I'm a little skeptical about skepticism...

A few of us went down to Caltech the other day to see a debate between an Evangelical Christian (Dinesh D'Souza) and a "militant agnostic" - Micheal Shermer of the Skeptic Society.

I left the debate feeling a little more than skeptical about becoming a "skeptic", and I certainly didn't want to form or join a society of skeptics. Here's why...

I don't think we learn our most valuable lessons from being skeptical. I think the most beautiful and exciting moments in life come in the midst of balanced and reasoned expressions of faith.

When I'm flying down a mountain on my bike, for example, I may be skeptical and cautious regarding the upcoming hairpin turn - I may even dissect the turn in my head and decide to alter my course, brake harder, or speed up. But it took an awful lot of faith to even get to the turn...

I already had faith that my bike would hold up to the forces exerted against it; that my skill-level would be up to the descent at hand; that my inner tube would not blow up mid turn... Those are just the objects of faith at MY disposal. Think about the faith it takes to descend that mountain in regards to the actions and intentions of other people: Oncoming cars, drivers who may come up behind me, mistakes made by road crews, oil slicks from poorly-maintained vehicles, water in the road from badly-aimed sprinklers... That's a lot of faith! It takes a lot of faith to even get to the point of dissecting the upcoming turn, and faith is the only context in which we really learn (skepticism is a tool we use to understand what we are learning).

The Christian in the debate (Dinesh) made a great point about this faith/skepticism stuff; if I was truly a skeptic about my relationship with my Wife, we'd never have been married. Marriage should be a well-informed and intentional leap of faith. I didn't KNOW when I married my Wife that she would be a great Mom, but I had faith she would be. I didn't KNOW that I would be a supportive Husband, but I prayed God would give me the grace to be the Husband He wanted me to be. I didn't even really KNOW, when I really think about it, that Kristin loved me. I had to have the courage and the faith to believe that she meant what she said. If I had waited with a skeptical eye until marriage made rational sense, I'd have either married a robot or remained single, and Kristin would have eventually had "faith" in marrying someone less skeptical. My skepticism would have kept me from being with the love of my life.

Faith has brought me happiness, meaning, comfort, companionship, and two beautiful kids (they got Mama's good looks).

So a well-informed and reasoned faith defines my life (Kristin and I waited 3 1/2 years to get married - we looked before we leapt, but we did leap!). I would imagine it defines yours to, at least the parts of your life that bring you joy. Our relationship with God is no different.

To learn more about looking and leaping into faith in Jesus, check out www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org

What Are You Reading?

Scott suggested that we should share with each other what we're reading as a church.

Here's what's on my nightstand, in various states of completion:

Shane Hipps: The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture

Overview: Shane is a recent Fuller grad who came and presented on this book in one of my classes while the book was being written. Wow. It was a whole new way of thinking. He focuses on Marshall McLuhen's philosophy (he's the guy who said "the medium is the message") and applies it directly to the church. Shane brings home the point that how we communicate a message is perhaps even more important than the message itself.

This is a must read.

Rob Bell: Sex. God.
Overview: Sitting on the nightstand. Ready to be opened...

God: The Bible
Overview: Hellooo... It's the BIBLE! I'm devouring John chapters 4&5 right now. Good stuff.

Alan Hirsch: The Forgotten Ways

Overview: I'll be reading this one for a LONG time... Alan goes back to the 1st century to examine the "missional DNA" of the church to find that mission is not something the church does - mission is the reason for the church to exist. Deep, good, practical stuff.

Feel free to respond with what you're reading...

God's peace, Rich

Read more at www.lifesongchristiancommuities.org

Home Church - Through a webcam????

Scott and Lori were in Connecticut, Paul, Ginny, Nathan and I all drove to Mike and Margaret's house in Camarillo, and we all met face to face to have Church... Sort of. A fairly new technology called "skype" allowed us to "webcam" with Scott and Lori in real time from 3000 miles away. It is a very different world...

As we work through Brian McLaren's The Church on the Other Side we've been asking a lot of TOUGH questions about what it means to be the church in the "postmodern" world. Last night was no exception...

Last night's chapter was an introduction to what "postmodern" means, and the kind of questions it presents to the Church.

The easiest way of getting into this, I think, is to just say that we are moving into the postmodern world, and it is a new and challenging place, particularly for those over 40 (Those over 40 are "immigrants" in the postmodern world - they have to work to understand and thrive in it). For those of us born in the '70s, we tend to think in a primarily "postmodern" way and see the world through that lens (Those of us under 40 are most likely "natives" - we see the world most naturally through a postmodern lens).

For those born in the '80s, '90s, and '00s, describing the postmodern world is almost impossible - it would be like you or I saying "the sky is blue", or "the grass is green". Those born in the last 20 years naturally see the world and know and understand their world in vastly new and different ways than ANY other previous generation in history. The Church has an awesome opportunity here... Generations of young people are seeing the world in a new way and they are generally more open to spirituality than their "modern" and rationalistic parents.

We'll dive into this later, but for now let's just start thinking about how we know things... Ask yourself these questions. If you have a few minutes, just copy and paste the questions into a new document or an email and type out your answers. Feel free to email them to me if you want to discuss them more deeply.

- How do I know something is true? Is it because of the experience of learning about it? The person or book or (insert other media) that informed me? The trustworthiness of the subject in question?
- Why do I follow Jesus (why am I a Christian)? How do I know that Christianity is true?

These questions are at the heart of what it means to be a Christian in the postmodern world, and those who naturally see the world through a postmodern lens naturally answer these questions very differently than those of us born over 40 years ago (unless we have forced ourselves to learn about postmodernity)...

God's Peace, Rich

Check out Lifesong's website at http://www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org/

Little Miss Sunshine and the Christian Facade...

I love weird movies. I love the movies that peel away the veneer of daily life and really dig around in what we're all really like. Little Miss Sunshine is one of those movies; it's characters are multi-dimesional, it's plot is surprising and moves at a brisk pace, and when the movie is over you feel like you've learned something about life that will help you deal with it a little better. That is quite an accomplishment considering that Steve Carell's character is suicidal; "Duane", the teenage boy, reads Nietzche for fun and has taken a vow of silence; his Dad (played by Greg Kinnear) is the annoying 9-steps to self-help guy you hope to avoid at your company's convention; the Grandfather is addicted to heroine and curses like a sailor; and the Mom of the family is understandably just struggling to cope - sneaking cigarettes when no one else is looking. Everyone in this movie is struggling to get by, and there are no easy answers.

The true star of the show is Olive - a 9 year old rather, ummmm, homely-looking young lady who is convinced that she is really destined to be a beauty queen. Her belief is so pure, and her devotion so complete - including countless hours of rehearsal on a secret dance routine choreographed by her Grandfather, that the rest of her family finds hope and meaning in helping her become the beauty queen that she knows she can be.

There's a lot to say about this movie, and by the end of it I really felt like I had been blessed with a candid and truthful expression of a lot of the feelings we all feel but are either too ashamed or too committed to holding everything together to let out. More than anything, I found it refreshing that there was no one who was superhuman in this movie. They all had sins that were laid bare in front of the lens, and yet each of these people had moments in which they acted with dignity, humility, and honor - even if the outcomes of their intentions were derailed. It kind of reminds me of Luther's comment about Christians: we are both saint and sinner at the same time.

It's funny, but of all the people in the movie I most wanted to hang out with the suicidal character and the teenage boy who wouldn't talk and said (on a notepad) that he "hated everyone". In the moments when the two of them were together, there was no pretense in their conversations, and there was a genuinely human connection between them that ensured that they worked to protect each other. Upon Carell's first night "home" in Duane's house, Duane is forced to share a room with his suicidal Uncle. Before going to bed Duane scribbles on his pad, "Don't kill yourself tonight, okay?". Carell responds, "Not tonight, not on your watch", and a fast friendship is born. They were both DESPERATE for some real human interaction, and the teenager's concern for Carell, although it was masked behind pen, paper, and the implicit assumption that he only cared because he would get in trouble if something happened, shone through all his angst and led to an unlikely and much-needed friendship.

I sometimes wish "Church" people could be this free and open with each other - to reach out at the risk of exposing our sin just so that we are not alone in it. A great many people have the perception that people who go to Church are "faking it" when we're in "service" on sunday and we're really more authentic to our true nature during the rest of the week. How sad...

We all need some kind of public face to get us through the times that are just plain awful - but sometimes the facade gets worn more than our true personality. We become the "perfect Wife", or the "Jock", or the "CEO", or the "Geek", or the "Perfect Husband", or the "Coach", or the... You get the idea. My idea of Christian friendship is one where those of us who follow Jesus let our friends in to our joys and our pains, and we do so in a spirit of trust and faith. While we don't need to revel in our sin, we do need people to walk with us in our brokenness, and to be there with a real human touch and word when we are sick of ourselves, or when we feel we are becoming our facade.

My dream as a Pastor is to grow a Church that welcomes people as they are. I would love it if people partnered with Lifesong and built friendships that helped them become more like Jesus in the midst of their struggles. It is my hope that the teenage boy in the movie who wore the shirt that said, "Jesus Was Wrong" would sense that Jesus was about much more than "right or wrong" at Lifesong, and that Jesus welcomes and even beckons people like him into His Kingdom. God is given a lot of room in which to work when someone lives with their brokenness on his sleeve (or on their chest) and there is less of a facade to have to dig through (although many times black-dyed hair and depressing slogans are a thicker facade than perfectly done nails, obscenely-white teeth, and a perfectly waxed Mercedes).

In the end, the family works together, through and in spite of their faults in order to get Olive to her pageant. Her innocence is kept in tact despite some truly horrible events that they endure together, and they begin the journey home. But the audience is left with the knowledge that there would be more hard times to come, and that the beautiful ending moments would last just a few moments - and I felt hopeful anyway...


Find more hope at www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org :)

A Holy Monk and Retail Therapy...

The first time I heard the term "retail therapy" I knew we were in deep trouble. I say "we" because I have been, from time to time, as guilty of feeling the rush of buying the next ___ as the next person, only to get home and realize that I really didn't need or want said widget - no matter how good it looked in the store.

What I was after was the rush. It feels good to see something, desire it, and then have the power to claim it as my own, have it put in a bag and drive it home. It really doesn't matter what "it" is. The process of consuming makes us (me) feel powerful, and as North Americans in 2007, we have a lot of power...

Retail therapy is understandable, rampant, unavoidable, and yet also horribly destructive. It causes us to think (even for a moment) that we can solve our own problems, or satisfy our own deepest yearnings.

It's quite fitting that I began to see this more clearly by reading the writings of a Monk from the middle ages. Bernard of Clairvaux knew what it was to yearn for material things. And yet he wrote about such things with such wisdom and grace. I'll leave you with a few of his words from his beautiful work, On Loving God,

(We) want to traverse creation, trying all things one by one, rather than think of coming to Him who is Lord of all. And if our utmost longing were realized, so that we should have all the world for our own, yet without possessing Him who is the Author of all being, then the same law of our desires would make us condemn what we had and restlessly seek Him whom we still lacked, that is, God Himself. Rest is in Him alone. Man knows no peace in the world; but he has no disturbance when he is with God. And so the soul says with confidence, 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee; and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee. God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. It is good for me to hold me fast by God, to put my trust in the Lord God'. Even by this way one would eventually come to God, if only he might have time to test all lesser goods in turn...

Amen.


www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org

What Does God Say About That? (and other ridiculously insightful yet simple things kids say at just the right time)

Slithering like a snake along the ground isn't so bad if you're 3. Unless the room in which you are slithering happens to be the bathroom...

"Nathan, get up", I barked unceremoniously.


"Why, Dad?"


"Because it's not good for you to crawl around on the bathroom floor and it might make you sick sometime"


"But I don't like it when you tell me no, Dad"


"But I have to tell you when things are right and wrong or good or bad so you'll grow up good"


"HMMM... WHAT DOES GOD SAY ABOUT THAT DAD???"



How do you answer a 3 year old slithery snake who is asking about the theological realities of passing on the faith from Father to Son and the moral and religious formation of a young life?


"God talks to us through the Bible, and the Bible says I need to keep you safe and help you to grow up good. So, you need to listen when I say no."


"Okay", he said.


I was in disbelief that I got away that easily... Then I became intrigued...


"What made you ask about what God thinks, Nate? Where did you learn that?"


"I don't know", he said, "God lives in my heart though." I almost fell over, so I sat down on the edge of the tub instead. I beckoned Nate to come closer, and I wrapped my arms around him and drew his head into my chest.


"That's right, Nate, God DOES live in your heart..."


www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org

Change Has Changed...

The following post is a devotion I put up on our church's website: http://www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org/...

"If you have a new world, you need a new church. You have a new world."
- Brian McLaren

Change has changed. It used to be that every few decades a new technology or idea would come about that would change the way we lived or how we viewed the world. The telegraph eventually gave way to the telephone and radio. Radio set the stage for television and cell phones. Eight tracks and vinyl records eventually gave way to the CD. Then came the iPod and now the iPhone. The dizzying truth is that the gaps between the advent of these new technologies used to be centuries, then decades, and now just a few years. It seems as if these changes are so rapid that we can't even keep up on a day to day basis.

A few of us here at Lifesong have been reading Brian McLaren's The Church On The Other Side, and we've been openly talking about some of the ways our world has changed, and about how it is literally impossible to keep up anymore. McLaren actually says that change itself has changed, and that the rate of change has sped up to the point that it is actually impossible to think about and process all the information we are confronted with each day.

So the question for us is: What does this mean for the Church? How should we live as those claimed by Christ in order to save the world if we can't even comprehend what is going on in the world?

The first thing to do, as I see it, is acknowledge that we're ALL in the same boat. No one is comfortable with the rate of change in the world, and no one can keep up with it all. Change has leveled the playing field, and we are all trying to wrestle with how to live. I propose that the Church has two options:
1) Grasp the past tightly and try to weather the storm. It seems this is the turn that the Catholic Church has recently decided to take with its recent advocacy of returning to the Latin Mass. This is also the approach of many Evangelicals/Fundamentalists who long for the glory days of religious revival or the hey-day of the American empire. I sometimes watch the more-extreme voices for these folks on channel 17 and they're usually talking about how evil the rest of the world is and how great their brand of Christianity is. As one of my professors rightly said; "the way forward is not backward".
2) Pack lightly and move forward. Change happens, and when it does, the Church needs to change too. That means that we need to discover what is essential to our faith and be willing to re-invent everything else. There are, however, many ways to go wrong with this approach. We sometimes throw the baby out with the bath water when it comes to change and tradition, and some traditions speak throughout the ages. I suggest that maybe the best place to start as far as what is non-negotiable is this simple three word confession that dates back to the early church: Jesus is Lord.

If we live with this truth at the center of our lives, nothing else can claim us or distract us from our mission in the world. If Jesus is Lord, nothing else can be. We still, of course, have to figure out the practical implications of what it means to make Jesus' life the center of our lives, but at least we'll be asking all the right questions - even if the answers miss the mark (and they will)...

We're still trying to figure out how we should live in this world of rampant change, and I have to say that it's really refreshing just to stop for a minute and talk with trusted friends about some of the craziness (good and bad) in the world and take time to think about what it all means. Ultimately, we know that as His people, Jesus is present and in the center of these discussions, and we pray for the courage to continually re-invent our Church so that we might live with Jesus at the center of our lives - constantly reminding ourselves that if Jesus is Lord, nothing else can be...

Check out how our Church tries to follow Jesus through all this change at www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org

Why Blog?

So here it is... I've finally made the leap into the 21st century with my first blog.

Every so often I dive into the "blogosphere" and read up on just about anything I want to learn about from some pretty entertaining and educated characters. So why, I find myself asking, am I adding to the blog noise with one more?

The answer for me is pretty simple: My church's website won't let people comment on my thoughts on daily life without a password... So here I am, posting to my own blog.

I hope that in a few years I can look back on this first post and say a few things:

1) People have learned how to live better lives from the things discussed here.
2) We will have made progress toward learning how to be more authentic Christians.
3) That this blog has been even a small part of a second major reformation of the "protestant" church.

I think that for too long those of us who call ourselves "Christians" have separated going to church from our everyday lives. We can no longer, and we never really could, GO to church. We ARE the church. It is our identity. God has claimed us, and we are no longer our own...

So how do we live differently in 2007 and beyond? That's what we've got to figure out, and I think that we're on the verge of something big. I think that we're about to be humbled in a big way. The institutional/denominational "church" is declining, and God is doing something new...

Let's talk about what this "new" thing is. And let's learn from Jesus how to live differently, as His people for the good of our neighbors in this new world...

God's Peace, Rich
www.lifesongchristiancommunities.org