Category: Church

By now most of you have probably heard about the tragedy in Newtown, CT.  By now most of you have probably caught up on the news, heard from the President.  By now most of you have probably read tweets, posts, status updates, etc with ranging emotions.  Times like this bring about a lot of confusion, anger, sadness and heartbreak. It also brings about a lot of debate, healthy and at times unhealthy debate on politics, rights and privileges of living in a free society.
This is not a post about that.
I’m truly saddened by this tragedy.  Saddened for the families of all involved, for children whose lives are forever altered and for whom school is no longer a safe place of learning.  For parents who have the unthinkable task of burying their children.  For children who have the unthinkable task of burying their parents.  For the loved ones of the shooter who are now mourning several members of their family and asking the questions of why.  For a community now forever changed and defined by this day.
I can’t scoff at the timing of my parables final and that while I was listening to the reports I was also reading about the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares found in Matthew 13.  I was reading how the significant question being addressed in this parable by our Lord and Savior is “How can this be the Kingdom (of God) if evil is still present?”
Or in other words: Why does God let bad things happen to good people?
Jesus addresses this question with this parable:  The Kingdom has become like a farmer who has planted good seed in his field.  But that night as the workers slept, the enemy came and planted weeds among the the wheat, then slipped away.  When the crop began to grow and produce grain, the weeds also grew.  The farmer’s workers went to him and said, ‘Sir, the field where you planted that good seed is full of weeds! Where did they come from?’ ‘an Enemy has done this!’ the farmer exclaimed.  “Should we pull out the weeds?” they asked. “No,” he replied, “you’ll uproot the wheat if you do.  Let both grow together until the harvest.  Then I will tell the harvesters to sort out the weeds, tie them into bundles and burn them and to put the wheat in the barn.”
Later his followers ask for an explanation and Jesus says that the field is the world, the farmer is the Son of Man, the good seed is the people of the kingdom and the weeds are the people who belong to the evil one.  The harvest is the end of the world and the harvesters are the angels.
At the end of the world the Son of Man will send his angels to remove all the evil from his Kingdom.
But this is not the end.  We’re still living in the Kingdom among the presence of evil.  Jesus assures us through his ministry and the presence of the Holy Spirit that the Kingdom is present in the world today ad he also assures us that evil is present in the world today, as seen by days like today.
This parable speaks nothing of retaliation or even what we should do about evil.  He only assures us that he is present and that one day there will be judgment.  The greek in the parable specifically says, “The Kingdom has become like”.  This passive verb form is Jesus’ way of assuring us that this was not what the Kingdom was meant for, it has become this way.  Our world has become this way.  Evil has come and dwells among us and for whatever reason the time for judgment hasn’t come yet.  But we are assured that it will come.
Until then we cling to the presence of our Lord and remind ourselves that this is not the end.

I’ve been working at churches for almost 6 years now, really 8 if you include those years in college.  And there are still a few things that get me every time I experience them.  They aren’t abnormal experiences when you’re within a church body, in fact I’ve had then happen to or around me probably 100 times, but still – they blow my mind every time.  Every.  Time.
A couple of them happened to me today which once again, made me blessed to be in this place at this time.
First up – when the church body rallies around an individual or a family in prayer.  We have a family in our church who has had a bit of a rough season.  The husband has been in need of a kidney transplant and this week his wife is going to be his donor.  It’s an incredible story and as a church we have been praying them through this difficult time of waiting for answers.  The surgery is this Wednesday so this morning at church, we gathered around this family to pray.  It was such an amazing display of faithfulness of a community.  I know it’s not unexpected in a church but it’s something that our church does so well, we know how to care for our people.
Secondly, the moment when we go from people who worship side by side to people who worship together.  There’s a couple in our church who have been attending for quite some time, they recently became members and they are even in my small group.  This morning, in the midst of the usual weekly chatter after service, talking through our past weeks, our upcoming weeks, even the upcoming small group Christmas party, there was a shift in the conversation.  It was really subtle, but the shift was there.  It was like talking with old friends, we were joking in that comfortable fashion.  This couple has become a part of my community, I look forward to seeing them each week and hearing about what’s really going on in their lives.  We worship together rather than simultaneously, our friendship bringing glory to God.
Another evidence of this was in another conversation with some newer attenders.  I had mentioned that I had been praying for this woman over the week because as a member of the staff I had gotten her prayer request the past week.  Later in the conversation I had mentioned that my finals were coming up this week.  This same woman placed her hand on my shoulder and said, “Now I know what I’ll be praying for you this week.”  Her warm smile lit her whole face up and I was so blessed in that moment.
This third moment that blows my mind is the moment when someone (family or individual) goes from visitor to attendee.  Most of the time it’s a subtle shift, but today it came as a (shocked) statement from a dad.  We had the opportunity for child sponsor ship through Covenant Kids Congo and while I was manning the table, a newish family approached.  Through the conversation the daughter, a 7th grader, was telling me how she wanted to be a missionary some day and how excited she was to sponsor a child.  Her dad kind of shook his head and mentioned, “We’re going to end up going here aren’t we?” to his daughter.  I then got to hear some of their story about church, but that’s not the point.  In having this conversation with me and his daughter I could see it dawn on him that his family was becoming attached to this place.  It was a great moment to witness as he looked over at his daughter who just nodded enthusiastically.
The reason I think I still find wonder in these moments is that it is so counter-cultural.  In this western world we are fed this idea that we don’t need anyone else in our lives.  We are individuals or individual families.  We have no need for the type of community that the Church is about.  And yet, when people taste the kind of fellowship that comes from the Holy Spirit, it’s addicting.  They want to join up in a good way.
This is not to say that our church is doing it perfectly (although, I’m biased, I think we’re awesome) or to say that all churches experience these moments.  I think these moments are so often missed, so often taken for granted.  As staff members we are so quick to merely desire more congregants that we miss the process and the story of how they got there.
But we can’t miss that!  We can’t take for granted that we aren’t adding numbers to a page or an attendance rate.  We are adding active stories being lived out within our midst.  We are adding community.  We are adding hearts to beat in time with our own as we bring glory to the Almighty.

This weekend I got to babysit for my favorite Chicago Kansans.  I always love babysitting for them because it usually means a few things: guaranteed laughs, good food, snuggles and some book reading.  It’s a fabulous arrangement.
A side note, with no relevance to this post is that I was babysitting so that the parents, my dear friends, could go watch their team K-State play.  So when I walked in on Saturday night all five family members were wearing K-State t-shirts.  Love it.
So fast forward to dinner.  I had served up our delicious food and we had some Gungor playing in the background.  We were sitting at the table when The Earth is Yours came on.  I made a comment on how much I love that particular song and this conversation followed:
“You know Alicia, this whole CD is about the Bible,” their 5 year old daughter told me.
“I do know that.  Do you know what this song is about?” I replied.
“No.”
“It’s about how God created the earth and so everything on the earth belongs to Him.”   I could see her mind working on processing this when the chorus came on.  Almost like she couldn’t help it she started singing along.  So I joined in, quickly followed by their 3 year old son.
Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord.  The earth is Yours and singing, 
When the verse kicked back in, I continued my explanation.  I tried to explain what Holy means to these two small minds.  I tried to explain that this song was meant to worship God for his creation and the ways that he provides for us.  I talked about how when we say, “The earth is Yours and singing” we are saying that we recognize that God is the one who created us all and that he is Holy.
Then the chorus came back around.
Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord. The earth is Yours and singing,
Then there was a moment of silence from the kids.  Until my little 5 year old lovely broke it saying, “So we just worshiped right there.”
“We did, yeah.”  I responded with a smile.
For the rest of the night she was astonished by the fact that we can worship whenever we want.
It was one of those moments when you realize that she gets it.  She gets what worship is on the most basic level.  It’s a conversation to grow on as she continues to understand the character of God.
But in that moment, I think she got something that most of us struggle to realize in our everyday lives.

This morning our staff gathered, as we do weekly, to Dwell in the Word.  Dwell is a practice we do once a week where we spend time purposefully dwelling in the Scripture for the upcoming two Sundays.  It begins with a prayer and then two readings of the same scripture.  After that we get to reflect to a partner, uninterrupted for three minutes.  Then you switch roles (within the partners) then we come back together as a whole group and your partner shares what they heard you say.  Then we reflect on how this process went for each of us individually.
This morning, our second dwell passage was Exodus 2:11-25.  During my time with my partner, I reflected on the part of the scripture where Moses is attempting to correct two Hebrew men he found fighting.  One of the men says to Moses, “Who appointed you to be our prince and judge?”  Then it is revealed that Moses is a murderer and he flees to Midian….
The place I was hung up on was this question of “Who appointed you?”  The answer to the Hebrew man’s question is … No one… YET!  It would be another 40 years before Moses was actually called to do the work of the Lord.  At this point, Moses was just a highly confused Hebrew man who had been raised Egyptian, and having just killed an Egyptian slave driver for beating a Hebrew man.  He was trying to put his own kind of salvation on his fellow Hebrews, thinking he knew what was best, when the reality was – that wasn’t God’s plan and he wasn’t ready yet for God’s plan.
Reflecting on a similar part of the passage, my partner said, “As God encounters us we are called to conform – to be in a better position of listening.”
It was so profound to me.  So many times I think that I know what is best for any given problem presented before me.  I think I know how to fix it all.  And recently I have found myself in several situations that in all honesty, just plain suck. There are people in my life that are hurting in ways I can relate to but I can do nothing about.  And in those moments all I can do is pray harder for God’s intervening hand.  I can’t fix the situation, I can’t make this person act better towards this other person.
This past Sunday I prayed one of these prayers.  Being at the complete end of my own rope in helping, I prayed fervently that God would intervene and open the eyes of the blind.  That he would make this situation in my life go from broken to complete and to use me in the process.
And God moved.  I am not saying the situation is healed, there is going to have to be a lot more prayer for that to happen completely.  But there is progress.  There has been movement that have happened that I could only dream of.  It’s not complete but it’s a step forward.
Sometimes I need to remember that I am the one that needs to be attached to God, not God attached to me.

In this senior seminar that I talked about in my last post we’ve been asking the question of What is the Gospel? And last week our presenter was Soong-Chan Rah, who is one of my favorite professors. As we were talking about the question of what is the gospel, Soong-Chan brought up this idea that when we are asked to articulate the gospel, the majority of people will start with the fall rather than creation. We start our gospel sentences with the idea that we are sinners who have fallen short and are in need of the saving grace of Christ. The chaos of the world causes us to look forward to the Shalom – the wholeness and peace – of the eschaton.
Yes, and…
Then, Soong-Chan talked about a friend of his in the Native American community who talks about the idea of starting our gospel story with creation rather than the fall. He told this story about how in a community that is full of struggle and strife, they tend to start the gospel with looking back at the Shalom of creation rather than looking forward to the Shalom of the restoration in the second coming of Christ.
This idea is fascinating to me. I think about how so much of the time we articulate the gospel as saving faith in Christ that points to a time when struggles and pain will be no more. We can have faith in sufferings because we look forward to a time when it will be better. For the most part, this is easy because we can always look back to a time when we weren’t struggling personally. But what about communities that do not have that story? That struggles have characterized their whole life.
In the biblical story we have the ability to look back to the relationship that Adam and Eve had with God in the garden – this idea of complete Shalom – a wholeness that comes only from a relationship with God. Then the fall, we are distanced from God by sin and now we are striving to get back to Shalom. We have a picture of this in our biblical story. We know what Shalom looks like and now all we can do is follow and strive to get back to that Shalom.
Personally, when I came to Christ it was more powerful for me to look back to creation than to look forward to the eschaton. The life I was living was one of constant struggle. I lived in a broken home with an alcoholic father who looked as if he would never get clean. The most valid argument I heard for faith in Christ is that the life I was living was not the one intended for me by God. That I was created for this Shalom relationship with God.
I know that’s not everyone’s story but I think we may need to rethink our audiences when we talk about the gospel. Maybe we need to bring creation back into it.d

I’m taking this senior seminar on the Gospel. It’s been kicking my butt recently, trying to figure out what my theology of the Gospel is and wondering what Gospel it is that I will be preaching when I’m a pastor. Asking hard questions like whether we are creating disciples of Christ or people who think they are going to heaven no matter what. It’s been a really challenging and rewarding class.
This week we had a lecture from one of our Old Testament professors. Somehow we got onto the topic of individualism and the formation of our identity. Our professor (who is nuts about the discussion of identity) was talking about how there is this new generation in the church (or just in our culture) that are really into this whole idea of being an individual and not like anyone else. And then he started talking about our identity and asked us how much of our identity was completely up to us. How much of our formation was our own doing? He wanted a percentage.
I thought about it, about the things that I claim have created me into the person I am and realized that the majority of identity forming events and people in my life were not of my own doing. I didn’t choose them, I didn’t choose the way I reacted to them (at least not consciously), I didn’t choose any of it. Identity has happened to me…creation has happened to me. I am a passive identity-maker.
This isn’t to say that I don’t have responsibility for the person that I am, that’s not it. It’s more that the people that I am surrounded by and the events that have endured are what have shaped my identity. To speak in more spiritual terms, my identity has been handed down to me by the Creator. I have become who I am now because of how he formed me and the people that he has placed in my life and around me.
So if that is true, how much of an individual can I be? How can I stand out and be “different” than anyone else if I have little control in who I am? And in all honesty, being an individual in this culture in this time means more of how I dress or what music I listen to than fundamentally who I am. I think about how many people struggle and fight to become different than everyone around them only to become more like the people around them.
So when we are talking about youth ministry, when we are talking about students who are consciously trying to figure out who they are–how do we instill in them that their identity is not their own but rather handed down from their Creator. That there is a God out there that has an plan of who they are and how they should live. Yes their God created them as an individual but an individual called to live in community with other individuals.
We are individuals created by a creative God who wants to see us living in communities with other individuals without being individuals. We have a common good, we have a common goal, we have a common God to worship together.
Still thinking through this one…what are your thoughts?

My Christian Ethics class is blowing my mind. I already knew this would happen. People that have gone before me have warned me that this Ethics class with this professor was amazing.
Each week there is an insane amount of reading (like a book a week) and then we sit in class and discuss issues such as remembering suffered wrongs, poverty, immigration etc. Today we have an immigration specialist talking about the current immigration situation in the US and the Ethics we are called to in response.
This guest lecturer (who is awesome btw) is a Catholic theologian and talks about how the beginning of a person, in Catholic anthropology, is the fact that they are created in the image and likeness of God. This is the right of Human Dignity in the 4 rights that Catholics teach in their Social Teaching. Human Dignity states that the human person precedes the state.
Within the question of immigration, human dignity asks – how does your position on immigration that “those people” are made in God’s image and likeness”?
I know that the discussion on immigration is big and complicated. And to be completely honest I have stayed a little bit out of this conversation because of my personal connection to the issue. Which I know, means I should have educated myself on it but considering some of the experiences I have had with anti-immigration people and groups – I’ve decided to be hands off. Until now.
We had to read a book for this class called Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church and the Bible by M. Daniel Carroll R. (Who is a prof at Denver Sem…by the way). It not only lays out the history of immigration in the US but also how the Bible deals with issues of immigrants and immigration. It’s actually a great read that makes you see the side of the argument that as Christians, we are called to care for those in our country who are seeking refuge or a better life. To borrow a commonly used phrase around seminary, that could preach.
As I’m learning more about myself and more about my call I realize that if you want to get my attention on something – show me a person who is unfairly having their human dignity stripped. My heart will be wrenched everytime. I will want to jump in and do something about it. Last week we went to the juvenile detention center and ever since then I’ve had this thought about wanting to work there. I went to a meeting at Midwinter about education in the US and the court systems and again – I wanted to get involved.
Seminary has rocked my world in a lot of ways. Not entirely the classes (they’re good too) but the experience of being educated by people who are passionate about various issues and educate others on those issues. My eyes are being opened to things I knew were problems but I’m finally educating myself on. Fascinating.

My friend wrote recently that she had been reading about the Lord’s Prayer over on the blog of Andrew Arndt.  So I clicked, out of curiosity and read some of Andrew’s stuff on the Lord’s Prayer when I remembered an article I read last year on this prayer that we know so well.
So I dug up my research from the paper I had written on the Lord’s prayer and sure enough I found the article written by NT Wright entitled “They Kingdom Come: Living the Lord’s Prayer.”  It was a short article and in all honesty, a bit of a cop out for a scholarly article on my passage, but it radically changed how I thought about these words that flow so freely from my mouth when prompted, almost rehearsed. (Okay more than almost…)
Wright dwells on the line of the prayer where we ask “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  Wright says that to pray Thy Kingdom come is to see the world as the Lord sees it, with the love the Creator has for his creation and to see the utter brokenness and woundedness that the world lives in today.  Then we take this love and this grief and see how that love and grief has existed before–in the death of Jesus on the cross.  With that image in our minds we pray, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  We are praying for the redemption of the world and for the radical uprooting of evil and the final marriage of heaven and earth – for God to be all in all before our eyes.
But if we are going to pray this, we need to ask the question, Are we willing to be Kingdom-bearers?  Are we willing to act as healed healers rather than broken bullies?  Are we willing to sing the song of redemption loud enough for the world to join in?  To fully live as Jesus created us?
We are all broken.  We have all fallen short of the glory of God and been dealt bad hands.  We have suffered from the evils of this world, the question is, how do we lead from that brokenness?  How do we give up the idea of perfect leaders and take up the idea that we can lead and bring healing because we have experienced healing?
With all those questions in view – are we willing to pray this over familiar prayer and truly ask for the Kingdom of Heaven to come here, to meet us in this world.  Are we willing to lead the way in this transformation?  Are we willing to be Kingdom bearers in our everyday lives.
I’ll tell you one thing, after reading this NT Wright, I find it harder and harder to take this challenge that Jesus handed out in Matthew.  Every time I pray that prayer I think about whether or not I am really up for this challenge.  What if we were to fervently pray for the Kingdom to come and for His will to be done?  What kind of church could we have then?