If you ever went to church camp as a kid, you probably know what I’m talking about. You spent an entire week immersed in God, reading your Bible, singing worship songs 3-4 times a day, praying, and learning all kinds of new and exciting things about what it meant to follow Jesus. So you went home “on fire” for the Lord. And maybe you even managed to maintain that same level of excitement and commitment for about a week or so… But we all know what eventually happened, don’t we? You forget to read your Bible one day and it turns into a month. You skipped morning or evening prayers. You lost interest in wrestling with questions of faith. And maybe you felt like God had left you. You asked questions like, “Why can’t I hear God like I did at camp?” and “Where is God now?”

Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani? [Mark 15:34]

Regardless of whether it was a youth gathering, a camp, a concert or whatever, we’ve all had those “mountain top” experiences. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, we can admit that there are times when it is easy to believe in God and times when, well, not so much.

In case you didn’t know, one of the things I’m passionate about is EMS. My full-time career aspirations lay in EMS and fire service, and it’s something I’ve been doing part-time for 3 years now. When people find out that you’re in emergency medicine, one of the first questions they always ask is, “What’s the worst call you’ve ever had?” I always hestitate to answer. No doubt what they are expecting is something like they’ve seen on “Third Watch” or “Rescue Me”, a story of fire or car accidents or something like that. My worst call ever was nothing of the sort. I’m not a huge fan of talking about it, but in January of 2009 my partner Brad and I coded a 15 week old baby girl, who later died. Like I said, there are times when it is easy to believe in God and times when, well…

I would love to tell you that, more than a year later, I’m “okay” with it. The truth of it is, I’m not. It’s not one of those things that I think I will ever truly come to terms with. Babies aren’t supposed to die. This poor girl never had a chance to ride a bike, have a first kiss, fall in love, tell her parents she loved them or anything of the other things that make up a life. Never had a chance. I don’t think about it often anymore, but when I see so many people around me contributing so little to society and wasting the gifts given to them, I can’t help but wonder why this girl died and others live.

Just like any relationship, faith has its good days and its bad ones too. I’d count that cold January day as a bad one for me. The truth is that sometimes it feels like God is no where to be found, doesn’t it? And it’s not just in the face of physical death, it’s the people we lose to addiction, to decite, and to shame.

Ask yourself this quesiton: have you ever felt like their was more evidence for God’s absence than his presence?

Me too.

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will cause all of my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion… There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back…” [Exodus 33: 19; 21-23]

I would love to be able to sit here and tell you why that 15 week old baby girl had to die and why all of the bad things that happen to people happen. The honest truth though, friends, is that I have no idea. What I have realized is that sometimes we don’t see God until he has passed by. In the moment of our grief and our brokenness, God is mostly certainly present, but more often than not it doesn’t feel that way.

I have to believe that God is not sitting by and watching his creation fall to pieces. I have to believe that in the moments when I would swear God is no where to be found, he is present in hidden ways. I have to believe that when we cry about death and brokeness that God cries along with us. Because if not, then this is all we have, and that is something I refuse to believe.

Why didn’t God reach down and bring that child back to life? Why weren’t we able to bring her back? Why? I honestly I have no idea.

What I’m considering now is that sometimes we don’t see God except after he’s passed by. I’ve been changed forever by what I’ve experienced and even though I can’t tell you what God is up to in my life, I’m trusting that one day I’m going to look back on that day and understand. I fully expect that, in this lifetime, I will come to understand what I am supposed to understand about that January morning. That doesn’t make it okay and it doesn’t make it any easier.

Our desire is to know exactly what God is up to all the time. Why can’t we see and hear God all the time? What possible good could come from the brokenness that you and I have experienced? In the face of the pain that we have all seen and see everyday, how can we possible believe that God even exists, let alone is on our side?

The answer, I believe, is resurrection.

“The story, the big story, of the Scriptures is not, ‘Hey, someday we all abandon this place,’ the story is ‘God has not abandoned this place,’ and in fact something new has begun to put this place back together. To renew this world, to redeem this world, to restore this world, to reconcile this world. To bring heaven and earth together here. The Bible begins here and the Bible ends at the end of Revelation, God takes up residence here… It’s about this world, the world that God loves, the world that God has not abandon.” – Rob Bell, “Resurrection”, a sermon from April, 04, 2010.

The Bible, the story of God and his people, tells us that the day the women went to Jesus tomb they found it empty. He is not here. The good news of the resurrection is not where you get to go when you die, the good news of the resurrection is that God’s restoration of this world has begun with declaration that everything you thought you knew about death and life has gone out the window. With the empty tomb God institutes a new world order, a creation that is has he intended, a world in which love wins. The good news of the resurrection is not “you are going…” the good news is, “God has come.”

It started with Jesus and it continues with us. Just as we can look around and see death, pain, and sadness, we hear stories of lives changed, of miracles happening, and of a God who has not given up on this world.

I recently had a conversation with a good friend who’s grandmother had passed away. He said to me, “It’s difficult now, but we know we’ll see her again.” I asked him a question that I’ve asked to many people, “Can you imagine going through this without knowing that? Without God?” He said back to me, “It would be impossible.”

Even in the midst of his sadness and grief, my friend understood that even though it felt as though God was distant, he was present.. and he knew that was better than no God at all.

I don’t have a good explanation for that baby girl’s death.

I do have an empty tomb.

He is not here. He is risen.

Today I will begin a series about something that’s a hot topic in a lot of ways: Church Marketing. I’m hoping to get one or two “guest bloggers” in here too because, let’s be honest, we’re all tired of listening to me rant.

Recently I was in a wedding in Missouri. One of my good friends from college got married at a small winery in the Ozarks, it was very lovely and good times were had by all. Anyway, from where I am in Des Moines it is a 5 hour drive and there’s not really no good way to get there. We took a different route coming home than we did going down and all along the road were BIG billboards that said things like: Know Jesus [above a picture of clouds and light, read: heaven] or No Jesus [above a picture of fire, read: hell]. While I am willing to give them credit for being mildly clever, I was frustrated to the point of anger when I first saw that sign. And it wasn’t the only one, I can remember seeing at least 3 more with a similar message. There was not a single sign that invited people in a relationship with Jesus that would be life-changing and fulfilling while at NOT presenting it at the sunny alternative to an otherwise gloomy after-life.

But that got me thinking about this passage from Meeting Jesus at the Bar: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Evangelism an essay by Heather Kirk-Davidoff:

As a mainline pastor I carried with me some assumptions that I inherited from the tradition in which I was formed. The outreach work I had been trained to do focused on attracting visitors to my church with flyers, programs, and advertisements, and then following up with visits, encouraging them to become members, to make financial pledges, and to agree to serve on a committee. Behind this work was an assumption that membership in a church was what the people in my community wanted and needed. My job was to recruit them into the particular church I was leading.

I think a lot of people think of their church as a product. And what’s the first thing you ask yourself when you are creating a new product… what do people want/need? Heather Kirk-Davidoff’s church was making was that people wanted committees and boards and service projects and all of the things that come along with a traditional (and cliche) church experience. If you believe that people want potlucks once a month to which no one brings an entree and everyone has a meal of salads and desserts until someone finally goes to Hy-Vee and gets fried chicken, then that’s what your church does or becomes. The job of the church leaders isn’t so much spreading God’s word and Kingdom Expansion as it is marketing a product. And that puts a sour taste in my mouth. But it goes deeper than that, was Kirk-Davidoff writes:

My evangelical colleagues were also trained as recruiters but of a different sort. Evangelism, as they were taught it, is rooted in the assumption that people are (or can easily be led to become) deeply anxious about their fate after they die. Christianity offers a solution to that anxiety because the moment that a person makes a decision to accept Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross, his or her eternal fate changes from damnation to bliss. As Dallas Willard insightfully describes in The Divine Conspiracy, when Christians focus on recruitment alone, the ongoing nurture of relationships and practices in this life becomes nearly irrelevant.

Remember those signs I mentioned earlier? Let’s ask this question: what assumptions did the people who made those signs have? They were convinced that, as Kirk-Davidoff says, “… people are (or can easily be led to become) deep anxious about their fate after they die.” To put it simply: they are convinced that people don’t want to go to hell. And if they don’t believe that hell exists, they can easily be convinced that it does and they don’t want to go there. It actually reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons, the first one I ever saw. In this episode the town comes into some money and they have a meeting to try and decide how to spend it. A smooth operator of a salesman comes in and convinces the town that they need a monorail. Anyone remember that? Did the town of Springfield really need a monorail? Absolutely not. But this guy had a product to sell and he created a need for it. I really believe that some churches are doing that too. They are a certain thing or can provide a certain thing and they go out and convince people the church (not God, please note) is what they need. And that puts a sour taste in my mouth too. The focus shouldn’t creating an imagined need for a God that isn’t actually relevant, the focus should be uncovering the deepest questions of our souls and discovering through the revelations in scripture and experience that God is the answer to those questions.

Anyway, as I kick off this series on The Church Market I wanted to have some of the people I know and trust weigh on this question: what assumptions do we as the church make about “seekers?”

From Luke:

I guess my personal stereotype is that they may not have any questions at all. When I think of someone “seeking,” I think of someone who either had a reason for not going to church and has reconsidered (me), or someone who never really thought about church in the first place and had his or her curiosity sparked somehow.

I don’t think a lot of people go to church [services] to get really tough questions answered. Maybe some do, but a service is just that: a service intended for the masses. When people have specific questions, I would think that their logical move would be to ask a Christian friend, look online, do some research, etc. So, I guess it depends on the level of questions we’re assuming they have.

From a Friend of Sarah:

I won’t attempt to posit a complete answer since my words would be laden with my own personal issues with the church. But, since I often consider myself an “outsider” to the church (and have been called that by churchgoers on numerous occasions), I feel somewhat compelled to at least respond to your inquiry. I offer the following brief, personal reflections. (In other words, I do not attempt to speak for all outsiders or “seekers” or churchgoers, just myself.)

The closer churchgoers are to outsiders, the better churchgoers will understand them.

Churchgoers often criticize the views of those who hate the church without understanding that hatred ourselves.

Churchgoers often defend Christianity while forgetting that Christianity doesn’t need to be defended. Rather, Christian faith should lead the church to defend the outsider.

All parties involved need to understand “Christ” as separate from “Christianity” and act accordingly.

Churches make far too many assumptions about “seekers” that have no bearing in reality.

In our day, there is (almost) no such thing as a “seeker.” Very, very few people are simply coming to church as “seekers.” People end up at church because other people invite them. And churchgoing people earn the right to invite other non-churchgoing people to church only if they build relationships with them.

The church cannot provide “answers” to the questions of “seekers” unless it is willing to question itself.

The day of the “seeker-sensitive” church is over. If a church thinks that it can play “cool” music, open the doors, and watch the “seekers” come in, that church is already dead.

Again, I do not claim to offer anything profound here, just my own feelings and experiences. (This is me as outsider and insider, former and hoping to be future pastor, and a would-like-to-be-a churchgoer.)

From Bill:

I think I agree with a lot of what Sarah said. As a life-long “insider,” it is sometimes hard to identify what a “seeker” really is. I’m afraid that attempt to plan a “seeker” service seem to think that all those non-church-goers out there are just waiting to find the “right” church that will be comfortable to them.
Actually, Jesus said “GO make disciples,” not “plan a service and wait for them to come.” There are people “out there” who truly have spiritual needs. They may be searching for something, but unless they have a relationship with someone who knows from experience what Jesus can and has done for us, they will not, on their own, “find” him by “seeking” a church. A true “seeker” is a Christian who seeks out those who don’t know Jesus and works to develop a relationship that will help lead that person to Jesus.

From Mike:

I’ve been a seeker for over 12 years now and I’m still asking a lot of questions on this journey. I haven’t quite moved out of the seeker category yet so you better be sensitive to me and my questions. lol

Anywho…Here are some of my favorite questions I ask often…as a seeker:

Who are you God and what’s your perspective/heart on xyz ?
Who do you say I am?
How can/do/should we relate with one another?

From Sarah:

“There is a doubter in every believer, and the doubt has an almost wholly positive function, for it keeps faith from degenerating into credulity. There is also, for the most part, an openness to something akin to faith in every nonbeliever, and that openness also functions positively, for it keeps disbelief from degenerating into cynicism.”
(Douglas John Hall, God and Human Suffering, 16)

From Ryan:

I’m going to make the assumption that everyone on the list is well inundated in typical church activity and are “church-goers”.

One thing that has always bugged me about some evangelism is when people come from the perspective of, “I need you to accept Jesus the way I do, or I won’t be okay…” I’m all for faithful witnessing & challenging people, but let’s leave the approval up to God. If God sends His Spirit into the new believer, marks them and convicts them of Sin, you’ve got a follower of Christ. Let us keep to thanksgiving and prayer, lead by love in Christ. Col 3

My favorite quote on the “seeker” movement.

>> I’m for the seeker movement, I go to seeker conferences and I tell them I’m in. There’s only one problem there’s only one seeker and His name is Yahweh. He’s seeking you to keep His commands in love.

-Paul Washer (vague memory of, not exact)

All-Keep meditating on the word through prayer and comparing yourself with Christ through gathering with followers regularly.

Anyway, in staff meeting today our senior pastor was giving us a little talk about a vote coming up in our synod. I’m not going to mention the name of the church, our location, or the synod with which we are affiliated because none of that really has anything to do with this story. So he’s talking about this vote that’s coming up and sort of laying about the different sides and where the pastoral leadership comes down on this issue theologically and then pauses and looks off into the distance, as he often does, and says, “We’re living in a post-denominational world.”

Whoa.

Growing up I can remember very distinctly this conversation with one of my teachers:

Teacher: Where do you go to church?

Me: We’re Christians.

Teacher: Yes, but what kind?

Me:… We’re… Christians.

I wasn’t old enough to know any of the difference. Now it seems I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life studying the theological discrepancies between the mainline denominations, primarily Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist with a little Baptist and Pentecostal thrown in for good measure. During my freshmen year of college I had a crisis. I found that I didn’t agree with one of the doctrinal stances of the church to which I belonged. What to do? I had been through the whole confirmation and youth group thing and had been well-indoctrinated with “good Lutheran teachings.” But now I found myself up against a road block. No matter which way I looked at this issue, I just couldn’t come to the conclusion that that was what the Bible really said. So I left. And it was kind of a big deal because at one point I was set on becoming a pastor in this synod. Today I can’t imagine…

When we were growing the only differences we recognized in our churches is that we used different colored hymnals, sang different songs on Sunday morning. Obviously the differences were and are much bigger than hymnals and songs, but when you’re a kid those are the sorts of things to which you pay the most attention. For a long time I thought it was really important which denomination you claimed… now I’m not so sure. Also hear me when I say that I don’ think denominations are all bad, but here are some things I’ve noticed over the years…

1) Denominations tend to divide instead of unite. One of the things that concerns me the most about denominations is that it is a system of labels. Pastor and writer Nanette Sawyer of Wicker Park Grace Church in Chicago wrote:

He [Sawyer's childhood pastor] was defining Christian identity as assent to a list of certain beliefs, and he was defining Christian community as those people who concur with those beliefs. This didn’t leave any room for questions, doubts, or growth in faith. It made community acceptance of each other completely conditional on having already arrived at a particular intellectual destination. In asking me if I was a Christian, and accepting my preteen answer, he essentially told me that I wasn’t part of the community. I wasn’t in; I was out. And so I found myself spiritually homeless. (from essay, “What Would Huckleberry Do? A Relational Ethic as the Jesus Way”)

The great irony innovative thinkers like Luther, who is credited with “starting” the Lutheran church is that Luther never wanted to leave the Roman-Catholic Church. In fact, he loved it. He cared so deeply about it that he set out to reform its way of thinking, believing that the church which he so dearly loved was headed in the wrong direction. He didn’t come in and say, “Hey these guys got it all wrong… let’s get out of here and start our own church.” When one thinks in terms of denominations there is something at work that is almost always damaging: the desire to know who is right and thusly who is in. If I subscribe to a denomination, I can easily know who is in and who is out… and if our primary concern as the Church is who is in and who is out, then we’ve probably got larger problems to deal with. As Sawyer writes, “Even if we could answer the question of who is and isn’t a child of God, it wouldn’t help us be better followers of Jesus; it would only help us divide people into categories.”

2) Church Shopping. Okay, this is going to happen whether denominations exist or not. What I think we all fall guilty of doing is attempting to “sell” our specific church of denomination like we’re selling a product… or even worse a lifestyle. The aforementioned senior pastor said that we don’t want to encourage people to think about our church purely in terms of where we stand on social hot-button issues. As he said that, I turned to my friend The Digital Pastor and said, “But that’s how people shop for a church.” Instead of asking the question, “What does this Church do to love God and love people?” People come in and ask questions like: what’s the church’s stance on gay marriage? What about the death penalty? Pro or anti war? Contemporary? Conservative? Liberal? Are the church’s stances on these issues important? Yes! But only insofar as they reflect what the church believes to be Biblically founded truth and not a marketing campaign in disguise. I believe that denominations make it easier for people to make  assumptions about the church before they’ve ever set foot in it, like religious window shopping. And that usually ends one of two ways 1) You leave with nothing or 2) You go home with a bunch of crap you don’t need.

3) Majoring in the Minors. We (the Church) are really, really good at this. I know that this isn’t intentional, but a lot of the time what happens with denominations is we end up focusing on the things that are not important… what is referred to as majoring in the minors. I believe that it stems from our desire to know and understand everything… that sort of post-enlightenmentism that we are still combating in a lot of ways. One could write countless blogs about this… and many people have… so I won’t dwell here.

What I will do is end with a quote by Mark Scandrette:

And we are reminded that kingdom love is not so much something to be exhaustively understood as it is a present reality to inhabit through action. (from the essay, “Growing Pains: The Messy and Fertile Process of Becoming”)

The picture (not the one to the right of this text) was of me. And it made no difference that it didn’t actually look like me at all, didn’t matter that there was nothing to set this portrait of me apart from a portrait of any one of the 2,000 other people in the worship center that morning. The picture was of me because that’s what the artist said it was and that’s all that matters. You see, no one gets to dictate what you are except the one that created you. 

For the last several months I have been exploring the topic of purpose. In Part One I examined the motivation behind why we make the choices that we make… we are all searching for something. We are all dying to know that we are valuable. Part Two focused on what happens when God, the one thing that is supposed to give us a purpose, feels absent. This post begins with a well known Psalm, Psalm 23. In the New Revised Standard Translation of the Bible, Psalm 23: 6 reads like this, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…” If you are at all familiar with this Psalm, then this wording probably sounds correct to you. But here’s a shocker… it’s not. The Hebrew word that gets translated as “follow” here is “yirdifuni” (transliteration). Though follow is not an entirely incorrect translation, a more accurate word in English would be “pursue.” I know it’s only one word in a book (or technically a library) of millions of words, but it makes all the difference. Why? Because if God is pursuing you it means he put something inside you, he wired you up and made you worth pursuing. No one dictates what worth except the one that made you.

A story that has always raised a lot of questions for me is the calling of the first disciples. Here is the story, as recorded in Matthew’s gospel:

As he [Jesus] walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zeb’edee and John his brother, in the boat with Zeb’edee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him. (Matthew 4:18-21 RSV)

It’s a curious little story isn’t it? Here are several men with careers as fishermen and, while it is not the most desirable position, it is a job nonetheless. Not only this, but they have their lives, surrounded by family and friends. So these men are out at work and along comes Jesus, who tells them to follow him. And here’s the amazing part…. they actually do it! Seriously? When I first heard this story I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of person would do that? Who would leave his entire life behind and follow a man he had never actually met? The story begins to make sense, however, when we understand something about Jewish culture at the time. The “dream job” of male Jews was to be a rabbi and at a very young age that training begins. The boys would spend years memorizing Torah and Jewish law and only the best moved on. Rob Bell explains further:

So when this student came to the rabbi and said, “I want to follow you,” the rabbi wanted to know a few things: Can this student do what I do? Can this kid spread my yoke? Can this kid be me? Does this kid have what it takes? 

The rabbi would question the student. Questions about Torah, about tradition, about other rabbis. Questions about the prophets and the sages and the oral law. Questions about interpretation and legislation. Questions about words and phrases and passages.

… if the rabbi believed that this kid did have what it took, he would say, “Come, follow me.”

The student would probably leave his father and mother, leave his synagogue, leave his village and his friends, and devote his life to learning how to do what his rabbi did. (Bell 2005, 129-130)

Now let’s take this information and think about that story from Matthew again. These men are fishermen, which means at some point some rabbi determined that did not have what it takes to do what he does. That being said, they resigned themselves to the family business: fishing. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but it’s important to note that these were the “not good enoughs.” Now along comes Jesus, and as far as anyone knows at this point Jesus is another rabbi among many. And this rabbi came making bold new claims about scripture and its meaning, not all that uncommon for rabbis, actually. Word gets around about the new rabbi with new ideas, so we can even assume that the disciples would’ve heard something about Jesus before he met them that day on the shores of the sea. And when the rabbi calls out and says, “Follow me,” what is he really saying?

Come be like me.

Come learn from me.

I believe you have what it takes.

I believe you can do what I do.

And here’s the really exciting part: Jesus calls you. God desires a relationship with his creation more than anything else, this much we can be sure of. And it breaks God’s heart to see his people suffering, to see creation living so opposite of his intention. I have had many conversations with people who are questioning or don’t believe in God at all. A common question is, “Well if God is real and the world is so broken, why doesn’t he do something about it?” I’ve got news for you: God is doing something about it… and it’s you and me. Remember Jesus said, “Surely you will do even greater things than this…” The rabbi has come and called us… and as my pastor Mike Housholder is fond of saying, “There is no plan B.” Sure we can speculate all day about why God chooses such broken and imperfect people to take part in his work of redemption, but where will that ultimately get us?

For a long time I thought the point of Church was to increase the number of people who got into heaven. Now I don’t believe that’s the case. Here is what I do believe: I believe the world is broken. I believe that God is good, loves his creation, and has no desire for us to continue to exist in this broken state. It is difficult to look at the world around us and not think, “Something is not right here. This is not the way we are meant to live.” Jesus, the rabbi, calls us to follow him. For what purpose? It’s simple actually, the rabbi thinks we have what it takes. The rabbi thinks we can be like him. I used to think that professing belief in Jesus and “getting into heaven” was the end, now I know that it’s just the beginning. When you are baptized, when you are welcomed into the family that is God’s Church, you become a part of something much bigger than your individual salvation. You become a part of God’s plan to redeem the planet, a part of bringing God’s shalom to the earth, a part of making this world right with God… call it what you want.

Here is the point. If God created us to be a certain way and if we fall away from God every day and if that really and truly breaks God’s heart every single time and if God so strongly desires reconciliation with his creation that he went so far as to die and proclaim final victory over death and if that tomb was really empty that first Easter morning and if because it was empty we are now able to be a part of God’s redemptive action and if the rabbi really believes that we can be like him and if there really is no Plan B… then that changes everything.

To all of us that have questioned our sense of value and wondered what we’re worth and what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives, the rabbi calls out with a simple message that changes everything:

Follow me.

For those of you who don’t know the story, here’s what happened. Favre spent 16 years as the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers. He broke a lot of records while he was there and was loved by Packer nation. Prior to the start of the last season, Brett announced his retirement following the Pack’s 13-3 season that came one game short of the Superbowl. A lot of things happened over the next couple of months, but a few weeks before training camp was supposed to begin, rumors started flying that Favre wanted to come back. Rumors became fact and soon Brett was on a plane headed to Green Bay. He left just as quickly, though, and was later traded to the New York Jets. That’s an abbreviated version of the story, but I think it will suffice for our purposes.

What’s the point I want to make with Brett? It’s this: Favre un-retired for a reason. It wasn’t money, he’s done very well for himself over his long career. It wasn’t the lack of accomplishments; Favre holds a spot in every major passing record book and is number one if a few of them, plus he’s got a Superbowl ring. No, Favre’s return can be boiled down to one sentence: I know I can still play this game. He said it a number of times in press conferences, but in retrospect what he was really saying was, “I don’t know what to do when I’m not playing this game.”

In The Search for Purpose Part One, I explored the human need to know who we are and the ways we manipulate and change God to support our own narcissism. I ended by saying that only God gives true purpose, something I plan to explore further in Part Three. Donald Miller sums this up better than I would in his book Searching for God Knows What:

… I was very concerned with getting other people to say I was good or valuable or important because the thing that was supposed to make me feel this way was gone. And it wasn’t just me. I could see it in the people on television, I could see it in the people in the movies, I could see it in my friends and family, too. It seemed that every human being had this need for something outside himself to tell him who he was, and that whatever it was that did this was gone, and this, to me, served as a kind of personality theory. It explained why I wanted to be seen as smart, why religious people wanted so desperately to be right, why Shirley McLaine wanted to be God, and just about everything else a human did. (44)

What happens when God, the “thing” that is supposed to make us feel good or valuable, is gone? Well, allow me to clarify, when it appears to be gone. God never actual leaves us, but we often attempt to ignore God’s presence. What happens is we ascribe meaning to things that have none. I think perhaps the best way to understand this is to think back to middle school. I wouldn’t normally ask anyone to do that, because if your middle school experience was anything like mine it probably isn’t too worth remembering or thinking about all that often. But still, remember Trapper Keepers? Anyone? No one said it, but everyone knew it: it mattered what kind of binder you carried all your stuff in. The more pockets, the more absurdly large, the better! When it came time to get out your binder in class on the very first day, you knew you were about to make a social statement about who you were and what you were about. And the whole time you were eying the people around you, hoping to confirm that your binder was, in fact, the best one.

That might sound a little heavy handed, but that’s part of my point. At that age we didn’t know any better, but we were ascribing meaning, taking our sense of value, from something that was meaningless, that gave nothing. This is what happens when God is seemingly out of the picture. And when we can’t take our value or purpose from God, we will take it from others. Without God, I am only as valuable as the people around me say I am. As Donald Miller explains in the aforementioned Searching for God Knows What, we start existing as though we are in a lifeboat:

The thing is, if people are in a lifeboat, the reason they feel passionate about being a good person and all is because if they aren’t, they are going to be thrown overboard; they are going to be killed. I realize that sounds grim, but I kept comparing, in my mind, the conversation that might take place in a lifeboat with the conversations I heard at Palio or at Horse Brass. Because when you really think about it, these wants we have, like wanting to be right, wanting to be good, wanting to be perceived as humble, wanting to be important to people and wanting to be loved, feel perilous, as though by not getting them something terrible is going to happen. (106)

Without God I am only as valuable as people tell me I am, so I’d better get people to think I’m valuable. Facebook, Twitter and the like are all tools we use to project an image, to help us stay in the boat. Without God, there is nothing more than self-preservation. And the real problem with taking of value from, among other things, Trapper Keepers is that they are finite. Eventually, the Trapper Keeper will be gone and if all of my sense of value, my identity is wrapped up in that Trapper Keeper then I have no idea who I am or what to do now that it’s gone. That’s exactly what I think happened with Favre. He had no reason to return except that he had no idea who he was away from football. And understandably so, that was all he had known his entire life. Insofar as God’s presence profoundly impacts our loves, so too does God’s perceived absence. As Erwin McManus writes in his book Soul Cravings, “Ironically, even if you do not believe in God, your life may be more shaped by your lack of relationship to Him than any other relationship in your life.” (Entry 18) Our lives will be greatly impacted when we try and live them without God because we will be forced to grant meaning where there is none. We will look for what which cannot be found anywhere or in anyone other than God.

When we try and live life without God we will constantly be searching for something but never finding it. As McManus writes:

You will spend your life working through relationships trying to understand your need for love, your inadequacies in love, your desperation for love, and all the time you might miss the signs that your heart is giving you, that you’re searching for God.

A life without God will eventually lead to all of us feeling like Brett Favre. Eventually that thing that we thought was fulfilling God’s role, that we thought was giving us value, will pass away. We won’t be able to play the game any more. We won’t be able to work, to do the job the same way we used to. And we will find ourselves saying, “I have no idea who I am or what I’m supposed to be about.”

Do you know what you mean to God?

Hello Chris!

There, glad I got that out. I feel better.

I have been playing around with this idea for a while now: we are addicted to identity. Let me explain. In the age of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and countless other networking sites that exist under the broad umbrella of “social media,” we have become addicted to identity. And don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty as the next person. My BlackBerry makes it that much easier to fuel my addiction to identity. We’ve got a problem folks, a serious problem. Countless status updates make it easy for us to let people know who we are… and who we want them to think we are. The anonymity of social networking allows you to be whoever you want to be. 

Stop and think about it for a minute. Look at your past Facebook updates. Who do you want people to think that you are? The Smart Guy? The Party Girl? The Work-A-Holic? The Hip, Semi-Emergent, Theology Reading, Suedo-Pastor Guy? (That last one may or may not be a self-portrait.) Donald Miller writes in Searching for God Knows What:

…I figure I was attaching myself to a certain identity because it made me feel smart or, more honestly, it made other people tell me I was smart. This was how I earned my sense of importance. Now, as I was saying earlier, by doing things to get other people to value me, a couple of ideas became obvious, the first being that I was a human wired so other people told me who I was. This was very different from anything I had previously believed, including that you had to believe in yourself and all, and I still that is true, but I realized there was this other part of me, and it was a big part of me, that needed something outside of myself to tell me who I was. (43)

This section in my copy of the book is highlighted, underlined, and marked with a bright yellow tab. Why? Because it hit home. Miller says he is a person, “… wired so other people told [him] who [he] was.” Whether he knows it or not (and I suspect that he does) Miller is making a commentary on the condition of humanity. We are all people wired up so that others dictate our value. I determine what my role is and how important I am by how other people treat me. The kicker is that now, in the age of social media, we have the ability now more than ever to project the imagine that we want others to perceive. Status updates and Facebook profiles (not to mention blogs by no-name students of theology ) all help us tell people who we want to be, how we want people to think about us. But let’s take it one step further:

One of the needs on Maslow’s pyramid was the need to know God. Not to know God, but rather to supply for the human psyche a kind of divine heritage providing, among other benefits, an explanation for existence. Because science is severely deficient in details of origin, Maslow held that man invented God as a kind of false bridge from one need to the next. God, far from a Being who had revealed Himself to man, was more an intellectual cuddly toy with which man snuggled during his dark night of the soul. God, in other words, was somebody who validated man’s identity. Man need God to shove into the crack created by the truth of his meaninglessness.

The truth of our meaninglessness. Here is the great irony of our lives, we think (note I said “we”, which includes me) that we don’t need God. We understand our existence (read: purpose) to be wholly separate from God. God is more like an accessory to existence than a necessity. And here’s the best part, he comes in different makes and models. There is Catholic God, Lutheran God (or Catholic God 2.0 if you want to poke fun at Lutherans, which I do because I am one), and countless others. And in this age if you don’t like any of the flavor options, you can even create your own. We treat our God experience like we’re stepping up to the custom burger bar at Fuddruckers. To paraphrase Miller, we create a God that validates our identity. 

I have discovered two truths of humanity:

1) We crave meaning. Our addiction to identity is nothing more than an attempt to satisfy our desire for purpose. We long to know, we are desperate to know, who we are. It’s not selfish, it’s how we’re wired up. Everyone needs to know that they have purpose, that they belong somewhere and are valued by someone.

2) We create meaning. Because meaning is so fundamental to who we are, we create it everywhere: the jobs we have, the degrees we hold, the cars we drive, the stuff we own. We assign meaning to everything in our lives, including God. Does anyone else see the problem with us assigning God a purpose? Me too.

I have discovered this truth about God:

Only God gives true meaning and purpose. No one gets to tell you who you are and what you are meant to be except the one who created you.

As I grew up in traditional Lutheranism, my understanding of atonement was that I was “saved” by “faih in Jesus.” At the time I never really understood what that meant, but I said it a lot. I actually still don’t quite understand it, but I will make an attempt. This leads us down the road to substitutionary atonement. Here is, in essence, what I mean by that. It starts with us owing God something (like perfect obedience to the law), a bill that we do not have the ability to pay. God, being love, sends Jesus so, through his death and subsequent resurrection, pays the bill on our behalf. If we have (and are saved by) faith in Jesus, then we are saved when (and this is where I get fuzzy) we believe and profess that we wholly lack the ability to atone for our sins before God and need Jesus to do it for us. For a long time I understood God in this way: God was a judge and I was on trial before him. I was sure to be convicted of the crime that I was being charged with, but I had a great lawyer, Jesus, who argued on my behalf and showed that I was, in fact, not guilty. I’m not making that up. That’s seriously how I understood God, Jesus, and myself. Furthermore, I only understood this to be important insofar as it meant that I “was going” to heaven.

But what happens when we make a change. I do not claim this idea as novel, because I am most definitely not the first person to notice/write about it. Consider the aforementioned phrase “pistis Iesou Christou” translated in a different (more accurate) way: the faith of Jesus Christ.” How does this factor into our formation of a coherent atonement theology? What does it mean to say that we are saved not by faith in Jesus but by/through the faith of Jesus? Here is what Douglas Harink, associate professor of theology at King’s University in Edmonton, says about this in his book Paul Among the Postliberals:

The meaning of justification has been more or less explicit throughout our discussion of the faith of Jesus Christ… For Paul justification… is the definitive, cosmic, apocalyptic act of the one God of Israel in Jesus Christ, whereby this God, through the death and resurrection of the Faithful One, conquers the powers which hold the nations in bondage and reconciles the world to himself, in order that he might create in Christ a new people, indeed, finally a whole new world, in which loyalty, obedience, and faithfulness to the one God of Israel is made possible among the nations in the power of the Holy Spirit… God’s right-making faithfulness thus also calls forth and enables a corresponding right-making (justice) among the peoples of the earth; specifically it creates the theological-political space for a reconciliation between Israel and the nations, a reconciliation made concretely real and present in the baptism and table fellowship of Jews and Gentiles in the new community that hears and obeys  the good news which Paul preaches. (44-45)

God’s primary action is redemption/reconciliation of/with his creation which he loves so dearly. God so strongly desires atonement (at-one-ment according to my friend The Digital Pastor) with his creation that he redeems all of creation in the “definitive, cosmic, apocalyptic act” that is Jesus the Christ.  By using the “faith of Jesus” as a jumping off point, I propose the following. I affirm the fall of man (either that it happened or that it happens as Rob Bell says) and thus a doctrine of original sin. I understand God’s work to be redemptive, his “end game” being the realization of perfect community amongst his creation, as he originally intended it to be. Because of the fall, we are inadaquate to be a part of this action and unable to realize fully our roles in this action. Now we come to The Jesus Event (I credit my friend Mike the Deconstructionist with that terminology), whereby we are all freed from that which has held us back from realizing our full potential as a community of God’s people and by which faith is made possible. The first step, then, is not our faith or believing, the first step is The Jesus Event, God’s freeing us from the bondage of sin and death. Here Harink turns to Karl Barth:

… Justification remains wholly God’s work, directed first toward Jesus Christ, “who lives as the author and recipient and revealer of the justification of man” (Church Dogmatics 4.1:629); in and through Christ humanity itself is wholly justified. Therefore, justification cannot be “completed” or “made effective” through human faith. Now – and only in apparent contrast to what he says in The Epistle to the Romans – Barth understands faithitself as a “work,” a human action (617), so how can it be thought to contribute to our justification? To think thus is to fail to recognize that as a sinful human being the believer “needs justification just as much in faith as anywhere else, as in the totality of his being” (616). Instead, faith is the first of the works that justification establishes: “Faith is the humility of obedience… Faith differs from any mere thinking and believing and knowing, or indeed from any other trusting, in the fact that it is an obeying” (620) (52-53)

It is The Jesus Event, God’s cosmic act of redemption, that makes faith possible. Because of what Jesus has done on the cross, we are now free to realize our roles as the people God intended us to be. Here is what Rob Bell says about this in Velvet Elvis:

Which leads to forgiveness. The point of the cross isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness leads to something much bigger: restoration. God isn’t just interested in the covering over of our sins; God wants to make us into the people we were originally created to be. It is not just the removal of what’s being held against us; it is God pulling us into the people he originally had in mind when he made us. This restoration is why Jesus always orients his message around becoming the kind of people who are generous and loving and compassionate. The goal here isn’t simply to not sin. Our purpose is to increase the shalom in this world, which is why approches to the Christian faith that deal solely with not sinning always fail. They aim at the wrong thing. It is not about what you don’t do. The point is becoming more and more the kind of people God had in mind when we were first created. ( 108 )

I occasionally find Christians annoying. Can I say that? Can I get that off my chest? Thanks. I feel better.

As someone who spends a lot of time around (and often finds himself in the midst of) various “young adult” (not to say “emergent”) church movements, I’ve noticed a few things. Not the least of which is the fact that: we teach people to be counter-cultural. We are quick to move to sermons that focus on the evils of the culture that surrounds us. We point to Jesus as someone who was counter-cultural; so much so that the powers-that-be wanted to (and eventually did) kill him. Often that’s what we think Christianity looks like. It means rejecting all ideas of the culture out-rightly, citing them as misguided or evil. Instead, we are told to live differently. Do not be of the world just because you happen to be in the world.

Here is my issue with this. If we allow this mentality to persist unchecked, the result is a Christianity that defines itself in opposition to culture. Instead of focusing on what we are, we too often focus on what we are not. We want to make it very clear: we are not consumer-capitalists, we do not support war, we not pro-choice, etc. These are all examples, but you get my drift here. I have been reading Douglas Harink’s book, “Paul Among the Post Liberals,” for a class and been greatly enjoying it. In that book, Harink shares this quote from theologian John Howard Yoder:

To make “distinctiveness” a value criterion is to measure the truth value of meaning system A in terms of the other systems (whether B or C or N or X) that happen to be around, from which [A] is supposed to differ. That is a method mistake. Some of the neighboring systems may be very much like it. Some of them may be historically derived from it, which is true of most of the post-Christian value systems in the West. To ask that Christian thought be unique is nonsense. What we should ask of Christian statements is that they be specifically or specifiably Christian, i.e., true to kind, authentically representing their species. Whether a specifiably Christian statement [or social structure] is “distinctive” depends on the other guy. (140)

Yoder is able to articulate here something has been getting under my skin for a least the past year. Why do Christians act the way that they act? What is the motivation? What is the intent? We do many things (some of which are good, don’t get me wrong) under the banner of being “Christian Radicals.” But why?

Perhaps it is best explained using this example. A few months ago I was in the office of the chapel at the small, liberal arts college I attend. A friend of mine suddenly put down her copy of the latest Shane Claiborne book (who I really have nothing against) and announced, “I think I want to get arrested at some point in my life.” Before I go on, let me be clear: I like this girl. We were friends and we still are friends. Her faith and the way she views the world has been a wonderful gift to me. That being said, it was all I could not to fly off the handle. When I asked her why, she said something like, “It just seems like if you haven’t been arrested at some point, you aren’t being a very faithful follower of Jesus.”

Um, what?

This is a perfect of example of what I was trying to get at before. Defining ourselves (Christians) as what we are not often walks hand in hand with doing radical (sometimes illegal) things as an “act of witness.” But what does Yoder say? This is foolish. Instead of doing things that are radical for the sake of being radical witnesses, Yoder argues that we ought to behave, well, like Christians and let the culture worry about itself. The Christian ought not to define his/her behavior based on statements like, “Society tells me to do X, so I will do the opposite because Christians are counter-cultural.”

We ought to act as Christians. Yoder accounts for the often forgetten (and occasionally seemingly impossible) possibility that Christian beliefs and what the culture tells us to believe might be the same thing. So instead of worrying whether we are being “counter-cultural” enough, why not simply worry about being a faithful community and leave the rest up to, “…the other guy.” Instead of striving to be radical, let’s strive to be the Church and if that happens to be counter to what the culture is or says, then so be it. It’s not so much a matter of changing what we do, but rather how we think about it.

Remember earlier when I said I thought Christians were annoying? It’s not because of the things they (or we) do, it’s because too often I don’t think people have really thought about the why. If it turns out that getting arrested, in a particular situation, is a faithful witness of what the Church is, then do it! This gets into more complexities when you start talking about Divine Command Ethics (which I happen to love), but that’s another blog for another day. For now, can we please stop worrying about waving the banner of Radical Christianity and counter-culture and just be the Church?

“Jesus going to the cross to wipe away our sins is essentially God renewing his marriage vows to his people…. God is saying, ‘I want to know you and I want you to know me and this is how serious I am about it.’… But there’s another word for that and it’s called atonement… What do we see when we look at the word atonement? At-one-ment.”

He goes on to talk about the ways that we have given ourselves away (sexually in this case) hoping to find the “oneness” that we all seek. I’m currently struggling with my atonement theology, so I’ll leave that be for another blog at another time. Here is the point I want to make about this, though: whatever atonement is, God did it because he so strongly desires to know us and for us to know him. God desires to be with us.

A lot of the things my friend The Digital Pastor said were true. If we are being honest, we seek “oneness” in most of the things we do, except we usually call it community. There is a fantastic little book that I have gotten a lot of milage out of called Soul Cravings by Erwin McManus. The entire first third of the book is dedicated to one topic: intimacy. Erwin’s point is simple: we crave intimacy. We desire it with all that we are. It doesn’t mean that everyone is extroverted, because everyone certainly is not. What is does mean is this: people were never meant to be alone. God knows this. God went to extreme measures, namely Jesus, to ensure that we would never be alone, as The Digital Pastor said so that we would know, “… how serious God is about it.” In Blue Like Jazz Donald Miller reflects on a story about him orbiting the planet, all alone:

“I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy’s story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was rel and what was not. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing.” (p.71)

What are we apart from community? Not just community with others, but community God, as experienced through our interactions with other people? Nothing. Not even human.

This is all well and good. If we can wrap our minds around the concept of God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, for some reason desiring intimate community with us, so much the better. But the reality is that even though we hear this all the time and perhaps even make conscious effor to live differently in light of it, we still seek intimacy in other, often unhealthy, ways. The question is: why? God demonstrated on the cross, in the ultimate self-sacrifice, just how much he desires us to know him. We are constantly reminded of this, in our “church” language and in the crosses and other trinkets we see people wear. So why do we seek intimacy in places and people that, in the end, will just leave us more run down than before?

Why does God still feel so distant?

It is is easy to look around and claim that God is not present. Where is God in Darfur? Where is God in the sex-trade industry in the East? Where is God in children starving to death?

Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani

Never have I so felt God’s absence than a few weeks ago on what I’m sure will be one of the defining moments of my life. The ambulance service (a 911 emergency response unit) that I work for was paged out to a house for a possible DOA. Before we could get there we were told that the patient was a 9 week old child. My partner told me that when we got there he would go in, pick up the child, and come back out. As I watched him run out of that house I could hardly believe what I saw. He carried in his arms a 9 week old baby girl… but she didn’t look how a baby should look. She looked fake, like a training doll that we might practice CPR on. This was no practice or training session, however. As he set her down on the cot and I started doing chest compressions, she became real to me. She was still warm to the touch, but there was blood around her mouth and nose. And she wasn’t crying. Babies are supposed to cry. As we worked I found myself crying out to God, more desperate for his presence than ever before. It was a simple prayer: God we need you here. She needs you here.

I will spare you the medical details of what transpired. Suffice it to say we did not arrive in time. Our shifts are 24 hours long and we had a few more calls during that time, so it was easy to push her to the back of my mind. It wasn’t until I’d really had time to process it that I began to feel… much of anything at all really. How could I look at that beautiful baby girl, now lifeless before me at only 9 weeks old, and come to any conclusion other than, “God is absent.” How can I watch a 21 year-old male stop breathing, watch his heart stop as he finally gave in to the cancer that had ravaged him for 5 long years; watch his father (who was with us in the ambulance) climb over the seats into the back to hold his hand as he died; watch is mother come apart as we wheeled him into the ER, covered by a sheet, and believe God is present?

God we need you here.

(This is part one in a series.)

Everyone’s heard that phrase: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Now of course there is such a thing as a free lunch, but you understand what Anonymous was trying to get at here. The point is really that nothing good in life comes free… or even easy.

It is, in fact, contradictory to our very nature. In a recent conversation with a pastor friend of mine I was enlightened to the fascinating world of the levels of consciousness in which we exist as people. Now I don’t remember all of them (I occasionally can’t remember where I parked my car), but the one that jumped out at me was the second level of consciousness. At this level a person is only able to grasp transactional relationships. “If this, then I get this. If I do this, then I will not get this,” and so on. This is the level at which most people operate, so says my pastor friend.

I’m not sure to what extent there is mobility amongst the levels of consciousness. As in, if I acheive the fourth level, can I ever digress back down to the third level? How many save points are there? How many lives do I get? Okay, I went for a video game thing there… it probably wasn’t funny. I feel like it is possible that we go back and forth. I feel like it’s possible because I do it all the time. At times I find myself operating at another level, able to step back and see the larger pictures, see how things interact, how I interact with the world. At other times, and if I’m being honest probably most of the time, I’m at level two. I can only see decisions as far as they affect me and my life.

Not only that but I assume that the rest of the world functions with this same rationality. Everyone is looking out for his or her self. If they do something for me they are certainly expecting something in return, otherwise they would not have done it. So when that rare person comes along who does something and asks nothing return, I get confused. When they do it a second time, I get more confused and even a little angry.

Here’s what author Donald Miller says about this in Blue Like Jazz:

“Rick tells me, looking back, that he was too proud to receive free grace from God. He didn’t know how to live within a system where nobody owes anybody else anything. And the harder it was for Rick to pay God back, the more he wanted to hide. God was his loan shark, so to speak. Though he understood that God wanted nothing in return, his mind could not communicate this fact to his heart, so his life was something like torture.” (p. 83)

Miller’s point here, in part, is that we simply do not know how to exist in a system that is not about transactions. It’s not that we can’t compute it. Our brains are capable of understanding what is taking place. I love the way Miller says this, “Though he understood that God wanted nothing in return, his mind could not communicate this fact to his heart, so his life was something like torture.” I understand that God asks nothing in return of me. There is no, “I will redeem you, but only if you do __________.” I have heard this many times and I understand it to be the circumstance in which I exist.

And yet I feel guiltly. A lot, actually. James Allison (whose book, “Undergoing God,” I have just finished for a class and is mostly un-interesting, save for one or two chapters) says, and I’m paraphrasing, that we ought to walk about as people who are constantly being forgiven and of whom nothing is asked in return. Again, I can intellectually grasp this idea. But in my heart I still feel the weight of guilt. In my gut I feel like I owe somebody something for this thing called sin. Often times I feel as though I’m in the movie “The Godfather,” and God is saying to me, “One day I will ask a favor of you…”

And I almost wish he would. I wish he would come to me and say, “Hey remember how I took care of that sin thing for you? Okay, well I need you to pick me up at the airport on Tuesday. Do that and we’ll be all settled up.” So I’d get in my Trailblazer and pick up God at the airport on Tuesday and now we’re good to go. But then I’d start thinking on disproportionate the thing I did was to the thing God did… so I’d think maybe we’re not really settled. So I’d call God up on the phone and say, “Are you sure that’s all you need? I mean, the thing you did was pretty huge. All I did was drive downtown.”

As people who center their lives around God and how God teaches us to exist in community, we must, as Rob Bell wrote, as though there is nothing we can do, there is no point in protesting, the bill is already paid.