter 24:3-14. Jesus begins to tell them about when the Temple will fall (which is essentially the end of the world to them). Jesus talks about destruction, persecution, and wickedness all in the midst of trying to preach the gospel of the kingdom.

Here is the clincher: How would the disciples deal with this kind of change and challenge in the coming days? Gordon says they would need to reinvent themselves, something they did an incredible job doing through Acts and the Pastoral Letters.

In changing times, the church must reinvent itself to reach outside of itself.

30
Apr

Who Stole My Church? .2

By Tyler 8 Comments
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Part One

The first meeting is almost a disaster with Gordon and the group. It begins with everyone just blurting out all their struggles with the church (a reminder here is that the group consists of mostly older people who are mostly against all the changes occurring in the church).

Here is a short list of the issues that this group names in the first meeting:

  • Pastors should wear a suit and a tie. You honor God by dressing nice.
  • Losing the prayer service on Wednesday night was the biggest blunder so far.
  • Sunday school classes are important for spiritual growth.
  • Young people don’t know the Bible.
  • There must be a choir and hymns.
  • Young people do not tithe well.
  • The music is too loud.

I’m sure some of you can relate with any number of these things. Others of you don’t see any of these things as issues. Wherever you stand, these issues are real and real people struggle with them every time they go to church.

I think far too often my generation wants to go off and start their own church geared towards young people instead of trying to bridge a gap with this older generation. Instead of discussing these issues they take the easy road and join together with those who think like them. I’ve heard many people say that finding a good youth pastor is harder now because most youth pastors can just go off and start their own “emerging” church.

I read a blog a while back that said church cannot be all things to all people. I understand the point, it does make some sense. But really, that person was just advocating for churches being split up by tastes, style, and age, and the problem is that we lose the community aspect of it. Now some will say that community is a group of people. I say community is not a bunch of people who are all alike spending time together. We must learn to work together. Family isn’t one age group and it isn’t one style. Family takes a lot of work.

Before going on…I wonder: How would you reach out to the older generation here? They’ve stated their issues and struggles. Do you give up or do you try to bridge the gap? What do you say?

Tomorrow I’ll share a little about how Gordon tries to defuse the situation.

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29
Apr

Who Stole My Church? .1

By Tyler 8 Comments
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Jay, Jill, and I have been going through the book Who Stole My Chuch? by Gordon MacDonald. First off, great book. I totally recommend it to anyone in ministry or anyone who is interested in the great debate of “contemporary versus traditional” and how to deal with change in church.

I read the book in a week. For those of you who know me…you know it usually takes me at least a month, maybe three to get through a book. So, this is record speed. I have never, ever read a book in a week.

That being said, I don’t think MacDonald says anything that hasn’t been said before, but it is written in narrative form, which attaches you to people within the stories and make it a breeze to read.

It is a fiction story with Gordon leading a church in New England in 2007. He has been at that fictional church for 3 years. There was a church vote about adding a new sound system, but before they could vote a number of older members of the church are noticeably outraged. Gordon ends the meeting and asks a number of that group to join him to talk about their frustrations with him as a group. That group meets and soon it becomes a weekly Tuesday night gathering called The Discovery Group. These group meetings are what make up the bulk of the content. It is through the conversations during these meetings that we see just about every issue come up in regards to how an older generation views church versus how a younger generation views church.

That is a good starting place. I’m going to do a few posts on this book. He covers far too many great topics to not delve into some.

I’ll start tomorrow.

07
Feb

Irresistible Revolution .13

By Tyler 2 Comments
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The last chapter of Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution is titled “Crazy But Not Alone.” This is a great summary of the book and brings us to the roots of a lot of Claiborne’s arguments. A lot of it is surrounded by the ideals of the emerging church. Let’s take a lot at some of the values he exhorts us to.

  • One of the values that just about everyone says lies within the emerging church is, relationship and community. Claiborne says we show these values by giving grace and love.
  • I really like one section where he talks about dark and light. He equates the dark with human suffering around the world, something everything hates. But I thought it was interesting what he said about the light. “It can become quite comfortable, like a campfire…we must neither get used to the darkness of human suffering or fall asleep in the comfort of the light.” I’m not exactly sure what he is referring in with “light” but I get the sense that he is attacking a relationship with Christ with no action.
  • While Christians use different methods for reaching the lost, Shane contends only one method is God’s: love.
  • Shane says that it is important for young people to stay rooted in their local church and to grow under their elders. While it is easy to simply complain about the church in a self-righteous cynicism, it is the high road to stick with the church. “The Creator and the church are our parents, and having one without the other leaves us very empty. Though our mother has many illegitimate children, we still love her.” What a great way to end this book. Much of it has been spent sharing an outcry against the “Religious Right” and many of the ideals that people would categorize under Christianity. But Shane ends with a strong reminder for his young readers, that the church needs them.

My Final Thoughts:

I thought this was an incredible book. I talked with my good friend Ric a while back. He too had read this book recently. We both said that it was a book that had shaken our foundation of what we believe and why we believe it. Shane had the audacity to take on just about every controversial subject that I can think of. He did this with strong Biblical support and legitimate personal experience. This allows for a very convincing argument. Don’t read this if you are enjoying your comfortable life, because it will make you re-think all that. Actually, if you love your comfortable life, maybe this is the book for you. The only problem I have is that with all the questions his book brings up…I find it hard to grasp concrete answers.

06
Feb

Irresistible Revolution .12

By Tyler 2 Comments
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Chapter 12 of Irresistible Revolution is called “Growing Smaller and Smaller…Until We Take Over the World.” This title is inspired by mega churches. Shane is questioning what kind of gospel we are preaching in the US that allows us to have these huge churches. The Bible talks about it being harder for a camel to slide through the eye of a needle than a rich person to enter into heaven. To him, clearly this message isn’t being portrayed in churches or they would be a lot less crowded.

I thought hard and I could not think of anytime in church where I had heard the idea of the Christian faith growing smaller (yes I know, that is weird wording he uses). Here is how he comes to this idea.

  1. He thinks in America the church has offered cheap grace. This idea of “accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and come to church on Sundays and tithe.” There is little personal sacrifice needed except from the wallet.
  2. Churches often have visions, plans, growth ideas, but lost in these huge ideas is caring for those around us. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community (even if their intentions are ever so earnest), but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
  3. To enter the kingdom of God we must become like little children.
  4. Acts 6:1-6 talks about a community structure within the early church that provided for widows and orphans before anything else.

So while you might have been thinking Claiborne was talking about smaller in number he wasn’t. I see him talking about how our huge God decided to become human. He is talking about how the kingdom is inherited for those who become like children. Amidst our society that values big ideas, Shane is talking about a gospel that reaches out to the small.

One thought of mine is that Shane has spent a lot of this chapter talking about reaching the poor for Jesus. Going to the small of the world and serving them. I understand the gospel to be for everyone. Gay, straight, rich, poor, black, white…etc. He hasn’t given any talk to a churches ability to reach the rich (as difficult as the Bible makes it sound) in our churches. Do you have any thoughts on this in light of a gospel of small?

05
Feb

Irresistible Revolution .11

By Tyler 2 Comments
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Chapter 11 of Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution is titled “Making Revolution Irresistible.”
He begins the chapter talking about how he rebelled from “church” by joining social activist causes. Quickly he felt, “a self-righteousness mirroring that of conservative Christianity. I felt an aggressiveness and judgementalism reminiscent of that which I had grown to despise in the church.” He was fighting for issues and what changed for him was when he began fighting for faces, people, not issues. “That’s when things are transformed, when people become humans, neighbors, family.”

For Claiborne everything changed when he was able to put a humanity to something that feels larger than life. This happened especially during his time in Iraq. His time there humanized the war…even for me. He says, “degrees of separation allow us to destroy human beings we do not know except as the enemy.” A reference to 2nd Samuel 21:1-14 speaks well to this idea. He talks about a woman named Rizpah (Saul’s concubine) and how she tried to cover her son’s dead bodies who were killed by David’s men. Word of this spread fast and quickly to King David. When he hears about this he provides the bodies a proper burial. It was the humanity that touched David and changed Shane.

It is often hard for us to see faces of big things like aids, war, starvation, malnutrition. It is not often in my day that I seem to care about such things and I think Shane makes a great point by saying that they are issues to me. They have no humanity or faces in my mind.

I wonder how to respond so that we do see faces to these issues…and I wonder how that might change us.

31
Jan

Irresistible Revolution .10

By Tyler 1 Comment
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Research has shown that the more a person goes to church, the more they are likely to be sexist, racist, anti-gay, for wars and committed to a local church. Shane questions what Bible we are teaching. It is these things that cause many people to think of Christians as hypocrites instead of audacious lovers of people. Brennan Manning says, “The greatest cause of atheism is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, then walk out the door and deny him in their lifestyle. This is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” So how can we reverse this? Shane gives a few examples that can help us envision how to live as followers of Jesus who are full of grace.

1. If terrorists are beyond redemption, he says that we can rip out half of the New Testament, since half of it was written “by a terrorist who became an extremist for grace.”
2. Shane tells the story of a woman he met in Iraq whose son and husband was killed by an Iraqi police officer. In court the woman told the judge that she simply wanted to officer to know grace and love. She asked that he be ordered to come to her home in the slums 2 times a month.
3. Spin magazine did a feature on Shane and the community he is a part of named The Simple Way. He said after the feature ran he received hundreds of letters from non-Christians who were intrigued by the God he followed and many other letters from Christians who were upset that he would do an interview with such a secular magazine. It was at that point that he knew he had done the right thing.

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