catching his breath

I like to occasionally direct you to blogs, books or articles worth reading. I found one this morning and I believe it has the chutzpah and punch to catalyze the type of shift in thinking and action churches need.

Mark Hamilton (PhD – Associate Dean, Associate Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology) has written an incredible piece dealing with the demographic crisis in church culture. Read and start a conversation in your context.

Here is a line from it to stir your interest: “No one who has been a Christian for more than twenty years gets to be the “weaker brother.”

My family and I are leaving Hobart to go work with the Skiatook Church of Christ. We’re excited. I will be doing youth work again and can’t wait. There are so many things I can say but don’t know where to begin.

For those of you who know me (and know why some of the things have happened recently) let me simply say the church in Skiatook knows as well and have embraced my family and me. When we visited I sensed a deep awareness of God’s presence. They have agreed to provide a place of healing and transformation as we work together to find God’s activity and join up.

Thanks to God and to you all for remaining with my family and me.

Stayed tuned as I will soon begin sharing on the blog my  journey with Skiatook.

I’m on a streak. Two days in a row I’ve ran. I need to stay on top of my health and everyone I know that runs loves it, so…

I still hate it but am making myself learn to love it. Any runners out there want to share some advice? Best time to run? Form and technique tips? Shoes? Etc.?

Also, be sure to check out John Dobbs blog tomorrow. Click on the link for Out Here Hope Remains to the right.

God bless.

What do you think about the song? The short film?

The song blows me away…”If I can change I hope I never know.” How many live with these feelings?

I’m still baffled by the short film. It’s powerful but in a way that words can’t explain. And this is why I believe that those who follow Jesus must wrestle with art expressions such as this video.  Yes, we’ve often done a great job of engaging our intellect as we attempt to discover the human condition. But what about engaging our soul? Our emotions? Have we thrown in fully, (emotionally, spiritually, soulfully) to find solidarity with the society in which we find ourselves?

What people in our neighborhoods, schools and jobs face often defies articulation. Can we meet the mess of life without words? Yes, but.

Doing so means that we must open the emotions of our life to the vulnerability of being torn deeply by things to painful for words. Will we wear the scars of a neighbor’s wounds?

Recently I teamed up with John Dobbs in writing. His blog Out Here Hope Remains has had a profound impact on people. He writes with honesty and from a place of deep faith. He has experienced excruciating pain and yet, still, hopes in the resurrected Messiah. He is an inspiration to many. I’m glad to be a part of what God is up to through his blog ministry. So go on over and check it out.

I’ll remain posting here but only on some short thoughts and perhaps a bit of commentary on pop culture here and there. I’ll go a little deeper every other Friday at his site. Have fun and stay tuned. And thanks John!

God bless,

Josh

Finish the sentence. Ministering means…

Ministering means helping others find thin places. I first read about thin places in a book by Marcus Borg. It stuck and I haven’t let go of the concept. Thin places exist when heaven and earth come wonderfully close to slamming together, where only a trace of humanity’s fall remains. They are moments when a person can sense the divine within the mundane. They are experiences where things of earth seem flooded by the energy of heaven. In the moment of a thin place, a person can feel the tug of God’s presence.

Imagine you were injected with liquid metal and studded with magnetic particles. Now envision that throughout the day you were required to pass between a sheet of metal and a life-sized magnet. Both warp and lunge your direction as you walk through. You feel the impending collision ahead of time as each piece forces millions of invisible, molecular particles into your path. That’s the force of thin place.

Prayer. A certain song. A smile. Birth. That old recliner. A lover’s embrace. A glass of wine shared among friends. Psalm 23. Worn spots in the shroud of humanity’s fall.

Ministry, then, ought to encompass an intentional effort to lead others into thin places. It is God alone that can heal and mend broken hearts, and in a fallen world that bars his full disclosure we must encounter him at the thin spots, at least for now. So I understand ministers as once-broken veterans of thin place exploration, discoverers of the renewing force of God’s presence, who go back and share their discoveries with those now-broken.

In a sermon he preached on Acts 1, Walter Brueggeman invited the listeners to imagine what must have went through the mind of Mathias as he anticipated the rolling of the dice for the next spot open in the 12.

Yes! I’m the next apostle. And maybe not…

Well, now it is certain death. So goes the life of a marteria, a witness, a martyr.

To tell the truth is risky business.

The lives of Jesus followers testify to the truth of the resurrection. As witnesses who tell the truth we mock death, we defy the lies, we announce the reality of resurrection that bursts open a new direction for the future.

Imagine the early Christians. They announced a regime change. The future was open for a new world, a new peace and it had nothing to do with Rome. Risky. Dangerous.

To speak the truth is risky business.

But what do we expect? Jesus told us as much would happen:

Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man… Luke 6

When we witness the truth people won’t like it.

The traditionalists won’t like it. They will cling to their traditions and spit in your face. They’ve erected structures that enslave. Resurrection sets free! They can’t handle the moving, life-giving power of God’s Spirit bringing life and newness to everything.

The religious won’t like it. They have their religion by which they keep everything the way they want it…they sell their religion, they perform for the Sunday gathering and pass the plate. You remember in Acts 19 when Paul upset the silversmith?

Many current American church groups can’t take it. Our culture of consumerism will fight back… Church has been streamlined and polished to the point that the resurrection life will break through and disrupt everything…

In a resurrection reality there is room at the table for the poor and oppressed… they’re not just a line on the budget

In a resurrection reality those with a past have a future and a contribution… they’re not just the latest how-not-to lesson for our children.

When preachers witness the truth of resurrection people squirm, they create excuses, they grow uncomfortably angry… it’s risky to speak the truth to a church culture conditioned to be fed and satisfied spiritually, to consume the latest religious product… How many churches today would have Jesus minister to them, really?

The resurrection of Jesus isn’t self-help speech that encourages you for the next week. Our gatherings aren’t intended to offer the latest pop-psychology to make you feel better about yourself.

We gather to witness the resurrection of Jesus and acknowledge our participation in it. We meet to dare the powers to go ahead and try something. We gather to regroup as we prepare to storm the gates of hell another week. We together fall to our knees in worship to announce as one the resurrection of our Savior who alone holds our allegiance. In doing so, we renounce all other allegiances.

Attending a Christian gathering should be the riskiest thing one does all week. Because we are identifying ourselves with a group who counters the current society and its attempts to offer life. A people who hold up the poor and create solidarity with them. A community that condemns sexism, racism, injustice, oppression. We gather to say that the culture outside of the kingdom of God has no claim on us, death can’t defeat us!

And if… if you sit there, like me, wondering about the risk, asking what risk? It may be time to reevaluate our witness and our testimony. It may be time to rethink whether our lives express the truth of resurrection as incumbent upon the body of Christ, or have we settled for a rather sorry version of pop-culture religion?

John Dobbs has launched a grass-roots effort to honor ministers by asking bloggers to blog about a minister(s) who has impacted them (you can read more about it at his blog). I love the idea. Here is my contribution.

I come from a family of preachers: a grandpa, an uncle, a cousin and a dad. Dad didn’t always preach full-time, but he served as a deacon, which if done right exemplifies the essence of a minister. Now (and for the last 10 or so years) he ministers in the pulpit for a small congregation in Texas. Not only that, he directed a week of camp at Green Valley Bible Camp for around 9-10 years, and a majority of those years were directed while he worked full-time as a network analyst. He took his vacation to minister to young people in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas instead of sipping margaritas on the beach (actually I can’t convince him to have a drink with me so he wouldn’t have done that anyway…but the line sounded good).

Even though I actually started preaching full-time before he did, he still produced an incredible impact on my journey as a minister. Honestly, my initial mode and style of preaching came from other places and not him. I endured an indoctrination at a school of preaching and struggled to find a message and ministry of grace. He deserves no credit for that part of my ministry.

Though he raised me around rigid conservatism, he actually showed me the path of questioning everything while still getting along with those with whom we disagree. While a deacon, dad rarely let the preacher off the hook. He wanted to know why the preacher said what he said. I remember frequently waiting for dad to finish talking to the preacher after all the lights had been turned out in the church building. He wouldn’t settle for a traditional answer, he wanted to know God’s direction. This momentum of questioning eventually caught up to me, moved through me and swept me into a new era of my own ministry. This is where dad gets the credit.

He taught me how to question. He passed on to me the gift of relentlessness when it comes to finding God. He showed me that going against the traditional flow is what we’re often called to do, even if it stirs up family Christmas and comfortable congregations. He never liked the taste of canned answers and I’ve inherited those taste buds.

So Tony Linton, dad: Thanks. I now enjoy a ministry flooded by grace and truth because you taught me to never settle and to never quit asking questions.

If you have a minister in mind then write up a tribute to him/her and explain the positive impact on your life. Thanks to John Dobbs as well for the great idea. Keep the flame of encouragement going… get to writing. There’s got to be some more good preachers out there, somewhere.

*Whine alert*

I have suffered lately through some financial stress and a mild depression, which explains my lack of writing. Out of the circumstances though has come several thoughts. Let me share them with you.

1. The work of a preacher shouldn’t exempt from the minister’s primary responsibilities the one thing that supports the naming of the role: preaching. I have, through a grad course I’m taking at ACU, found a new and profound respect for preaching. The preacher’s work is difficult and often misunderstood. Much grace should be extended to those who preach in our pulpits. This isn’t a selfish, aggrandizing plea for sympathy; it’s the truth.

2. Creating solidarity with others different and less privileged than us often produces messy situations and vulnerable moments. I have no doubt that merely creating a budget for benevolence and calling it good functions as a backdoor move to opt out of genuine responsibilities to love others. To express the love of Calvary calls for a willingness to suffer inconvenience and social stigma… to find oneself often arguing the nonsensical side of things and challenging others to defy conventional wisdom… to include in your circle of friends those you normally wouldn’t.

3. The dark cloud of criticism and perceived failure often surrounds those unwilling to cave to a world-oriented traditionalism that seeks to define and craft the body of Christ in its image. Again, the clash between what’s common and popular for Christianity and a simple desire to manifest Jesus (as his representative body) ignites a fire of competing agendas to co-opt what it means to be church. Too often the loudest and most tenured of the collective church groups, regardless of any attempt to found their opinions in the gospel narrative, force acquiescence from those weary of pleading with rocks.

These are just thoughts. They are somewhat negative and critical, I know. But they flow from an honest desire to see through some of the reasons I feel disconnected from an expression of discipleship as taught by Jesus.

You are welcome to add your thoughts and critiques of what I’ve said.

A good friend of mine died yesterday. I am unable to make it to give her eulogy, but was able to write up something that will be read tomorrow. Below is what I wrote.

Pray for the friends and family. Rene, this if for you.

Rene wanted me here with all of you to celebrate her life and it pains me that I can’t make it. Yet I believe she would understand. She was one of the most gracious and encouraging people I’ve met.

Nothing can be said to change these circumstances or make the pain of her loss better, so I will avoid trying with my words to do so. To the friends and family of Rene who hurt, all I can say is allow God to experience it with you. Invite him into your pain and he will enter.

Rene understood this more than most, I think. She lost her son Brandon several years ago, unexpectedly and tragically. Then she lost her beloved Jim a few years after that. She was no stranger to pain. But that didn’t mean she was a stranger to God. Pain and God often and tearfully intertwine, and Rene embodied this bittersweet marriage.

Because of this and from what I know of her she still embraced life, even through heartbreak and brokenness. She understood that when God and pain dance together life will always ask to cut in.

Death does not have the final say. Pain cannot dominate us. When God steps into the experiences of death and the valleys of our pain life emerges as the consuming presence and ultimate reality.

So today isn’t about Rene’s death as much as it is about her life. Not just her life before her death but her life now. Yes… her life now. Even living within range of death’s putrid breath, Rene’s calmed and assured life echoed the mocking tone of Paul’s question, “O death, where is your sting?”

And though she has left the stage of earth, I can imagine her now, along with Jim and Brandon, chanting the chorus of resurrection, with fists in the air, defying death to make a move. “O death, where is your sting? Where is your victory? Bring it on for we have life and his name is Jesus!”

And just as she did many times through her tears on earth, let that chant march you through the mourning of this life until morning breaks on the next.