Both A Stranger And A Neighbor

In Luke 10:25-37, Jesus has a conversation with a man who is asking him about what constitutes being a good neighbor, as we're directed to be in the Great Commandment - "Love your neighbor as you love yourself!" We don't know the man's specific intentions with his questions, but it seems as though he's trying to get out of doing something he doesn't particularly want to do. 

The link below is to a sermon I preached on this subject on 2/16/15. In this audio I seek to answer two questions: 

 1) Who, really, IS my neighbor? 

 2) What does it mean to be a good neighbor?

https://app.box.com/s/oub2hh8jlx5trz4o6dfkgco4ymqizs1k

 

Some Thoughts on Women and their Role in Ministry (from Amy)

Women's roles in ministry is a big topic. It's one that I really became more keenly aware of in college when I chose to attend a Christian university affiliated with the Church of Christ. I've heard many people say things like "My parents said I could be whatever I wanted to be." or "My Dad was the head of our house, and he made all the decisions." I think in many cases, our upbringing shapes our view on women and their roles. Those two statements essentially exemplify two extremes. I know some friends who experienced the former who feel very empowered to go conquer the world. And then I met some lovely girls in college who were (just keeping it real here) paying thousands of dollars for a Home Economics degree in hopes of meeting a husband and staying home. (Note: I have no issue with that goal. I just think paying thousands of dollars at a private university for it may not be the best use of funds.) For the record, I believe marriage is a partnership and that if it's operating in a Godly way, both members get a voice in the decisions and will lovingly come to a conclusion even when they don't agree.

In my case, my parents very well may have talked to me about being whatever I wanted to be, but it's not what sticks out. I knew I was supposed to go to college - that much was clear. And I also remember my dad steering me towards a career that was in line with my talents. He may have wanted to me to make more money than the career path I was planning, but it just felt like he was trying to give me good life advice. (For the record, I'm glad I listened. I think teachers are some of our world's heroes, but I know for sure I am not meant to be one. That was the path my young mind originally had planned on.)

As I entered college at a traditional Church of Christ school, I realized what a big issue the role of women in ministry could be. This denomination, among many others like it, traditionally places some significant limits on the roles of women. To be fair, some of the more contemporary "CofC" churches have loosened up on this stance significantly - for which I applaud them - but there are rules at some churches that the only teaching role a women can fill is to teach boys in Sunday School up until a certain age. Otherwise, they would be "exercising authority over a man" - stunning.

As James and I think about the church plant, our bylaws, and the role of women specifically, I'm struck most by looking at how Jesus himself treated women. One of the first women he met was Anna, a prophet. He forgives and blesses the woman who covers his feet with perfume and kisses them. There's the woman he healed simply because she touched his robe, and women were the ones that first learned of Jesus' resurrection. This was all during a cultural time where the men dominated society! Jesus' treatment of women differed from the cultural norm of his time.

I work full time for an accounting firm as a Finance Director. I am blessed to get to work from home unless I'm traveling, and I have the flexibility to go meet a friend for coffee on occasion if my meeting schedule allows it - it often does. Some have questioned my job and whether I can be an effective church planter's wife with a job like that. I have even been quoted statistics of how many church plants fail if the wife has a career. Here's what I know. I know that my job is something I hold with an open hand. God can have it or change it - anytime he wants. If he asked me to quit it tomorrow, I'd quit tomorrow. For right now, though, I see my job as an enormous blessing handed to me directly from him. I really love the people I work with and what I'm doing. In fact, I've never loved my job more. That's not to say it's not hard or there aren't hard days, of course, but what job worth doing doesn't come with some hard days? In the midst of my demanding job, God is still giving me opportunities to meet new people, invite them to dinner or coffee, and build relationships. Imagine how much more I'll be able to do that when I'm not living 45 minutes from those people! And the true blessing of my job in this season is the financial freedom it gives us to be able to focus all of James' efforts on the church plant itself. We consider it a true blessing that he doesn't have to go get a full time job and try to do church planting on the side, as many church planters are forced to do. This will make a huge difference in both his ability to concentrate on doing ministry and developing relationships with people, as well as continuing to be involved as a father and husband.

I just attended "If: Gathering" this weekend with some friends. (Have you heard of this? If not, I encourage you to check it out. You can listen to the replay at ifgathering.com. Actually, by the time I'll post this, you can't. You have to buy it now. But you should.) It was a conference for women held in Austin that live streamed to groups all over the nation and world. The theme was around faith this year, and the teaching was out of Joshua. I will attempt to eloquently sum up my thoughts, but first let me start by giving you my favorite quotes.

• From Jennie Allen: If we're asking the questions "Am I enough?", "Will I be safe?" and "What will it cost?", then we're in the wrong book completely - the wrong narrative. This may be a hard reality, but it's so so true. We're NOT enough. But God is enough. It won't necessarily be safe. And it may well cost everything. Those aren't the questions. The story is about God - not us. How can he use us to dangerously affect the Kingdom for him?
• From Jen Hatmaker: God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good. We know we believe this in the day, but we find out if we believe it in the night. 
• Also from Jen: Faith is not the formula to get the good stuff, it IS the good stuff.
• Still Jen: It's safe to be faithful to a faithful God.
• Still Jen: Faith doesn't erase insecurity, doubt, suffering or fear...it just overcomes them.
• From Ann Voskamp: He crafts the beauty of women...refines you, defines you, remakes you, renames you: Beloved.
• Also Ann: Forgiveness is really forgiveness when forgiving the unforgivable.
• Still Ann: Woe is us for comparing our race to another's race when we are to be running for God.
• From Vivian Mubani: We have a limited view of God when our friendships are monocultural. (LOVE this.)
• From Christine Caine: Being faithful doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you're more full of faith than fear. (Think feeya. She's Australian, mate.)
• Also Christine: The famous 7 last words of the church: We've never done it that way before!
• From Bianca Olthoff: Results are God's responsibility, response is ours.
• Also from Bianca: Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean God didn't promise it to you or that it doesn't exist. You just don't possess it yet.
• Still Bianca: Just because your progress isn't obvious doesn't mean your faith isn't working.

Our small group discussion was so good - really hitting on the hard questions. Things like: How can you trust a God who didn't promise us a lack of suffering? The answer? You can't. I think God didn't make that promise to us for a reason. You don't trust in the lack of suffering or good circumstances. The trust is that he will be there to help you overcome them. And the trust is in his larger plan and that he is some how, some way, working it out for good. We also talked about getting to a place where we want what God wants more than we want what we want. This is a daily - sometimes multiple times a day - question. Can we constantly relinquish our wants and desires for his? Such a simple question with such a hard answer.

And there was such a good discussion on race. Dear God, please ensure our new church is diverse. Not even just racially, but socioeconomically, politically, all of it. What I love so much is that even with our small community group, there is already clear diversity. I pray so much that it continues. I don't want a church that looks and is all exactly like me. We are made strong in our diversity. May we be leaders in the conversation on improved race relations in this country.

And then we had such a great discussion in our small group about the purpose God has given us as women. One of my friends heard a comment on the radio from a Christian woman that said: Behind every great Christian man is a good Christian woman. While that might sometimes be true, Lynn Hybels made a great point of how so much of the suffering in the world is experienced by women and children. We all have a purpose in joining God's kingdom to love the marginalized and those who are suffering. Also, if Jesus took time to recognize and honor women, it leads me to the conclusion that women's roles in ministry are not to just be the invisible Christian women behind the great Christian men. God puts specific purpose inside us all - man or woman.

Which leads me to our last main conversation topic. What if we don't know what our "purpose" is yet?? What if we feel it's more than the day to day ministry of our families and the local places we may serve? I admit, I'm blessed to know my purpose - for now. But three years ago I didn't know it. And if I'm being super honest, I didn't even want to. I thought I was fine where I was. Thank God, he changed my heart. If you're in a place where you are asking God for your purpose, know that I'm praying he reveals it to you. I have such a heart for all women (and ok, yeah. I guess for the guys, too. Whatever.) to know and live in their God-given purpose. Dear God, may it be so. Amen.

Thinking More Specifically...

For the past couple of years since embarking on this journey, I've read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people, spent countless hours in contemplation and reflection on how I arrived here, and many other hours engaged in conversation with Amy as we sit in the hot tub sipping on a glass of wine. Though the schedule has, at times, been extremely hectic between my responsibilities, her job, our children, and the attempt to develop relationships with lots of different people, it has been a fun and exciting time in our marriage and family too. There are both benefits and distractions that come with lots of reading, but I think, at the end of the day, there are more pros than cons.

One benefit is that I have been continuously challenged in my thinking. My thinking about church. About God. About my salvation and the process that has occurred since. My thinking about people - both those who believe and those who don't. Issues about gender and homosexuality. Issues about the nature of thought and perception. The complexities of communication, on both micro and macro scales. And perhaps most of all, about what in the world God wants to do with me, with Amy and I, with our family, with the new little community group we're a part of since early November, and what he might want to do with our now upcoming church plant.

The fact is that that could look like lots of different things. We had a prayer meeting a couple of nights ago. After laying out a few updates on what we've been up to in the last month, and before we took some time to pray together as a group, a couple of wise and more chronologically experienced members of our group asked some important questions. "What is your plan for this thing, say in 5 or 10 years?" "Have you given any thought to how you'll do church once you start having a regular gathering or church service?" I'll add here that these questions were not meant to stump me or to put me on the spot. These two people had listened to our update, and just spoke what they were thinking, which I appreciate.

After taking a few moments and trying to really wrap my head around both of these questions in order to give a real answer, (as opposed to a pre-packaged and neatly wrapped response) I tried to paint a picture that was neither too specific nor too general. I have found that much of my life in the last two (or ten) years has been spent walking through that tension. Amy and I have dreams and ideas and hopes and wishes for what this might look like in 6 months and 6 years, but absolutely none of those things are poured in concrete. They can't be. There's too much that God has yet to reveal to us. And I think we are learning to be okay with not knowing. So much of our story has been about that work in our hearts. And so much of the story of scripture, particularly related to the development of faith in people, has to do with the principle of "going without knowing".

Control. Security. Predictability. Safety. We've had to leave all of these notions in God's hands. We've had to let go of things. We've had to practice setting things down. And then re-setting them down after we picked them back up in a moment of worry or panic. Only to realize that we had to do it once again when we had picked things back up out of busyness or distraction. And while that hasn't come without some pain and discomfort at times, we can also look back and see that it truly was "for our good". And in that process, God has slowly and purposely and consistently chipped away at some of our old ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. We came across a statement by John R. W. Stott in a book we were reading a couple of weeks ago that really brings this to a sharp point: "To me, the essence of being a radical is being willing to subject one's inherited traditions and conventions to biblical scrutiny."

In that prayer meeting, one of things that I shared was the vision statement for Fringe Church. It has gone through a few permutations over the last 9 months, but I think we may have something solid here:

Love God Wholeheartedly. Love Others Sacrificially. Make Disciples Intentionally.

As I look back at my experience of church over the last number of years, I realize that I have spent time at all three of these things. But if I'm honest, I have viewed these as singular activities or purposes, as though I'm doing one of them in isolation.  I've put my "spiritual activities" into categories. And I've come to two conclusions. 1) If I'm doing something out of a genuine love for God (not to earn his favor, but because I know I am a well-loved son of God already) then it is likely that what I'm doing falls into at least two and possibly all three of these categories. 2) I will not practice any of these three principles accidentally.

Said another way, Jesus and his kingdom must occupy the central space of my life. Imagine your life as a wheel with spokes that spread out from a central hub. If I choose it, I can place myself (my wants, my will, my desires, my priorities) at the center of that wheel. And the spokes of that wheel, as I move through life and the wheel goes around, the pieces of my life that extend out from that center will spin around me, and as a result will all point back at me, and will be representative of the things I value. Each spoke has a different name. Family. Work. Hobbies. Marriage. Children. Church. Jesus. Friends. Laundry. (I don't know about you, but laundry takes an inordinate amount of time for what it really is.)

If, instead, I choose to put Christ at the center of that wheel, make him the hub around which all parts, pieces, and aspects of my life revolve, then the wheel takes on a totally different look. Do you remember "spin art"? It was this toy that had a flat, little table that sat on top of a little motor that made the table spin. You would clip a piece of paper to that table, turn on the little motor, and the paper would go around in circles. And as a burgeoning artist, you would take a squirt bottle of paint and, with supreme caution or reckless abandon, drip different colors onto the paper, making incredible patterns that would be nearly impossible to duplicate if the paper weren't rotating. Whatever paint you put at the center of that spinning piece of paper would spread outwards, and whatever color you used the largest volume of would become the primary color of that new piece of
 art.

The same principle applies here. If we place our selves as the center hub around which our lives spin, then "me" ends up as the primary color on the canvas of our lives. Or, if we put Jesus there, then our lives, whatever spokes of that wheel we might name, start to take on a Jesus-hue. They start to sound like, look like, feel more and more and more like Jesus. He will begin to permeate all of our activities, and thoughts, and priorities. And this is what I want. I want it for me. I want it for my marriage. I want this for my children. I want this for the church we will plant. I don't want Jesus to just be one spoke, one hour a week, one set of activities - one of many priorities. I want him to be the hub around which my life revolves. In 50 years or a week, whenever the days of my life come to their unpredictable end, I want someone who looks at the canvas of my life to see Jesus splattered over it, in every part, piece, and corner.