Questions...(Youth Specialties Review)

This last weekend I went down to San Diego to the National Youth Workers Convention put on by Youth Specialties. Before going down I was looking forward to spending time with friends and learning about youth and ministering to them; excited to see how God would then continue to shape my philosophy of youth ministry during this weekend. I never expected to have my heart be challenged in such an amazing, yet difficult way.

During the Saturday morning general session, an all-too-familiar speaker walked on stage, Francis Chan. I had heard Chan many times before during my undergrad at APU, and yes, at times had felt the spirit move through his words but never like this. Chan had gone through a type of crisis of faith over the last year bringing him to the point of thinking of leaving his church and questioning if he was really a “Christian at all” and taking a leave of absence for a while. Confronted with questions of his own spirituality in light of Jesus’ message of the Kingdom, he wondered why if Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves why he was not and why his church as a whole was not. He wondered why when he and most of the American Church when coming face to face with the message of the Sermon on the Mount or Matthew 25 side stepped it by over-spiritualizing it, and not taking what Jesus said with much seriousness. This brought Chan to the conclusion that he could not truly be in love with God if he was not truly a follower of Jesus; which defined as a person who followed Jesus’ commands. Chan believed that the role of a Christian was to urge others to follow them as they followed after Jesus, as Paul did and urged many to do.

After coming to this conclusion Chan realized that he could no longer live his life as he had for so many years. Therefore, Chan sought to become what we believed was a true Christian, or follower of Jesus. After a few months Chan was asked to return to his old church by the leadership. Chan said he would think about it but only if they made a few changes in the way they ran the church. One such change was to stop a multi-million dollar building project which included constructing a new sanctuary. Chan instead believed that the church should spend much less money and construct an outside ampi-theater where the church would worship together outside, instead of inside a building. Another change Chan requested, believing that the church should love their neighbors as themselves; the church must give away 50% of all tithes to the church to help those in need.

Over the last couple of months the Spirit of God as been moving within me in a troubling way. It is troubling because God has been convicting me personally that neither myself or my communities of friends are doing much to live out the Kingdom in our lifestyle. I have really come to question if many of my, or my friends’, weekly and daily lifestyle practices are Kingdom driven or even remotely Christian driven, if you will allow me to make this distinction in light of Chan’s talk. As of late, and in light of Chan’s talk I have been asking myself questions such as: if buying $170 dollars worth of beer and liquor to celebrate a friend’s marriage is Christian Kingdom living? Is living in a house for two plus years but still not knowing your neighbors’ names Christian Kingdom living? Is spending a majority of my money on CD’s and going out on weekends Christian Kingdom living? Is not calling out a friend for hooking up with a random girl or encouraging a friend to do it Christian Kingdom living? Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying these things are or are not “good” or “okay,” I am just wondering why I or my community has not been asking these questions, because we should be! If we are not and we are just sitting around talking about the Kingdom we have bought into the lie that words are enough. To quote Thrice, “what have we (myself and my community) to show except the promises we never kept.” We have in fact let ourselves down. Can my life, can our lives, be more than just “flashing lights and sounds?” If “rhetoric can’t raise the dead,” I, and we, should be “sick of always talking when there is no change.” Let me, let us become followers of Christ. Let us become leaders. Let us be able to say as Paul did, “follow me as I follow Christ.” Let us see the Kingdom here, now.

Just Moments in Time

For the past two years I feel that much of my life has been run based on some future event that is going to happen. Whether it is the end of a quarter, the end of a season in life, the end of a job, or the end of a day, much of my life has been lived impatiently looking forward. I have let myself become bound to the measure of clocks, watches, computers screens or calendars. There have been nights and days where I have dwelled on the future so much that I become paralyzed for doing anything at that current moment. I have felt that if a current moment of life comes, all will somehow come into order: my friendships, relationship with God, relationship with Katie, parent stuff, money. I have been living in the future, not within a current moment of life. Don’t get me wrong, there are times that I feel that I am right in that moment as if all rest of time is insignificant, but over all it pains me to say that this is not true for most of the moments in my life.

As of today I know longer want to be constricted to the impatience which has ruled my life of much of the last two years. I want to live my life in patience. Not the type of patience that is waiting for a future event, like a child patiently waiting for the morning to arrive on Christmas Eve. I want to live a life of patience that calls me to fight against the grain of my natural impulse. As Nouwen points out in his book Compassion, a life of patience enables us to “see, hear, taste, and smell as fully as possible the inner and outer events of our lives,” to “enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us” as we “give up control…entering into a unknown territory.” The patience that Nouwen speaks of reveals a new time, a time of grace. This time is not measured by units or numbers but it is lived in fullness. These moments of time are not necessarily happy, joyful, painful, or marked with struggle. These moments of time are experience in the fullness of there importance. Every moment in life is important, I…we, can no longer afford to live lives of impatience. May you and I live every moment to its fullness, experiencing everything each moment holds within it for the purposes of His glory that is now but is to come…

Is true community possible in the "now but not yet"

It has been a while since I posted...much of the reason for that this because for much of the last 2 years I feel that my life has been a weird balance of fragmented constant change. Moving from quarter to quarter, living pay check to pay check, moving from close friend to distant friendship, and driving place to place. I rarely have the time to just sit and process what is going on as I run through my life. As Katie can confess, this has lead to many nights where I lay on my back, in tears, trying to talk out what I am feeling.
It is about once a year that I really get the time to sit and process life...these last 2 weeks have been this time. During the first 3 weeks of Sept. Fuller usually stops enough while job stuff is in transtion that it allows me enough time to process what the last year has held. Last year, these 3 weeks ended with an amazing trip to CO, spending much needed time with good friends giving me enough strength to run towards the distance finish line. This year, while I have enjoyed not having school or work for the last 2 weeks, I don't feel as if I have recovered enough to keep me going. The only day during these last 2 weeks that I feel that I have really have been refreshed was the day I spent celebrating my 2 year relationship with Katie. (Side Note: I love you babe! and thank you for everything during these last 2 years!) Many of the last 2 weeks have been filled with me sitting on my butt...doing nothing, which if you know me is a quick way to kill me. I thrive off of community, doing, friendship, and conversation with people I love and who love me. My community has of late shrunk to a roommate whom I love, a girlfriend whom I don't know what I would do without, a friend who I talk to on the phone from Central Cali, friends whom I feel I don't really know anymore, what I can make out of the few friends from college I still have and what I can piece together with the new friends who are still to new to amount to much as of now. For some people this might seem like a normal group of friends but for me it is barely enough to survive. Maybe this is what life has come to. It seems that if the days of dreaming of a community of friends has drifted away. As I sat in church today and listened to my pastor Donn, who has been an amazing blessing in my life over the last 2 years, talked about community, I sat there wondering if a biblical community is really possible in our culture and world today? I long for a day where my married friends don't fall into some invisible married cassim of no return. I long for a day where people won't come home and sit in front of a box where they entertain themselves to death. I long for a day where people talk face to face and not read about each other on a blog sites or myspace pages. I long for a day where families of singles, marrieds, kids, and elders can come together weekly in fellowship. Maybe this hope is fleeting? I would like to think not, but it seems that the possibility of a world like this has been drifting further and further away in the "now but not yet."

What happens when the Church and Business Strategies mix

At Fuller Seminary I constantly get asked two questions: Where I did my undergrad? And what was my major in undergrad? As I quickly answer the first question proudly, Azusa Pacific University, when I come to the answer of the second question I almost have to force myself not to mutter it under my breath, Marketing. The silence in the air speaks a thousand words. The silence is usually then broken with an awkward, “really?”

As look back on why I chose Marketing as my major in undergrad I usually have the same response, “really?” It has been two years since I graduated from A.P.U. and since I started Fuller Seminary the fall quarter after I graduated from A.P.U. and what may come to a supervised to some of you, is that I have been indoctrinated with more church/business ties than I ever did at A.P.U. You see it was one reason that I made the move from marketing/business to church ministry was because I couldn’t put together the things I was learning in my mandatory Bible classes with the things I was learning in my Marketing class. It was if Church and Business existed in to different worlds or maybe “spheres,” props to Abraham Kuyper, and they shouldn’t be emerged together. Yet, I soon discovered the world some Biblical studies classes painted for me of how the ideal church or Christian should exist in America is far from anything that it actually looks like. In America lines between the sphere of the church and the sphere of business, which Abraham Kuyper believes should exist, have become blurred more than we would like to think or admit to.

Our current case study A addresses this exact problem. A pastor returning from a pastor’s conference with many new business strategy ideas wants to implement them in his dying elderly church in order to save the church from becoming extinct. In order to do this the pastor feels that the church should translate church/ministry success into quantifiableterms (numbers) that can be measured and analyzed by numbers. All ministries then that do not produce numbers are done away with because they do not fit the strategy of the church, to maximize the church numbers.

So is it wrong for the pastor to want to implement business strategies into his dying church in order to try to save it? I wonder if I frame the question in a different way it might bring to light what I believe are the really questions at hand. Is it okay for the pastor to try to save the dying church, or should the pastor let the church die along with the last elderly member of the church? I don’t think so. Is it wrong for the pastor to want to bring new live into the church in the forms of new members? I don’t think so. I think the question we have to ask though is, does the strategy the pastor wanting to implement belong in the sphere of commerce only or can this strategy also belong in the sphere of the Church?

You see it is not bad that the pastor wants to try to revive his church through bring new life to the church through new members but I think the pastor get into troubled waters when he bring a strategy that was developed in the commerce sphere of the world and implement it into the sphere of the church as the only measurable way to determine if a ministry or church is successful. Ministry should never be based only on quantifiable terms or the numbers of people we can bring to a church or ministry, as it is in the commerce sphere. Yet, the pastor has some things right, sometimes it is necessary for the church to evaluate if a ministry is being successful or not based on certain terms, it just shouldn’t be just quantifiable terms. I don’t have the space or the time to come up with a list of other terms a church can measure the successfulness of their ministries but it is important to realize that there are times when we, the church, need to take a critical look at our ministries in order to evaluate if we are using the resources of our church in the best way we can. Therefore I cannot support the pastor if he was willing to implement a church strategy outlined above.

To answer the last question, what would I tell the pastor if I was on staff at the church, I would tell him my option discussed above. Sometimes in churches we like to play along with things as if arguments or disagreements should not happen with the church, as if we should just go along with what our boss or pastor says because after all he is the pastor. The Church needs to be place where we can discuss, in a loving way, our disagreements. After all that is what Paul did when he confronted Peter and James over the issue of Gentile and Jewish relations detailed in Acts and Galatians. If it came to the point where the pastor and myself strongly disagreed and we could not work it out and I was forced to leave the church because of it then at least I stood my ground because if I didn’t I would be giving up on one of my strongest convictions, that we have to be very careful when the sphere of the church and the sphere of commerce emerge together.

The Theology of the Indie Rock Scene

There is almost on other feeling in the world. You have been standing, or sitting depending on the venue, for what feels like hours, yet you don’t leave because something inside of you is keeping you their. Then all of a sudden the lights go out, everyone in the room quiets down. If you listen hard enough from the back of the stage your hear something. As it comes into focus the words ring out as if they are the clearest thing you have ever hear, “Run, Devil run. Run, Devil run.” The words are chanted over and over again getting louder and louder as three figures approach the stage. They continue to sing as the rest of the band joins them on stage, one by one picking up each of their instruments. Then nothing the band stands on stage quiet. The only thing you can hear is the random screams of “yeah!” from the crowd. Then, at what seems at the prefect time Jenny Lewis, the lead signer, strums her guitar and the experience beings.
While not all indie rock concerts begin like a Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins shows and bands all do have very similar details that make them quit similar to Biblical figures and stories. For one by it’s own definition indie music comes from the margins of pop culture. Indie music also is speaking prophetically into the wider culture of the world, like my Biblical prophets of old. While some might argue this is not the case for all indie bands, and I would not disagree, there are many indie bands where this is the case. Take for instance bands that are leading the way in the indie music scene such as Manchester Orchestra, Pedro the Lion, mewithoutYou, Bright Eyes, Cursive and the band motioned above Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins.
Indie music falls in long lines of great musical movements that have come from the margins such as Jazz, Rap and Punk. Yet, unlike these music genres indie music takes many different musical forms and styles. Somehow dispite the diversity of sounds indie music has created a community of individuals much like that of early movements in the Jazz, Rap and Punk scenes. Take the band Broken Social Scene for instance. This is a band made up of different musicians, all from different music genres, who come together to tour and play music just because of their love for the music and their common social bound.
We though live in an interesting time in music history, because of the rise of music down loading, web sites like myspace.com and purevolume.com, individuals search for something deeper than pop music brings and societies over stimulation of media; the indie music scene is finding itself growing in leaps and bounds. As the growth of indie music communities continue to grow, musicians from around the nation are joining together just to play music they love and music that challenges the norm.
Jazz, Rap and Punk not only find their musical roots from the margins but have historically been partnered with social movements. Yet unlike the urban start of many marginal musical movements indie music comes from suburban areas of our nation. Other than the love music another thing that brings indie musicians and participants together as a community is their stance against the norm of pop culture and the injustice of the world. Members of the indie music scene believe that there are more important things in the world going on. Therefore they look behond their selves, their views on sex, drugs, or religion and join together to fight a common enemy. Indie music has created a community of bands and individuals who are declaring, we are unsatisfied with the norm of society and are working to change things. While all of many indie bands like Bright Eyes and Cursive might be creating social noise and doing little to back it up in practice. There are bands such as mewithoutYou who are leading the way for all indie bands in the scene. Many members of the band mewithoutYou are apart of social organizations that working for social change such as mewithoutYou’s singer Aaron who is apart of the Simple Way Community. By participating in not only prophetic enouncement but social organizations mewithoutYou is declaring, don’t only sing about the social issues of the world but work to change those issues.
As indie communities and bands around the world come together they are marching to a different drum. A drum whos beats sound familiar to those of the early church. Stand against the norm, declare the coming of something different, hear our words because they are important and do not stand in our way because we are about something larger than the America dollar.

Christian College Community

It has been almost two years since I graduated from Azusa Pacific University where I did my undergraduate work. I will never forget that day because I don’t think their will ever be another such day in my life. There I sat in a crowd of people, of which some I would call friends while other acquaintances, knowing these times might be the last few moments in my life that I would be “doing life with” this group of people.

It was six years ago when I shown up on the APU’s campus on moving day. The campus was filled with screaming college students ready to welcome me to my new “home”, crying parents, local business vying for my dollars which they hoped I would give them over next couple of years, and new college freshman and transfers who were filled with so many emotions and thoughts that they could not hope to articulate in one coherent sentence. The one thing that still stands out to me about that day was that no matter where I went everyone was friendly, welcoming me to my new community.

As the weekend festivities ended and college went on as I guess colleges does, I started to establish a core group of friends that I hung out with weekly. We ate together, went to shows together, ran around in short shorts soaking wet in 45 degree whether together, had conversations about life until 4 in the morning together, put a large “BLACK OUT” shirt on the BIOLA Jesus together, suffered through finals weeks together, and just did life together for four years. I lament that their will probably be on other time in my life that I will live in community as I did during my undergrad college years. The structure of our current society doesn’t make community living as easily as I would hope because our society has become way to individualistic and privatized.

This is not right! As humans we have been created to live in community with each other. If we can declare that we are made in God’s image, and that God exists as a divine community than we must declare as God’s image that we are created exist in community with one another.

Christian college community was all nice and good and I have to admit there was something special about living in a community with people that are experiencing similar things as you are, it still creates a false image of Biblical community. Biblical community should look more multi-generational then a Christian college community usually does. As Christians we should not take forsake the biblical model of multi-generational community for what might seem easier or more convenient for us. We need to be community with those who have experienced what we have not, where we can pour into the lives of our youth and children, and where we can sit and hear the stories of our elderly. We need to be in a community were multi-generations can live together and truly be a picture of our savior to the world around us.

As I said above, it has been two year since all of my college friends went our separate ways and while I still talk with some and live with others, my group of friends, that I did life together with during college is gone. I still hope that one day I might live in a community like I did in college, yet hopefully this time it will look a lot more like Biblical community then it did was I was in college.

The last 11 Weeks

Well, I have come to the end of another quarter. This was probably the busiest quarters that I have had a Fuller. I not only was taking 10 units this quarter but the reading and projects for my classes required a lot of extra time. For my Youth Outreach and Evangelism class I had to do 20 hours of observation of youth in a secular area. The youth had to be non-church students. After the 20 hours of observation I then had to lead 2, 30 minute focus groups in order to find out their thought on their family, school, friends, and what they did during their free time. For my Ethics class, Discipleship in a Secular Society, I had to read like 1,400 pages of reading in 10 weeks plus do 5 hours of outside volunteer work, which I did at Harambee Ministries.

Other than taking classes I was busy with at my church. Noah, one of our volunteer leaders, and I started a senior guys Bible study. I feel that the Bible study is going very well. Other than that, church stuff has been crazy with our Mammoth Winter Trip and other drama that will go unmentioned for the online audience. Three weeks ago we started our new sermon serious in which we will be going through the Sermon on the Mount. Janelle and I are very excited to go through all of the great topics and will come up as we go through this serious. We both feel that this serious of messages will help to bring new prospectives to our students as well as help to shape them as they seek to discover what this journey with God is all about. Finally, last Saturday I went with other members of Baseline, the church I am apart of, to a seminar at Fuller. Basline was one of 17 churches invited this all day conference on "Multi-Generational Ministry." I am very excited to see how Baseline starts to implement what we learned this weekend. Over all, I feel that these last 11 weeks have been really amazing. God has been and is doing incredible things in the students lives.

On a more personal level, life has been going well. I have learned a lot in the last few weeks, which can be both good and frustrating. This is definitely a time of preparation in my life. I know that in the next couple of months I will have to make some decisions that will affect my life greatly in the next couple of coming years. I pray that God gives me grace and guidance for I have no other idea how I will be able to make these decisions.

I know I haven't posted as much as I would have liked to over the last few weeks. Hopefully over the next couple days I hope to post more of my thoughts as I process a lot of what has been going through my mind as of late. The two posts that follow below are sections of two papers I wrote this quarter. I just wanted to post them to put them out there. I feel they reveal important information and I also just wanted to see what people thought of my ideas. I hope all you my friends are doing well, may God bless you as you are a blessing to others.