Max Lucado tells of a week long, high school fishing trip with his father and best friend. The secluded mountain destination overlooked a picturesque lake. Arriving late at night, dreaming of warm sunshine, easy boating and rigorous fishing, the trio awoke instead to horizontal rain and sleet. Three days of bad weather, endless Monopoly games and out-of-date Readers Digests frayed the friendship. Patience tired, tempers shortened and when the father called it quits on day four, no-one disagreed. Lucado reflects on the lesson he learned: “When those who are called to fish don’t fish, they fight!” Like youngsters kicking a football inside, external intended energies used internally quickly become destructive.
Lucado likens his high school experience to that of Christians - called to be ‘fishers of men’ - sitting inside the church misusing their energy. They miss the point. God calls people in, to send people out. Our coming to God is not an end in itself. Yes, we enjoy His forgiveness, love and transforming power. But, like Jesus and his disciples, he draws us, in order to dispatch us. Most Christians know they are called. Not all seem convinced they are sent.
Too many Christians today are keepers of the aquarium rather than fishers of men. (anon)
Monday, December 14, 2009
Discerning the Spirit's Direction
One of the questions people often seem to struggle with is whether the church is an organism or an organisation. Some people want to assert that the church is primarily organic. To be successful, we need to let its life spontaneously emerge. It’s like a plant which will grow by itself, but if we handle the plant too much with human effort we’ll probably damage it. The emphasis here is on God’s sovereignty. “If God is at work, we must step back and let him do his thing,” say those who see the church in organic terms.
At the other end of the spectrum there are those who think of the church as an organisation and it needs lots of human attention and energy to improve the way it works. Like tending to a well oiled machine, we need lots of planning, lots of committees, lots of effort and lots of strategies to make the church achieve what it should.
So, what do you think? Should we see the church in organic terms, or as an organisation?
These two opinions seem to rarely meet in the middle, but I’d like to suggest that the church needs to be marked by both the spontaneity of organic life and the order of organisation.
When Jesus sat on a rooftop in Jerusalem late one night trying to explain to Nicodemus how God’s Spirit worked, he said, “It’s like he wind, you don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going to but you can feel its effect on your face and in the swaying of the trees.” God’s Spirit is like the wind.
So, the church needs to be a yacht. We need to be organic in the sense that we are powered by the wind of God’s Spirit, but we need to be organised enough to hoist our sails at the right time and set them in the appropriate way to make use of that wind.
If we’re too organic, allowing any old thing to happen at any time, we’ll be like a little dinghy, without oars or outboard motor, spontaneously bobbing on the waves, completely free, unfettered but generally going nowhere. Free to move but having no direction.
If we’re too organised, too structured, too fixed in traditions and plans and committees, then we’ll be more like an oil rig, highly ordered but fixed in the one spot. The wind can blow all it likes but an oil rig is not going anywhere.
But imagine if we could be a yacht: organised enough to hoist our sails, free enough to move with the wind of God’s Spirit.
The trouble is, though, sometimes we raise our sails but the wind is not blowing. So often in the church we hoist our sails with a good idea and then find there’s no wind, so what do we do? We start blowing ourselves, and when the yacht doesn’t go very far or very fast we blow harder. Before long we’re either exhausted or we’ve hyperventilated. What we need to do is have the courage to drop our sails when the Spirit’s wind is not blowing and to better tune ourselves into the prevailing breezes.
At the other end of the spectrum there are those who think of the church as an organisation and it needs lots of human attention and energy to improve the way it works. Like tending to a well oiled machine, we need lots of planning, lots of committees, lots of effort and lots of strategies to make the church achieve what it should.
So, what do you think? Should we see the church in organic terms, or as an organisation?
These two opinions seem to rarely meet in the middle, but I’d like to suggest that the church needs to be marked by both the spontaneity of organic life and the order of organisation.
When Jesus sat on a rooftop in Jerusalem late one night trying to explain to Nicodemus how God’s Spirit worked, he said, “It’s like he wind, you don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going to but you can feel its effect on your face and in the swaying of the trees.” God’s Spirit is like the wind.
So, the church needs to be a yacht. We need to be organic in the sense that we are powered by the wind of God’s Spirit, but we need to be organised enough to hoist our sails at the right time and set them in the appropriate way to make use of that wind.
If we’re too organic, allowing any old thing to happen at any time, we’ll be like a little dinghy, without oars or outboard motor, spontaneously bobbing on the waves, completely free, unfettered but generally going nowhere. Free to move but having no direction.
If we’re too organised, too structured, too fixed in traditions and plans and committees, then we’ll be more like an oil rig, highly ordered but fixed in the one spot. The wind can blow all it likes but an oil rig is not going anywhere.
But imagine if we could be a yacht: organised enough to hoist our sails, free enough to move with the wind of God’s Spirit.
The trouble is, though, sometimes we raise our sails but the wind is not blowing. So often in the church we hoist our sails with a good idea and then find there’s no wind, so what do we do? We start blowing ourselves, and when the yacht doesn’t go very far or very fast we blow harder. Before long we’re either exhausted or we’ve hyperventilated. What we need to do is have the courage to drop our sails when the Spirit’s wind is not blowing and to better tune ourselves into the prevailing breezes.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The Living Dead
A guy in a taxi wanted to speak to the driver so he leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. The driver screamed, jumped in the air and yanked on the wheel. The taxi mounted the curb, clipped a powerpole and came to a stop inches from a shop window.
The startled, wide-eyed passenger said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to ask you something.”
The taxi driver, breathing heavily, replied, “It’s not your fault sir. It’s my first day as a taxi driver. For the past 25 years I‘ve been driving a hearse!”
This might sound a bit whacky, but I think that coming to church is a little bit like that driver’s experience. You turn up and are seated for most of the time. Normally you just expect to sit there and not be disturbed. But you just never know when God’s going to tap you on the shoulder or whisper in your ear. You never know when He’s going to take the words of a Bible reading or a song or prayer or even a sermon and say in the deep places of your own heart or mind, “Hey you, I want you to listen to this. This is for you.” Or he might even say, “I want you to do something about this.” God’s not a dead passenger on life’s journey, and we come into church not just to talk to him, but hoping that he might respond, and in different ways, talk to us.
The startled, wide-eyed passenger said, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I just wanted to ask you something.”
The taxi driver, breathing heavily, replied, “It’s not your fault sir. It’s my first day as a taxi driver. For the past 25 years I‘ve been driving a hearse!”
This might sound a bit whacky, but I think that coming to church is a little bit like that driver’s experience. You turn up and are seated for most of the time. Normally you just expect to sit there and not be disturbed. But you just never know when God’s going to tap you on the shoulder or whisper in your ear. You never know when He’s going to take the words of a Bible reading or a song or prayer or even a sermon and say in the deep places of your own heart or mind, “Hey you, I want you to listen to this. This is for you.” Or he might even say, “I want you to do something about this.” God’s not a dead passenger on life’s journey, and we come into church not just to talk to him, but hoping that he might respond, and in different ways, talk to us.
Monday, April 6, 2009
A Sign of the Times
Last Sunday, I was delighted to discover . . . that I was wrong! We recently purchased a new sign at Toowong Uniting Church - one with movable letters so the message can be changed weekly to offer the impression of 'life' rather than a fixed sign with static information. Last week in church I explained the rationale behind the use of our new sign: hoping it will become a stepping stone to bridge the gap between the life of our Christian community and those who have never been to church before. I said that I was under no illusions— I wasn’t expecting people to be converted because of our sign, nor was it likely people would be flooding into the church because of it. If you imagine two banks of a river quite some distance apart, you’re on one side facing someone else on the other; it's unlikely if you just stand on your bank and yell at them, “Jump across,” that they will. They’ll take one look at the distance and walk the other way. But if you can break that big gap into smaller steps, perhaps by tossing some stepping stones in the water, then the journey suddenly becomes far more accessible, more doable, more likely. Our sign is just a stepping stone.
Little did I know that as I was uttering those words last Sunday morning, two Hindu women were walking past the Church. They read the sign and decided to come and see what happens in a Christian worship service. They sat through the service and then spent some time afterwards asking a number of people in our congregation about their beliefs. It was exciting to think that such things still happen.
I still don’t think we’ll have people flooding into the church because of our sign. Perhaps those two ladies were already part way across the river. Perhaps the few words on our sign simply became the next stepping stone on a journey they were already on. We don’t know. So we keep serving to the best of our ability - I will keep placing the most engaging statements I can find on the sign each week and I trust that the congregation will continue to extend to those who worship with us a sincere, warm and open welcome. The rest is in God’s hands.
Little did I know that as I was uttering those words last Sunday morning, two Hindu women were walking past the Church. They read the sign and decided to come and see what happens in a Christian worship service. They sat through the service and then spent some time afterwards asking a number of people in our congregation about their beliefs. It was exciting to think that such things still happen.
I still don’t think we’ll have people flooding into the church because of our sign. Perhaps those two ladies were already part way across the river. Perhaps the few words on our sign simply became the next stepping stone on a journey they were already on. We don’t know. So we keep serving to the best of our ability - I will keep placing the most engaging statements I can find on the sign each week and I trust that the congregation will continue to extend to those who worship with us a sincere, warm and open welcome. The rest is in God’s hands.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Heart of the Problem
When you meet someone for the first time and exchange initial greetings, one of the first things people ask is, “What you do for a living.” I’ve discovered that when you answer that question with the words, “I’m a Pastor,” it’s an absolute conversation killer. So to try to avoid that sort of conversational suicide, I’ve been trying to think of different ways I can explain my vocation without immediately losing people.
Recently someone said to me, “What do you do for a living?” and, a little experimentally, I replied, “I’m in the recycling business.” They were very pleased with that, people like an environmentally responsible vocation, so the next question naturally followed, “What do you recycle?”
Do you know what I said? “People!” Then I quickly added, “Actually, I don’t recycle people. I work for Someone Else who does.” It got us talking. After he realised I hadn’t been recently released from a mental health institution, he said “I thought when you first said 'recycling', you meant you were doing your bit for the environment.”
“I am.”
“How do you mean?”
I said “Which is the better way to look after the environment, to pick up and recycle rubbish that has already been dropped or go right to the heart of the problem and change an individual’s motivation, change a person on the inside, so that they no longer want to drop rubbish and but desire to treat the world with a sense of care because they have come to understand it belongs to God and they are responsible as one of his stewards?”
Recently someone said to me, “What do you do for a living?” and, a little experimentally, I replied, “I’m in the recycling business.” They were very pleased with that, people like an environmentally responsible vocation, so the next question naturally followed, “What do you recycle?”
Do you know what I said? “People!” Then I quickly added, “Actually, I don’t recycle people. I work for Someone Else who does.” It got us talking. After he realised I hadn’t been recently released from a mental health institution, he said “I thought when you first said 'recycling', you meant you were doing your bit for the environment.”
“I am.”
“How do you mean?”
I said “Which is the better way to look after the environment, to pick up and recycle rubbish that has already been dropped or go right to the heart of the problem and change an individual’s motivation, change a person on the inside, so that they no longer want to drop rubbish and but desire to treat the world with a sense of care because they have come to understand it belongs to God and they are responsible as one of his stewards?”
Thanks?
Martin Rinkart should have felt God-forsaken. Rinkart lived in Saxony between 1586 and 1649 and was the Lutheran minister in a little village called Eilenburg. During the 30 Year War, which occurred in Europe during that time, this walled town of Eilenburg was surrounded and besieged by the Swedish army. No one was allowed in, no one could get out. Food ran out very quickly. People started dying, disease spread as the Swedish army fired their cannons randomly into the town. Over 800 homes were destroyed. The ministers of the town were under enormous strain as they had to conduct dozens of funerals daily for the poor perishing people of Eilenburg. Eventually Rinkart was the only surviving minister in the town. For about a month he conducted an average of 50 funerals a day and did his best to care for those who lost the ones they loved. This was very familiar for Rinkart because, as part of the siege, one of the people he buried from disease was his own beloved wife.
Eventually the Swedes demanded an enormous ransom, in exchange for sparing the lives of the remaining residents of the town. Rinkart left the safety of the walls to plead for mercy. The Swedish commander, so impressed by the faith, courage and dignity of this minister, reduced his demand to one twentieth of his original figure. The city paid and the siege was lifted. In all, he had buried 4480 people.
If anyone deserved to feel God-forsaken, Martin Rinkart did. Yet when he sat down to reflect on what he’d experienced, he pondered the fact that nearly his entire life had been marked by blessing, love and provision. And he questioned the tendency he found in himself to abandon his own love for God because circumstances didn’t fit with his expectations. He tried to step back and look at the big picture, not only of this life, but of this life in the context of the next life and the promise of God to continue the process of righting wrongs and healing pain and correcting injustices and restoring souls beyond the brief limitations of however many years we spend on this planet.
Rinkart turned these thoughts and reflections into poetry, which in turn became a hymn. In the face of such suffering and misery, Rinkart wrote these words:
Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices
Who wonderous things has done, in whom this world rejoices
Who from our mothers arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love and still is ours today
Eventually the Swedes demanded an enormous ransom, in exchange for sparing the lives of the remaining residents of the town. Rinkart left the safety of the walls to plead for mercy. The Swedish commander, so impressed by the faith, courage and dignity of this minister, reduced his demand to one twentieth of his original figure. The city paid and the siege was lifted. In all, he had buried 4480 people.
If anyone deserved to feel God-forsaken, Martin Rinkart did. Yet when he sat down to reflect on what he’d experienced, he pondered the fact that nearly his entire life had been marked by blessing, love and provision. And he questioned the tendency he found in himself to abandon his own love for God because circumstances didn’t fit with his expectations. He tried to step back and look at the big picture, not only of this life, but of this life in the context of the next life and the promise of God to continue the process of righting wrongs and healing pain and correcting injustices and restoring souls beyond the brief limitations of however many years we spend on this planet.
Rinkart turned these thoughts and reflections into poetry, which in turn became a hymn. In the face of such suffering and misery, Rinkart wrote these words:
Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices
Who wonderous things has done, in whom this world rejoices
Who from our mothers arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love and still is ours today
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Fire and Floods
Adequate words are elusive when reflecting on the events of this past last week. The extremes of fire in Victoria and floods in Queensland have physically devastated large sections of the Australian community, but also broken the hearts of most Australians as we watch the anguish and pain of our fellow citizens.
Few could view the news broadcasts without grieving alongside those who have lost family and friends in such tragic circumstances, or tremble with a renewed awareness of our own mortality and the fragility of life. Trying to imagine the destruction of whole communities has left us reeling. In the midst of such despair, one assurance remains: our God, who entered the very heart of human suffering in Christ and experienced the agony of crucifixion, weeps with those who are weeping and mourns beside those whose loss is so great.
Helplessness has been one of my dominant emotions this week. We want to make a difference. What can we do?
Here are some options:
1. Join us for an evening of prayer this Tuesday night, 17th Feb at 7.30pm at Toowong Uniting Church, 82 Sherwood Road, Toowong. As the reality of people’s loss sinks in, they will be needing our prayers for some time.
2. We will be receiving a retiring offering at church, both this week and next week, for the victims of both bushfire and flood. Two vessels, one for each cause, will be available for you to contribute to. The flood money will be sent to ‘The Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal’ and the bushfire money will be sent to the ‘SHARE Bushfire Appeal’ through the Vic/Tas UnitingCare office.
Few could view the news broadcasts without grieving alongside those who have lost family and friends in such tragic circumstances, or tremble with a renewed awareness of our own mortality and the fragility of life. Trying to imagine the destruction of whole communities has left us reeling. In the midst of such despair, one assurance remains: our God, who entered the very heart of human suffering in Christ and experienced the agony of crucifixion, weeps with those who are weeping and mourns beside those whose loss is so great.
Helplessness has been one of my dominant emotions this week. We want to make a difference. What can we do?
Here are some options:
1. Join us for an evening of prayer this Tuesday night, 17th Feb at 7.30pm at Toowong Uniting Church, 82 Sherwood Road, Toowong. As the reality of people’s loss sinks in, they will be needing our prayers for some time.
2. We will be receiving a retiring offering at church, both this week and next week, for the victims of both bushfire and flood. Two vessels, one for each cause, will be available for you to contribute to. The flood money will be sent to ‘The Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal’ and the bushfire money will be sent to the ‘SHARE Bushfire Appeal’ through the Vic/Tas UnitingCare office.
Friday, February 6, 2009
DOG and GOD
Many years ago when I was teaching in Miles (Queensland country town), I got my first dog as a giveaway from the Miles show: a German shepherd/boxer-cross called Jesse. Beautiful dog, but an incredibly destructive puppy. One work day, I accidentally left the back door open, and Jesse got into the house. I doubt that dynamite would have made more mess. She pulled all the sheets off the bed, chewed up my good shoes, knocked over tables, ate a few pages out of my bible, ripped my good trousers, broke my clock radio. She was a whirlwind!
When I was telling the cleaner at the school about it the next day, (a retired farmer) he said, “If you want my advice, I’d shoot her. Dog like that’s trouble. Need to shoot a dog like that.”
Naturally I was horrified. I said, “I don’t want to shoot my dog, I love my dog.” And as I uttered those words, I realised something about God's love. It doesn’t depend on the one being loved, it depends on the one doing the loving. My love for my dog isn’t about whether she’s good or bad, its about me, about the fact that I love dogs. God’s love for us isn’t about how appealing we can make ourselves to him, instead it relies on him being a loving God, whose very core and nature is love.
When I was telling the cleaner at the school about it the next day, (a retired farmer) he said, “If you want my advice, I’d shoot her. Dog like that’s trouble. Need to shoot a dog like that.”
Naturally I was horrified. I said, “I don’t want to shoot my dog, I love my dog.” And as I uttered those words, I realised something about God's love. It doesn’t depend on the one being loved, it depends on the one doing the loving. My love for my dog isn’t about whether she’s good or bad, its about me, about the fact that I love dogs. God’s love for us isn’t about how appealing we can make ourselves to him, instead it relies on him being a loving God, whose very core and nature is love.
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