01.22.08
Posted in The Word at 9:15 pm by terickson
I think that a great deal of the time, what catches up more than anything else is our inability to tell whether other people are trying to bear fruit.
Sure, we know what fruit should look like. But our protestant tradition (or, perhaps, even our catholic tradition) spends so much time telling us what not to do, or how not to sin, that we don’t have a lot of time left over for living a life dedicated to bearing fruit, to positive living.
Legalism is the element that has so crushed the church thoroughly throughout the years, and yet it’s also so useful, because it gives us objectives to attain to. If I follow this list, I can be relatively holy, or at least know I’m doing better than the next guy.
We’re called, by Christ, to go out into the world and make disciples. Being a Disciple of Christ doesn’t just mean getting saved and following a list of rules, it means actively taking on the character of Christ in everything we do, and bearing fruit as a result.
But the church we live in is a very volunteer, idea based church. We come because we want to. We volunteer when we have the time, energy, and chutzpah to go after it. But the church can’t hold us to anything, can’t expect anything of us…our time, our energy, are our own, and they should be grateful to have it.
And this is utterly, entirely wrong.
We should be glad that we have a place to volunteer our time and money, where the Lord is directly using our efforts. We should be pleased that there is an altar to lay ourselves on, to put to death daily that selfish seed within us that we may serve one another more.
But we’re not.
Harvest Church is all about Discipleship, or at least, it’s leadership is. And the church leadership is breaking themselves to try to get the rest of the church involved, committed, dedicated to this idea of living out Christ.
The problem is, we’re dancing on a fine line of legalism. We can’t help it. Anything we do within discipleship, we’re going to be asking people to publically dedicate themselves to action, which they will publically fulfill. They will be held accountable.
They will be judgeable by their actions. Legalism will be in force.
But maybe…maybe that’s necessary.
The formation of the Catholic church, followed by 1500 years of enforced proxy relationship with God crushed out the church’s awareness of layity service, active discipleship, community accountability, and other elements that kept the church alive apart from the monolithic presence of the big C Church.
The Protestant church brought back a personal sense of guilt and responsibility to God, and accountability in the form of a community which would hold you to the moral standards of God as interpreted by the (relatively) modern community of the Church…but it didn’t actually bring back a system of discipleship, commitment, and growth which would actually bring change in the heart through discipleship of Christ until John Wesley, and even that may have been a brief splash in the pond, relatively.
There are many people at Harvest Church who have stated that they want to take the next step, and be openly recognized as disciples of Christ. The worry is…at what point do they say “I’m sorry, that’s not my idea of bearing fruit” and drop out?
“Oh no, they don’t agree with me when I say those things, so obviously they’re not going to listen to me, so I’m not needed here.”
“It’s not my idea of a good time.”
“The Real God would never try to reach people this way.”
“I have more important things to do.”
We have dead to bury, and investments to take care of so that we can look after the poor some day.
We have meals to fix and chairs to arrange before we can sit at the feet of the Saviour.
Being a true disciple means that, if even after I give all of the reasons why I probably shouldn’t, they still want me to go and do it, then I thank God for the opportunity to serve, and go forward to do so with a grateful heart and a willing spirit.
Not my will, but yours Lord. Not my plan. Not my desire.
These things that I’m good at…you can probably show me far better how to use them, if I would just be willing to follow, and to serve, and to Love in Your Name, filled by Your Spirit, walking in Your steps.
We could grow by another 50 people by the end of the year. But as Sean said, growth reflects something spiritual in a church. Lack of growth does as well.
We haven’t grown in the roughly 2 years since we moved. We’ve added in a few here, lost a few there, but honestly, we were planning, origially, to hit 300 this year, and we’re at half that. Our giving is down, and our dedication, on paper, looks good…but in person…the fruit isn’t there. Not even budding.
Surely, there are some fine trees just straining to bud. If only we could tell which ones.
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10.06.07
Posted in The Word at 7:58 am by terickson
What if, as we have been discussing of late, Salvation is a process, not an event?
Salvation begins when we say to Christ, “I not only believe in you (as the demons do), but I also have faith that through your Lordship over my life, I can not only be delivered from Hell, but my entire life can become a better, more beautiful thing, as the Father originally intended before the fall” and then continues in a process of renewal throughout our lives.
If this is so…
Then perhaps much of what Christ says in the New Testament isn’t judgement, but a statement of fact. We get the two mixed up quite a bit, i think.
God created us to be a certain way. To have relationships, to live in open communication with Him and with each other, to love and support each other, to be individuals acting as a body, to have community, and family, and meaning.
Sin says to God “I don’t trust you to know what is better for my life”. Sin says to ourselves, “This damages me, breaks what I’m meant for, possibly cause me to die faster, but it makes me FEEL more alive and together, so I’m going to do it anyway”. Sin pushes us further away from who we were originally meant to be.
If our hearts and minds are actively engaged in sin, then it’s very difficult for the Spirit to work renewal within us, because we are pursuing corruption.
When Adam and Even ate the fruit in the garden, they didn’t instantly drop dead. But they had embraced death, they had taken on a lack of renewal, a pursuit of things opposite of life.
The life God intended for us is a comingling of the spirit and the body, an eternal communion with Him. The life that Christ calls us to isn’t just the opposite of Sin, but a resumption of the relationship that God originally calls us for. Stasis is not life. Growth and change are.
Knowledge isn’t growth, anymore than potting soil is a sign that your plants are doing well. Although it aids growth, knowledge is just an element that helps point us to where we need to grow. We still require community, and openness, and honesty, and a relationship with others patterned on our relationship with God.
We experience the process of salvation through our lives. If you aren’t experiencing salvation, seeking it, and bringing it to others, then you are embracing death.
We are not called to death.
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Posted in The Word at 7:50 am by terickson
Both our greatest weapons, as Christians, and our greatest enemies, are words. And not so much words themselves, as the Semantics of them.
Semantics (n) - the branch of linguistics concerned with the nature, the structure, and the development and changes of the meanings of speech forms, or within contextual meaning. (Websters)
We grow up in the midst of a world view, a perspective. Most of us never really develop the awareness, let alone the tools, to not only examine and articulate that world view, but to actively pick it apart and rearrange it as need be. And therein lies our greatest failing.
Consider the word “lost”. From a sheerly semantic outlook, this word indicates that the person affected by this state does not know which way to go, they are without bearing. But to the Christian mind, “lost” indicates a lack of salvation. With the caveat that, if you are saved, no matter how “lost” you become, because you are God’s child, you are in His hands, and everything is okay.
This comforting dictum is often handed to people whose lives are rapidly disintegrated by other individuals comfortably occupying an armchair in front of a warm fire.
But then, nobody says cliches aren’t true. They’re just overused.
Consider the word “Saved”. If you catch your wedding ring before it falls down the drain, you have ’saved’ it. If you put your leftovers in tupperwear for a later date, you have saved it.
If you have admitted to Christ that you can’t make it without His Lordship in you life, you are ’saved’. Though of course it doesn’t stop there.
Consider the context of these words. How do you identify somebody who is “lost”? Or somebody who is “saved”? If you believe that you can accurately identify either of these states, then you are using the semantic aspect of your upbringing as it translates into perspective to perjoratively judge somebody’s behaviour, and from that predict their eternal situation.
Which God says repeatedly not to do.
The Bible carries several themes. Salvation, Love, the fruits of the spirit…each of these has bearing on the entire bible, not just the particular verse you happen to be perusing at the moment.
Every verse must be read in context of Love. Of Salvation. Of Justice. Of Mercy. Of Grace.
But what does each of those words mean? We could (and many have) dedicate a book or two to Love alone. Or Grace. The two are surely entertwined. To know one is to know the other.
But often in church, both of these words are used without exhibiting qualities of either.
How can you know the nature of a word and yet never exhibit it? But then, semantically, most of us will never truly ‘grok’ love. Especially in a society that is actively hostile to it.
I can no longer say that I see anything in black and white. I question everything I know, that I feel, that I do. I cannot say to you that anything I know is absolutely true, that there is no doubt in it, except that God made the universe and for some reason has a purpose for me, and sent His son to ransom me, and various others.
But to say that a verse proves one thing or another, or that we were created in one way or another…you have your firm perspective. All I can do is admit that I have a perspective, and give the reasons behind it, and question your own. I am aware of my perspective, and am no longer entirely sure of it’s verity.
I think that any time we, as Christians, say anything from a dogmatic point of view, we really need to step back and take a look under the hood…what is driving that particular declaration?
It is not my place to judge any person, to condemn any person, to punish any person. To be better, or more blessed, or anything else.
It is my job to be Christ to others. To show them compassion and charity and love and grace where the land they walk is an endless desert. To bring water to the thirsty, shelter to the bereft, guidance to the lost.
I am to guide by leading, not by pushing or punishing. A cattle prod is not to be my instrument.
I have been walking in the desert for a long, long time. My constant companion is despair, and her good friend cynicism. And they aren’t often wrong about anything.
But what binds me to them is perspective. If my focus is only on them, then it will stay there. Wrenching it away from them to other things is the hardest thing I can do, but sometimes it’s the most important thing I can do, even if that refocusing only lasts for a matter of hours.
At it’s heart, after all, what is most missing from the church is the ability to be genuine. We get up in the morning, say a quick prayer to God, and then we tuck our hearts in a drawer and steel ourselves for the onslaught ahead.
We don’t bring it to the job with us, or in traffic, and certainly not in church. There is simply too much coming our way, too much which can injure us, cripple us, kill us… so we walk through life with extreme bullet proofing, and a stunt man.
As our fathers did before us, and their fathers before them.
And each person has to find their own way to lowering their shields, and trusting in God to strengthen their heart, so that everywhere they go, everything they do, what you see is truly what you get.
And only once that is what people see, can they see Christ through you. Not your good works, or your quiet platitudes, but the heart of Christ living in you, at every moment.
Each person has to come to it their own way.
Tim may stand up in front the church and tell everybody what we are, but each person has to find their way to that. We aren’t a sharing, loving, compassionate church because he says we are, no matter how much he earestly believes it to be so.
But then, some of us are very afraid of that, in any case. There are a number of us at church who do our jobs, and then quietly melt away into a corner because the sheer amount of energy it took to do whatever we do in church destroys, for the moment, all ability on our parts to actually deal with people at all.
Which is why I don’t move around the church shaking hands during greeting time. It literally takes so much out of me that I begin to shut down, even just standing there in that room full of people.
I come to that genuine quality through theatre, and through writing, and sharing my words. The rest of the time I’m just hanging on by my fingernails, trying to figure out if I’m truly listening, or if I’m just forcing my semantic outlook on what I see around me.
I have a passion to enable the genuine in those around me who have spent their lives hiding, just so they could keep on being part of the fringes of the church, never actually belonging, just nodding along with everybody else, without the tools, the focus, to see the perspective they are trapped behind that is really a lie…
To see that a loving, Holy, amazing God has far more in store for them if they can break out of what they were taught, into what He truly wishes for them…that even in the desert there can be beauty, and water, and amazing dreams.
I want to be able to see that, and live it, rather than just know it.
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