I ended up running at a 7’58″ pace and beat my goal of getting 8 minute per mile pace or better. Looking back on the race, I might have been able to push it a little more early in the race but there were some decent hills on miles 4-7 so I feel great about my time.

I wouldn’t say I love running, but I think think there’s a lot of value in being healthy through eating and exercise. Running has been a good fit for me to get a good workout in a short amount of time, while also being able to push myself to new levels of fitness.

One of my biggest gripes of American Christianity is its lack of a theology for the human body. When is the last time your pastor preached on the importance of treating our bodies with the understanding that they are living temples of God? Actually, I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard that talked about at church. What a shame.

I’ve been reading a good book by Matthew Lee Anderson titled Earthen Vessels (affiliate link) and also watching some of the tv show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution both of which has greatly challenged my understanding of how God views my body and how I’ve turned it into a temple for too many awful things.

Calvin called creation the “theater of God’s glory” and we play a role in that because He has created us to be His ambassadors.

I wonder if Christians have really missed the mark when it comes to a holistic understanding of how God desires to transform us?

More and more, Christians are being recognized for their desires to join in God’s pursuits of restoring our world, but they’ve missed out on God’s desire to restore our bodies.

That’s just one more reason why I run.

Check out all the other posts on VOCATION, RESTORATION, CREATION, and CROSS-BEARING.

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Growing up as a senior pastor’s oldest son I’ve seen the style of local churches change. It would not surprise anyone to here me say I think many churches get caught up in “what’s working.” And it is with this type of thinking we have our church building Christian culture.

We go to church to be fed, expecting great music and great teaching while our kids are entertained enough to want to come back.

As more people come to the church, the church begins to expand its staffing, building size, and amount of ministries. In turn, the expectations rise as to how effective the church can be at providing better music, better teaching, and better childcare because after all, people’s money should be used in an effective way.

In reality, none of this is bad in and of itself, but it paints a picture of an unhealthy cycle most churches and believers have been living within, especially in America. Thousands, maybe millions of people have come to know Christ through the church building culture of the late 1900s and early 2000s. I believe God has a better mentality in mind, one that doesn’t abandon the role of the local church, but sees its role transformation to be a catalyst for cultural engagement.

God desires to use us in his mission to engage our world. We have been baptized and called into the mission.

The church is now being sent into the world through vocation, restoration, and creation in order to selflessly announce the reign of God in this world.

Any thoughts as we wrap up this series?

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The last key area Christ leads us into cultural engagement is through cross-bearing. This is in reference to Jesus’ teaching to his disciples in Luke 9 when he says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it” (Luke 9:23-24).

Jesus’ demands of us are not surface level changes and they are not easy because they involve an immense sacrifice most are unwilling to give. He gave his life, in order that those who follow him would give their lives as well. Jesus’ atonement is not simply a gift of a better life or even eternal life, it carries consequence for our lives now as well.

The selfishness and me-first attitude of culture is often represented well within the walls of churches and believers everywhere. Those who do not know Christ will easily pick up on our selfish desires for converts if these three previous areas of focus (vocation, restoration, and creation) become acquisitive methods.

This last area of focus is the most important and is really where it all begins. CS Lewis hits on this in his book First and Second Things when he says, “You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only but putting first things first.”

For Christians the first thing is for us to follow Jesus with all we have, holding nothing back. Once we begin to make this first thing our top priority, all the other ways we engage the world around us will more easily fall in place.

(I’ll conclude the series in the next post)

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Christians have long been known to condemn culture when it does not reflect their beliefs and values system.

Jerry Falwell didn’t like Teletubbies, Terry Jones didn’t like the Quran, and Pat Robertson doesn’t like gay marriage. Sure these are extreme examples of Christian leaders who many Christians don’t appreciate, but these are the stories making national news.

There is a fundamental flaw to this approach of condemning the culture: nothing changes.

Most people refer to culture simply as the air we breathe. Culture is just the reality of the world around us.

As is most often the case, condemning a piece of culture only ends up bringing it more exposure and value, while making the condemner newsworthy enough to look foolish. Truly, “the only way to change culture is to create more of it” (Andy Crouch). Culture is not changed by reversing trends, it is changed by creating something new.

Don’t like what you see in the world today? Create something better.

I love the picture Gabe Lyons paints on the creation of culture: “The next Christians are fast at work creating good culture. In doing so, they aren’t just reconstructing what’s broken; they are adding on a new dimension in the places they’ve been called to—restoring the truth, goodness, and beauty that’s been lost.”

Creation of culture which reflects who God is shows itself by truth-telling, goodness, and beauty.

Michelangelo said that when it comes to culture we “critique by creating.”

It is next to impossible to know which creation will change the world as we know it. But ultimately God’s people have an opportunity to shape the culture in ways they rarely have before.

(Next post: Cross-bearing)

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Spend any time analyzing the world we live in today and it becomes so apparent we live in a broken and hurting world. People are amazingly talented at masking this hurt and pain, especially in America, but the endless stories of death and destruction on the evening news says all that needs to be said about the state of our world.

Rather than engaging this brokenness with care and hope, Christians are known to retreat to their churches to worship and judge the world outside those church walls.

One thing we learn from Jesus’ earthly ministry was that he focused so much of his time on bringing hope and restoration to people with broken lives. We see this with the woman at the well in John 4, the man with leprosy in Matthew 8, the woman caught in adultery in John 8, the Roman centurion in Luke 7, and with Zacchaeus in Luke 19. And really I could highlight many other situations as well. Jesus had engaged in their lives to restore them. In some cases this was a spiritual restoration, in others it was a physical restoration that carried a spiritual meaning. Churches are well known for caring about the spiritual needs of people, but few churches have been involved in restoring the physical needs of people.

Christians are called to take the mantle from Jesus to continue the act of restoring a broken world. The difficulty of restoring this world is the encounter we have with sin, because we will have to fight the urge to correct it. Paul, throughout his ministry in Asia Minor, engaged with unredeemed people stuck in sinful patterns of life. “He wasn’t there to close the deal and lead everyone in the sinner’s prayer, and he didn’t condemn them all to hell…Paul trusted God’s ability to fulfill his will in his own timing” (Gabe Lyons describing Paul’s ministry).

When it comes to cultural restoration I think of my friends at The Mentoring Project and the work they are doing to restore the lives of fatherless boys through mentoring. John Sowers, the President of The Mentoring Project, would often say to me: “How can we not do something?”

(I also came across this interesting post on Mr. Rogers being a restorer)

This is truly what restoration is all about: recognizing a brokenness and need in our world and doing something to restore it.

As restorers of today’s world we have the opportunity to bring hope to people and situations that are completely broken.

How have you seen Christians involved in the restoration of our world?

(Next post: Creation)

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I sense that in today’s churches many view pastoral leadership as the pinnacle of Christ following.

I like how Steve Bishop put it in a post I read over the weekend: “All Christians are involved in full-time Christian ministry. There is no such thing as part-time Christians. Never use the term ‘full-time Christian ministry’ to describe only those with a role in the church or a church-related activity.”

Gabe Lyons says, “For decades, many Christians have thought the only place they could impact the Kingdom was through serving in their local churches…But the faithful are coming alive as a new generation of Christians are making the real connections between their faith and their work…Imagine what is possible when Christians throughout the church recover this sense of vision for their work in the world.”

This framework sets up our discussion on vocation and how it relates to the missio Dei (The Mission of God). Our world doesn’t need more pastors, it needs more disciples who as teachers, doctors, lawyers, athletes, and entrepreneurs are living out the missio Dei.

Frederick Buechner is well known for saying that our calling is where “our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” As Christians find this calling within their vocations, we’ll see more churches reach a new level of “success” because it is no longer just the pastor pursuing faithful Christian calling.

I believe we must start with a healthy understanding of giftedness and value within the Body of Christ. 1st Corinthians 12 speaks directly to this issue as it shares on the various gifts given within the body. Paul also shares that each part makes up the whole body and is dependent on the other parts. This values each person and each gift as vital, not placing certain gifts and people above others.

We must see ourselves, not as working at jobs, but rather we are being called to serve in the missio Dei with our gifts through our vocations.

No longer is the church the center of disciples serving, the world is.

Christianity has often been thought of as something valued for an hour or two on Sundays, but the people making a difference with their faith understand their vocation to be integral to their faith.

(Next post: Restoration)

There is no disputing this fact.

Talk to most any person who would not call themselves Christian and they would say Christians are most known for being hypocritical, judgmental, overly political, and insensitive. In today’s world perception is reality, and whether those negative words reflect all churches or people we know, they do paint a picture of reality for how Christians are viewed today.

Christians have long struggled with ways to engage in their world without copying, critiquing, or avoiding culture. And judging by the common negative perceptions, we’ve clearly done a bad job.

This isn’t a call for Christianity to become more popular in culture, but it is an opportunity to open the door to spiritual transformation through Christ to a culture looking for hope and life.

Maybe all this time we’ve misunderstood our call to engage the cultures around us, after all many of us have to wonder whether our engagement with culture will ever amount to any good.

I want to focus on the ways I believe God is calling us to bind ourselves to the culture around us without losing our distinct mark as followers of Christ. Andy Crouch says, “Culture finds its true potential when God blesses it with his presence and offers it in transformed form as a gift back to humanity.”

We must see the great opportunity here, as God uses us to usher in his presence and his reign in our world. God calls the church (both local churches and individuals which make up the church universal) to engage with culture through working (vocation), restoring, creating, and cross-bearing.

Any feedback?

(I’ll focus on these areas of vocation, restoration, creation, and cross-bearing in the coming days.)

(Part Two)

As I’ve written about before, I’m currently reading The Gospel in a Pluralist Society by Lesslie Newbigin. He wrote about this idea of “being on mission” back in 1989, long before it was the latest way to describe how churches were operating. And I believe his words are of great exhortation and encouragement for us:

“To repent is to do the U-turn of the mind which enables you to believe what is hidden from sight, the reality of the presence of the reign of God in the crucified Jesus. To be baptized is to be identified with, incorporated into that which Jesus did when he went down into the waters of the Jordan as one of a company of sin-burdened men and women and so inaugurated a mission which would lead him through his great encounter with the principalities and powers to its victorious climax in the cross. To be baptized is to be incorporated into the dying of Jesus as to become a participant in his risen life, and so to share in his ongoing mission to the world. It is to be baptized into his mission” (page 117, emphasis mine).

This mission is for you and me.

3 funny (or odd) things about that:

1. Most hymns aren’t really “hymns.” Hymns in a musical sense have no chorus, but a lot of “hymns” do.
2. The Bible speaks about singing a new song, and I don’t think we should take that too literally but it is a helpful reminder that even the best things in life become meaningless when done over and over without purpose.
3. Everyone’s “hymns of the faith” list is different.

In my years of doing youth worship in high school all the way to today I’ve ran into many people who think songs written long ago have better theology than those written today.

Considering I’m a relatively young guy, I find that opinion to be a shot against my generation which, as a whole, isn’t hymn crazy. But I also don’t think it is true.

I’ve talked before about horrible lyrics in today’s praise and worship music, but I there is plenty around that is rooted in Scripture and has a richness to it. I ran across a song by a newer artist named John Mark McMillan this past week that I think is a great example of this this richness. It was a song he set out to write in the style of a hymn (though it does have a chorus, so like “How Great Thou Art” it isn’t really a hymn).

I’ve often found hymns to be written with a confusing language to those lacking in some theological or Biblical training. And this song (“Death In His Grave”) has enough of that to need explanation after a listen through. Some people call that a Biblical/theological richness, others just call it confusing. Here’s the chorus (check out the whole song lyrics here):

On Friday a thief
On Sunday a King
Laid down in grief
But awoke holding keys
Of Hell on that day
The first born of the slain
The Man Jesus Christ
Laid death in his grave

(watch the video here)

I guess my whole point is this:

It is Jesus we are after in our churches. At least I hope so. Plenty of the songs being written today draw us closer to Jesus through lyrics, just as much as hymns do. Hymns are not Canon. Neither are contemporary worship songs.

It is not the songs we should care about, it is the God we sing about in the songs that matters.

Eternal damnation.

This is often how Christians refer to hell. We kind of hold this over the head of those who don’t believe. “They’re going to burn forever,” we say.

I’ve been thinking a lot about hell. What it is and what it will be like for those who enter it. Is it really just this fiery pit that people live in for eternity?

Granted we get this imagery from the Bible. So it does have some merit but I can’t help but wonder if it all isn’t a little deeper than just a bunch of people in a fire.

What makes heaven such a perfect place is experiencing the fullness of God’s presence. The joy, love, wisdom, and all other attributes of God that we can grasp in their entirety. This is what makes heaven, heaven. It isn’t the gold streets people like to think of. None of that really matters.

So what makes hell a horrible place isn’t the fire, it is the lack of God’s presence in that place. When I think of passages such as Luke 16 and Romans 1:24 there is outlined a hell that is more about the focus on self, denial, blaming others, and blindness. These attributes of hell overshadow that of fire and damnation.

Tim Keller defines hell by saying, “hell is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a trajectory into infinity.”

C.S. Lewis says this about hell:

“There are only two kinds of people—those who says “Thy will be done” to God or those to whom God in the end says, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.”

True joy can only come from God.

(A lot more could be said on this subject, I know. There are books written about it. But this should be a helpful starting place for us.)

What do you think about hell?

(Photo: Ken Musgrave)