The Jena 6

After viewing the clip below regarding the Jena 6 on a couple of blogs, Rick's and Jamie's, I thought it worthy of posting here as well and deal in a positive way with my anger. There are several other clips available at You Tube regarding this situation.



There is also an online petition you might want to sign after viewing the video clips.

Than, lets remember we still have work to do in regard to race and reconciliation.

The Shack

I just finished reading The Shack by William P. Young. I've had it on my shelf for a while always with the intention of reading it soon. I started it twice but because its not unusual to be reading several books (3-5) at the same time, I'm not always prompt in reading the entirety of a single volume. I was nearly a third of the way through when my daughter Joy came to me asking if I had a good book she could read. Involved with a couple of other books at that moment I loaned her my copy of The Shack. Having some real spiritual depth to her I wanted her opinion before I finished it myself.

Finding it difficult to put down, she finished it quickly and gave it to her husband Matt. He finished it in short order and approached me asking if I had finished reading it. I reminded him than my copy was in his possession. Thrusting my copy which was in his hand at me he said, "hurry up and finish it, I want to talk. This might be the best book I've read." The interesting thing was that he was not the first to say those words; several others had voiced the same thing.

I also gave the book my son James who reads extensively and writes a bit occasionally. So impressed by the book, he ordered a dozen copies to give away. I have another friend who has given 36 copies out. And this book has yet to be released to the public. You can order copies of The Shack at on the book's website.

Its not the best book I've read, but definitely on my Top 10 List. I do agree with Eugene Peterson's blurb on the front cover; "This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress did for his."

There are many good elements to this book, but preeminent is the picture it paints of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit working with and in one person's life in the midst of great tragedy. A fresh perspective of the Godhead that is authentic, real and engaging. I believe the narrative and truths therein will be welcomed by many within contemporary culture. I'll probably say more about this wonderful book later.

missio Dei Group

I recently met a new friend Dan Steigerwald who with his wife Ann and their two daughters moved to Portland a year ago from the Netherlands. His heart is to network and develop partnerships that will send healthy Christ-centered leaders and teams who will start missional initiatives and churches in the urban centers of the Pacific Northwest.

To start he has invited several individuals from the Portland/Vancouver area who have a similar passion to join a Missio Group. Linda and I have been invited to join Missio. As Dan describes it, Missio will be a face to face learning community that gathers regularly to stimulate each participant’s natural missional engagement with their neighborhood, workplace(s) and social network. The format envisaged is a weekly small group experience over three or four months involving conversations about how we might join Jesus in the missio Dei (mission of God) within our contexts. This includes discussions about how to apprentice disciples in their “missional formation.” Attention is also given to thoughtful interaction over how we might help seed a misional DNA within existing and new churches. It is hoped that Missio might become a proto-type for a group learning experience that is reproducible within local churches and other expressions of Christ-centered community around Portland.

The following are some of the questions we will be discussing.

What does it mean to be “missional” and why it matters?
How might we “live prophetically” in our context?
What does it take to make friends with those who’ve yet to know Christ?
What does incarnational living look like in practice?
What does evangelism look like and what is the message we speak/live?
Why Christianize everything when there’s already great waves to catch?
What is “time-banking” and how does it foster community?
How does spiritual formation relate to missional church?
What does it look like to be creatively missional?
How do we form and link local communities for maximum missional impact?
What have we learned and how can we pass it on?

To say I'm excited is somewhat of an understatement. These are questions that not only need to be asked, but also wrestled with, and than applied for the sake of the missio Dei.

Worship As Evangelism

I came across an article on Allelon's website written by Sally Morgenthaler who in 1995 wrote Worship Evangelism: Inviting Unbelievers into the Presence of God. I read her book while still a pastor in a conventional church setting, and encouraged many to read it, because her insights connecting worship to evangelism were extremely insightful.

As I remember, the focus of the book was making conventional church worship more evangelistic; that worship and evangelism go together rather than being separate elements. The result would be another means for presenting the gospel to the un-churched, without compromising the nature and purpose of worship informed by Scripture.

The article titled Worship As Evangelism was originally published in the May/June 2007 issue of Rev! Magazine. What was so striking concerning the article was her transition away from much of what she proposed in her book due to the fact it might have contributed or at least aided in the creation of "worship driven subculture," with the excuse not to do the hard (dirty) work of evangelism. There was idea among some that one could remain inside the walls of a worship center participating in contemporary worship and simultaneously fulfill their evangelistic responsibilities. Worship now becomes the attractional tool for evangelism to occur. Her study revealed that "worship evangelism" type of Sunday worship experience had not attracted to any significant degree the unchurched to enter the church. The article chronicles some of her research regarding the impact of the Worship Evangelism emphasis of the 1990s on the American Church Sunday morning worship service.

The end result might have been a reaffirmation to the conventional church that worship is about where you go and who you worship with rather than what you do and who are 24/7.

Here are a couple of paragraphs in the article I find both refreshing and encouraging.

Conference organizers were confused. They wondered what had happened to me. Where was the worship evangelism warrior? Where was the formula? Where was the pep talk for all those people who were convinced that trading in their traditional service for a contemporary upgrade would be the answer? I don't have to tell you this. The 100-year-old congregation that's down to 43 members and having a hard time paying the light bill doesn't want to be told that the "answer" is living life with the people in their neighborhoods. Relationships take time, and they need an attendance infusion now.

I understood their dilemma, and secretly, I wished I had a magic bullet. But I didn't. And I wasn't going to give them false hope. Some newfangled worship service wasn't going to save their church, and it wasn't going to build God's kingdom. It wasn't going to attract the strange neighbors who had moved into their communities or the generations they had managed\ to ignore for the last 39 years.

What I believe Sally is saying; that true Worship Evangelism is relational engagement with friends and neighbors that involves more time than a once a week hour to hour and a half worship service. It is a commitment of time spent with those individuals we want to see enter into a transformation encounter with the One who is the Savior of the world.

Her closing paragraph in article is worth hearing and pondering:

I am currently headed further outside my comfort zones than I ever thought I could go. I am taking time for the preacher to heal herself. As I exit the world of corporate worship, I want to offer this hope and prayer. May you, as leader of your congregation, have the courage to leave the "if we build it, they will come" world of the last two decades behind. May you and the Christ-followers you serve become worshippers who can raise the bar of authenticity, as well as your hands. And may you be reminiscent of Isaiah, who, having glimpsed the hem of God's garment and felt the cleansing fire of grace on his lips,cried, "Here am I, send me."

I commend the article to you.

40th Wedding Anniversary

Well today the love of my life and I completed 40 years together as husband and wife. One of the more striking features of this day, was the realization that time has passed quickly. It seemed like yesterday when two kids really too young to recognize what they were entering into joined their hearts to voice several "I do's" and began a life journey together.

A journey that has involved multiple ups and downs, a lot of "in sickness and in heal, for better and for worse, in good times and bad," along with four children and ten grandchildren (and counting).

So thankful to the Lord for a life-partner who is a great encourager and supporter, who is both stronger, and wiser than I. A woman who is as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. The longer I share life with her, the better it is, and the more my love grows. I love her so much more now than I did back in 1967.

Maybe the greatest feature of this day, is a renewed awareness of how blessed I am - 40 years marked by God's grace and love.

Jesus Missional?

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.
John 1:14 (THE MESSAGE)

Organic Essence of the Church

There is no mistaking the fact that “organic” is a current buzzword. In contemporary culture, everything is organic. The reality is that everything has always been organic, but recently the world seems to have awakened to this truth. The dictionary defines organic in the following terms:

1. of or involving the basic makeup of a thing; inherent; inborn; constitutional
2. made up of systematically interrelated parts; organized of, having the characteristics of, or derived from living organisms 3. grown with only animal or vegetable fertilizers, as manure, bone meal, compost, etc.

Organic vegetables have nothing added to them. They are allowed to grow in a ‘natural habitat’ or at least in an artificially created environment that is as natural as possible. My current perspective of the church is organic. Organic in the sense that it discards the additives and preservatives that are current attachments of the institutional church and discovers how the living body of Christ might flourish if allowed to live and grow naturally. Some of these institutional elements (non-organic)are current leadership and administrative structures, programs designed to enhance congregational viability and attractiveness, and resources deemed necessary for churches to function, e.g. buildings, educational materials, financial resources, strategies, long range planning, budgets, etc.

These elements nullify much of the organic nature of the church. The church is best understood in ecological terms. At its core, it is designed by God to be organic both in form and substance. Corresponding to the natural order or eco-system, there is a spiritual order, the body of Christ. To aid in understanding the organic nature the church must consider the ecological sphere.

According to the usual definition, “ecology is the scientific study of the relationship between organisms and their environment in their fullest meaning.” Environment is inclusive of physical, biological, and living components that make up an organism’s surroundings. Relationships include the interactions among the various organisms within the physical world of life forms participating together within a given ecosystem.

The term ecology comes from the Greek words oikos, meaning “the family household,” and logy, meaning “the study of.” Literally, ecology is the study of the household. It has the same root word as “economic,” or “management of the household.” We should consider ecology to be the study of the economics of nature.

The major focus of ecology is the ecosystem. Organisms interact within the context of the ecosystem. The eco part of the word relates to the environment. The system is made up of a collection of related parts that function as a unit. A household is a system consisting of interrelated parts and subparts. Within this household are people who live together, extended family members, and other friends and relationships that are in continual interaction as they recreate, eat, sleep, and work together as interacting parts that support the whole. In this regard, all the parts and components of the Church universal together form an entire eco-system. The organisms of this eco-system are the local congregations, denominations, mission groups, and para-church organizations that are components of the larger Church universal eco-system.

A forest is a natural ecosystem. The physical (abiotic) components are the atmosphere, climate, soil, and water. The biotic components include the different plants and animals that inhabit the forest. The relationships are complex as each organism not only responds to the physical environment but also modifies it and in so doing, becomes part of the environment itself.

Scriptural terminology suggests there are similarities between the Church and an organic eco-system. Organic implies that God grows the church using means that correspond with growth in the natural world. This is illustrated in Jesus’ “Parable of the Sower” as recorded in three of the four gospels, regarding the kingdom of God. From this simple parable, we see that Church begins in the fields, where people are.

Nearly all the New Testament metaphors for the kingdom and the Church use natural organic concepts and identities to describe them. Just as God breathed life into all living creatures (Genesis 2:7), He also breathed life into His Church (John 20:21-23; Acts 2).

As Howard Synder states in LIBERATING THE CHURCH

The church in its most fundamental essence is nothing less than an interdependent, life-pulsating people indwelled by the presence of a resurrected and reigning Christ.

Therefore, the Church is an organic life-form designed by the Spirit to give expression to who Jesus is.

The New Testament employs terms like “household of God,” “the people of God,” “the bride of Christ,” and “fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” Ninety-six word pictures of the church have been identified in the New Testament. “Yet the image that permeates the New Testament understanding of the church and serves as an umbrella for all other metaphors is that of the church as the body of Christ.”

Because these images are so prevalent in Scripture, it is necessary to comprehend the church realistically and correctly in organic terms. Howard Snyder goes on to suggest that the North American Church is in need of a fundamental paradigm shift in its self-understanding, one that would allow us to view the church as part of God’s economy. He states:

Where the model is the institutional-technical-hierarchical of contemporary pop Christianity, a whole set of assumptions follows which make it difficult to really grasp the New Testament picture of the Church. But where the model is that of the body of Christ, the household of God and the community of God’s people, the door is opened to understand the economy and ecology of God and to see the church as charismatic organism….

To be organic is to possess life. And for the church, that life is spiritual, given by the Holy Spirit. The church as the body of Christ is a living social, spiritual, charismatic organism, it is alive. The central biblical images of the church are all organic and ecological: body, bride, family, vine and branches. Even static “building” and “temple” images become organic: “living stones,” “a growing building,” “a temple animated by the Spirit” (see 1 Peter 2:4-6; Ephesians 2:19-22).

The church is a divine organism mystically fused to the living and reigning Christ who continues to reveal himself in a people whom he has drawn to himself. In all dimensions of life and ministry, the church is designed by God to be essentially organic in function and form.