Tag: Church

Summer with Sojourn

We just wrapped up a 10 week summer experience called “DIG”. We had about 20 students on average (a big week being 25, small about 15), and we had some amazing conversations about integration, virtue, stories, and faith in practice. Also, I was encouraged to see students get more involved at church in various capacities (kids, set up and tear down, etc). We’ve never done something quite like this before…definite win!

Acts, Church, Tension, Beauty, etc

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Acts recently (see yesterday’s post). A common reaction to Acts is to look at all the exciting and crazy things that happen (3000 people joining the movement, healings in Jesus’ name, angels letting people out of jail) and to ask: “Why doesn’t the church look more like this today?”

I can sympathize with that a bit. But, I also am overwhelmed with how little has changed. People fight, disagree over little things, lie, criticize, and quit. The mission is always in danger of getting derailed by something that, in the grand scheme of things, is not all that important.

When I look around today and hear some of the criticisms about the church, I hear, at times, the “We just need to go back to Acts” sentiment. To people who say that, I ask: “Have you been involved in a church lately?”

When you are deeply involved in a community, and when you are a healthy person, you should see both sides of the Acts coin…the good and the bad…the beautiful and the ugly. Churches can be amazing: people finding their way back to God, great stories of transformation, miracles, serving the community, and on and on. But church can also be agonizing: fights, losing the mission, distractions, criticisms, and on and on.

Acts makes it clear that both of these realities are true of the church in a broken world. The challenge for me, as Acts has reminded me, is not to let idealism or cynicism win the day. The beauty is in holding the tension of these two realities. Church is where the miraculous happens and it can break your heart. God help me to live in to that truth.

Links of the Week

Nearly blew up the blog yesterday with the baby news. On to the links:

  1. Peter Carroll thinks you can change the world, Donald Miller tells us why
  2. I’m not a huge NBA fan but I found this article to be fascinating. The pay off comes near the end when the author writes: “Consider the NBA at its very best,” but the best line comes in paragraph three: “The stars who win championships allow themselves to be criticized and coached.”
  3. A familiar sounding story…I love the title “Important Things Are Hard To Do“
  4. Scot McKnight’s look in to the future of college ministry
  5. Seth Godin on whether or not to pay attention to the opinions of others

Reads and Links (Technology Themed)

  1. Brett McCracken on the beauty of being “out of the loop”
  2. Is texting good for relationships?
  3. Nadia Weber on the spiritual practice of saying “No”
  4. Scot McKnight has been doing an excellent review of a book by John Knapp called “How the Church Fails Business People“. Here’s a link to pt 5 and the rest of the series.
  5. Amy’s college pastor, Rhett Smith, published a book recently called “The Anxious Christian.” I’m about 3/4 of the way through it and it is fantastic. Pick up a copy!

Options, Sabbath, and Saying NO

The more I work with students the more overwhelmed I become at the number of options they have to choose from. Literally, everything (class, living situations, activities, what to eat for dinner) is a decision from among multiple options.

Most students don’t struggle with filling up their schedules, they struggle with saying yes and no to the right things.

If I’m being honest, I have the same struggle. Amy and I could be involved in a churchy opportunity (to quote Nacho Libre) every day and/or night of the week (and some weeks we are).

The question is almost never one of finding a good options, it’s trying to figure out, to discern, what is the best option. Many of us solve this problem by saying yes to everything.

Or maybe (if it’s a Facebook event). We all struggle with saying no. Maybe that’s why Jesus said this.

Saying no is important, even vital, for life.

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My friend has been telling about his teenage daughter and the struggle with being “on” all the time. Thanks to phones, Facebook, etc the only time she is ever “off” is when she is asleep.

As a result, the burden of carrying a constant emotional weight can be crushing. They’ve instituted a “no-phone-or-computer-after-8-pm” policy (it’s voluntary but appreciated). I’m trying to do a similar thing. It’s hard.

But it’s a no that opens up the possibility of saying yes to some really good things.

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Sabbath is a Christian practice in saying yes and no. Often, though, it is framed as saying no to work.

It’s more layered than that, though. It’s saying no to finding our identity in work, in production, in achievement, in connection. Walking away from work (or the phone, or the blog, or the inbox) for a time frees us from slavery to those things.

Which is beautiful. But even one more layer down, it is a reminder that the world goes round without me pushing it. People will be ok without me. God is in control.

—–

I stink at saying no. I would much rather just say yes to everything. Have all the experiences I can have. Keep everyone happy. Not miss out on anything.

But I distort my own importance and tell myself (and others) that the world revolves around me if I don’t say no, even to good things.

What do you need to say no to?

“Busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal…not of devotion but of defection.” – Eugene Peterson

On Crowder (A Work of Gratitude)…

During the summer of 1999 I spent my Sunday nights driving over to Santa Cruz to attend a worship gathering called “Graceland”. I had just finished my freshmen year at Pacific. The second half of that year marked the beginning of serious involvement with campus ministry (through InterVarsity) and for the first time in my life, on my own, I was really wrestling with Scripture and Jesus, and what they had to say about my future.

I was beginning to grow in an awareness of a number of things including: the reality that I did not want to do dentistry. also, something was happening, kind of underneath the surface, in the church and in my generation.

I had no language or way to really quantify any of those feelings, but something was stirring and it involved a new way to think about and approach the church.

On one of those nights at Graceland (the predecessor to Vintage Faith Church, led by Dan Kimball and Josh Fox) a strange-looking, skinny dude from Texas stood up to lead worship. He and the band he brought with him played “church music” but this was not like anything I’d ever heard or seen before. It was loud, it was loose, it was improvisational, and, and here’s the kicker, it sounded like the music I liked to listen to.

In other words, here was a band that I might go to bar or a club to watch play songs about girls instead leading me into the worship of a God I was beginning to surrender my life to. As much as I admired Josh Fox’s ability to lead worship, this was completely unlike anything I had ever seen or experienced before.

The David Crowder Band has gone on to accomplish many great things in the last 12 years, they’ve grown to epic proportions and their influence has been tremendous. So, I feel like they are the one thing where I can say “I was there before…”.

DCB has been with me ever since. Their first album “All I Can Say” was copied on a tape and passed around our IV worship team…that album contained a song “Make a Joyful Noise/I WIll Not Be Silent” that became an anthem of sorts for our community.

Their first “major album”, “Can You Hear Us,” became the soundtrack to a senior year filled with difficulties: the death of friends, breakups, fires in the dorms, graduating and saying some of my first big goodbyes. “Our Love is Loud” became the new anthem. Shortly after the dorm fire, I think it was a week later, someone heard about a free concert he was doing in Livermore for a college group there. 5 of us hopped in a car and we were off. Best show ever. Crowder gave me a hug afterwards when I explained some of the stuff going on back on campus.

“Illumination” is, in many ways, one of the inspirations for this blog. Every time I listen to that album I think of my first summer at Mount Hermon, driving to and from Monte Vista, and going to the only Passion event I’ve ever attended. I went because my good friend, Steve Comer, was running lights for the show. Crowder and Giglio talked about raising money to do a free show in Boston. They really wanted to go there because they had a passion (pun intended) for college students and there were 250,000 students in Boston. This was the first time I had ever heard anything about this and I remember thinking: “I need to go there.”

“A Collision” is still the best album front to back of all time, in my opinion. Musically it is a thematic master piece, and theologically it is up there with any of the best books I’ve ever read (I mean, read this). From that point on, Crowder’s been operating at a different level, not only from other worship leaders, but from other musicians, period. I could go on and on about this album. Bottom line: it is incredible, it’s as close to perfect as an album can be.

“Remedy” became the soundtrack for Durango, and I wore that cd out driving to Albuquerque and back.

“Church Music” is a genius concept album, and Amy and I enjoyed singing our lungs out in a New York club on that tour.

Which brings us to the end. You can read more about “Give Us Rest” here and here…all I will say is it is the perfect ending to an amazing run.

Back to the beginning. The first time I saw Crowder, some things were stirring inside of me that I had no language for…years later I can explain it all, I can see the conversations and the books and the lectures and the conferences that have helped provide context for all the change that has taken place in me, in the church, in culture.

But back in 1999 I had no idea about any of that. I only knew something needed to change…both in me and how we communicated Good News to those around us. Crowder absolutely tapped in to that stirring in my soul and opened it up so something new could come in and take root. His music gave expression to that stirring.

We’ve been inextricably intertwined ever since. And while it’s sad to see them go (and even though I’m sure there’s still more to come in one form or another), I feel nothing but gratitude for these guys.

So, thank you DCB. Thank you for making great music (and it really is great music, not just great worship music), for building cathedrals we could step in to, for leading us in worship.

In the end their own lyrics express the genius of what they did so well:

And I’m trying to make you sing//From inside where you believe

Like it’s something that you need//Like it means everything

And I’m trying to make you feel//That this is for real, that life is happening

That it means everything//I’m just trying to make you sing