DownshoreDrift

Gateway's Message to Moms on Mother's Day

Every year for Mother's Day, I like to ask a lady to share from her perspective a word of encouragement for Mother's. This year, I preached on Finding Your Place in God's Story and encouraged Moms to see life according to the idea of being created in God's image (Creation), being aware that we are all sinners, including their kids (the Fall), understanding that Jesus came for us to forgive us and redeem us (Redemption), and that we are to live in Hope by believing and passing on God's perspective to our kids (New Creation). I just wanted to encourage them in God's love, tell them that their worth and identity came from God and not their performance, remind them that things are going to go wrong in their lives and the lives of their family, and that Jesus is the one they are to look to and encourage their families to look to. Our Moms already do that so well, but I was hoping that they would see God's Story and find their place in it.

I asked Cheryl Brake, a lady in our church who has raised three boys along with her husband, Mike, to share about living God's Story instead of the world's from her own perspective. This is what she said (it was powerful):

Are You Mom Enough

When Alan called and asked if I would speak this morning he said,”I really want to encourage these mothers.” And in his tone was the sound of a heart burdened for the mothers of his flock. I got off the phone and I asked God to show me what was happening to the moms around me because I wanted to help my pastor carry that burden. Later that day, when I opened my Yahoo page, I got my answer. There was the Time magazine cover and the question

“Are You Mom Enough?

God reminded me of a conversation I had recently with an amazing mother. A mother is so amazing that she is adding to her family by adopting.

In our conversation she was asking me to review some paper work and she was telling me everything she was doing to mother her new charge. Then she looked at me and said, “Am I doing enough?” Ladies, today I am here to encourage you by telling you, you will never be enough.

Now before you throw your bibles at me just bare with me for a second, because my prayer is that the truth will actually set you free.

On an average day a mom’s job description is cook, nurse, referee, housekeeper, chauffer, coach, confidant, teacher, recreational coordinator, fashion consultant, purchasing agent, toy repairman, and bedtime storyteller.

If you are a Christian mother add to that bible study leader, worship leader, prayer warrior, protector from a fallen world, and you have just an average mother’s day.

No wonder we are tired all the time? And we end the day wondering if we did enough. “Are we mom enough?’

And if you have blown it in any way, well the answer is clear. You have failed! Every other mom is doing a better job than you and you know it. Does it sound familiar?

Well, I am here to tell you that being everything your kids need was never God’s plan.

In Gen 1:26-28 it says:
26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
27 So God created mankind in his own image
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

Mothers, this is where our story begins: Be fruitful and increase in number: Motherhood was part of God’s plan. But His plan was for us to be stewards, not saviors. It was part of a blessing, not a curse.

And when that child is born you do not have to tell a new mother that her child is part of a blessing. When she holds that beautiful bundle of joy she feels the goodness of God. She sees the beauty of His creation. She feels blessed.

But unfortunately, reality follows.

Gen. Chapter 3 says: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”

We see our perfectly blessed woman, created in His image, analyzing that fruit and deciding what is best for her and her family.

I have often wondered how many times Eve thought about that choice. Being removed from the garden, no longer communing with God in a state of perfection, would have been punishment enough. But can you image how that choice haunted her when Cain hit the terrible twos? There was sin staring her in the face! The blessing that was received in perfection was now walking and talking and screaming “NO” at the top of his lungs!

I was pondering this one day when my oldest was exerting his two year old status, and then I thought about Hannah. Now that woman was smart; she had a plan. She loved that little bundle of joy, cuddled him, and nursed him, but the moment that kid turned two she said, “Here God, he’s all yours!”

Moms I am sure you can see what I am saying here. Because of the fall, those little blessings are tough to handle. And let me tell you this, when sinful child meets with burnt out mom, it can get ugly.

BUT… There is hope. God did not leave us trapped in the web of sin and despair. He sacrificed His own to save us.

Every hope we have as a person, as a woman, and as a mother, hinges on the cross of Christ.

God provided a savior. God saved us from ourselves. His redemption took away the consequences of our sinful choices. It provided for us a Holy Spirit; The counselor, teacher and power source to choose a different way.

Ladies, what I am about to tell you is a very different way from the burden the world is putting on us.

We are not the glue that holds our family together Christ is. We will never be tough enough, smart enough, or loving enough to hold our kids lives together. It was never God’s plan.

The redemptive beauty of the cross is that it sets us free. Not only does it set us free from death, but it sets us free from the lies of this world.

We are free to see our children as heirs of Christ. Free to see that God has a plan for their lives, and free to allow Him full authority over it.

We are also free from the guilt that we are not doing enough. We are free from all the ‘experts’ telling us how to be the perfect parent. And we are free from yoke of slavery that says we determine who our children become.

We are also free to approach His throne boldly, to cry out for our son and daughters, and to admit to the God of the universe that we do not have a clue how to ‘fix’ them or the situation they are walking through.

We are free from the fear that this world will win, because Christ has overcome this world
.
We are free to show our children that we are merely stewards. Free to tell them that they were created for a bigger story, a bigger purpose, and a bigger plan.

We are free to make a mistake and ask their forgiveness, and show them that we too need redemption. We can tell them we don’t know which college they should attend, or what job they should take, or even where they should live.
All of those things are part of their story, and they need to listen for the voice of the author.

We are also free to tell them there is hope when they fail, there is one who holds their heart, and he collects their every tear in a bottle.

We are free to point them to a hurt and dying world around them, instead of fearing it’s influences over them. We can show them that the story of others in intertwined with their own.

We are free to tell them that this world is not their home and they were not made to feel comfortable in it.

We are free to believe that if our children are prodigals, that our God loves them with an everlasting love, and He is actively wooing them back to Himself and when they return He will robe them with the garments of His household.

Instead of spending our time and energy trying to be everything our children need, we are free to direct them to the Great I am.

And ladies, listen carefully to this part, we are free to release ourselves. We can trust that every mistake we made will be used for God’s glory. That the sins we have shown them will be the nails that hold them to the cross, and that the God who commands the morning also brings with it, new mercies.

Ladies, God’s plan was for us to Never be Mom enough. It was to provide a savior for our sins, strength for our weakness, and hope beyond this world for our children.

Remember our story started out with a blessing. Well God’s word says that your children are blessed because they were born into the home of a believer. Believe that. Believe that one day your children will say, “My mom was NOT mom enough but the Savior she showed me was EVERYTHING!

 

If you would like to hear this message, you can at the bottom of our church's website.

An Apology to the Man Who Scooped the World ... And Got Fired For It

A couple of days ago, the Associated Press righted a 67 year old wrong when they officially appologized to their long deceased reporter, Ed Kennedy, for firing him after he reported to the world that the Germans had officially surrendered on May 7, 1945, a day before he was supposed to report it. The US and British governments received the German surrender on May 7, but agreed to let the Russians have a separate surrender ceremony the next day. While Kennedy and a dozen or so other reporters attended the German surrender ceremony, they were sworn to secrecy and told that they had to wait 36 hours before reporting it so they did not steal the Russian's thunder. However, when word leaked out of Germany early that the surrender had indeed taken place, Kennedy decided not to wait for the Russians and he reported the news that the whole world had been waiting for.

For doing his job, Kennedy was reprimanded and fired by the Associated Press. He died in a car accident in 1963 believing that he had done the right thing, but never receiving support for his decision from his former employer. I heard this story on the radio today and it caused me to think about many applications. Kennedy was being true to his craft as a journalist. He did not just run ahead and break the story on his own, but once news was reported from Germany, he felt that it was his duty to tell the American people what had happened. He did the right thing, but he was not rewarded for it. Rather, he was punished. That is usually how it goes, unfortunately.

Everyday, we have the opportunity to be true to our calling and our vocation and craft. Everyday, we have the chance to do the right thing, even if it is unpopular. Perhaps we are to speak out against injustice or we are to push the envelope at work and innovate instead of just falling into predictible routines. Maybe we already know what we are supposed to be doing but are afraid of the backlash if we step out and do it. Perhaps we need to be reporting from the edges and telling the stories that people don't want to hear in ways that those in control do not want us to tell.  We might not be appreciated, but we will be right and that is far better. History has a way of coming around.

I had never heard of Ed Kennedy before today, but he became a hero of mine when I heard about what he did. We should all take note and when the opportunity arises, do the right thing at the right time and not look back - even if it goes badly for us.

Why Have the ERLC? Pt. 2

Yesterday evening, I questioned why Southern Baptists have a political lobby group, called the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).   In the comment stream, Robert Masters said that the ERLC is able to do things in the political realm that churches cannot do because of tax laws. But, that causes me to ask why churches are paying for a political lobby to represent their interests if we are not able to speak to those things ourselves. Have we just created a go-between? Aren't their other ways to influence the process? If we are saying that the ERLC is the voice for Southern Baptists in Washington, but individual churches are percluded by law to speak for themselves, then is it really ethical to create a go-between that does what we cannot do? I am not saying it is, because I don't know if Robert is right about that. But, it does bring up the question.

Todd Littleton raised an interesting point when he said,

Our structure seems to inhere the perception, if not the reality, that we outsource our missions to the IMB and NAMB. We outsource our ethics and ethical positions to the ERLC. We outsource our theological education and ministry habits to the Seminaries.

Then, when another entity like Lifeway presents statistics consistent with other researchers that our evangelistic efforts are falling short, our ethical actions in public spaces show little difference to those not self-identified as Christian, and our theological positions are all over the map, the church is to blame.

Works perfectly.

This is part of the problem in SBC life, I think. Our local churches keep passing all of our responsibility up the line and we pay someone else to do it. Those people then continually ask the local churches to send more money so we can support "missions" and if we don't send more money to the Cooperative Program, then we don't care about the work of God or something like that. But, what does the ERLC have to do with our mission? Perhaps Bob Cleveland captured the real issue when he asked:

I'd like to know if anyone has collected .. or even measured .. the results produced by the ERLC. We seem to track Baptisms, attendance, and things of that sort. But can we tell whether the ERLC has had any effect?

Aside from making headlines for taking a stand on something or other (or maybe worse), I don't know anything concrete that's been accomplished. Do you?

So, that leads us to the ultimate question: Why have the ERLC? What is it doing that the ethics departments of our seminaries or our state conventions or the Executive Committee or the office of the president of the SBC or any number of pastors or parachurch ministries are not already doing?  Do we need a separate entity to be our voice in Washington? Or, can we have a multitude of voices do the same thing and save over $3 million a year.  I am not saying that the ERLC is not doing some good, but isn't it the same good that is already being done by others or could easily be done by others at a fraction of the cost?

Still wondering why Southern Baptists have the ERLC.

Why Have the ERLC?

Southern Baptists effectively have a political lobby group in Washington, DC that speaks "for" the SBC on issues of related to ethics, morality, or politics. It is called the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). But, this begs the question: Why?

Why do we need to spend well over $3 million a year on a "think tank" in Washington, DC to lobby for moral/ethical/political issues?

Why don't our local churches make their voices heard through their Biblical witness and through their local engagement in the lives of people? (they do)

Why don't our seminary professors make their voices heard on the issues of our day? (they do, by the way)

Why not enfold the work of the ERLC into the ethics department of our seminaries, the Executive Committee, or the office of the President of the SBC? Why do we need a separate entity?

If we are wanting more money to go to missions, can someone please explain to me why we have the ERLC?

How does the ERLC aid in the mission of Southern Baptists, which is to make disciples of all nations? What fruit does it bear?

If there are not good answers to these questions, then what is the point of the ERLC? What are they doing that cannot easily be done by others and what makes their positions the "official" position of the SBC?

I am open to be persuaded.

Grasping for Your Best Life Now and What the Cross Says About That

The gospel of human potential and prosperity is all around us. The idea is that God loves us, has amazing blessing and prosperity for us, and all that we need to do is to tap into that love and blessing by faith. As we live faithful lives before God, He will grant us His favor and we will experience blessing after blessing. The number of things that this blessing applies to are legion. Good health, finances, a good marriage, wonderful children, freedom from pain and the past, righteousness in society, and a godly nation are just some of the areas that the gospel of potential/prosperity can be applied to. Perhaps you have seen the more egregious forms that tell you that if you send in some money to a TV preacher, you will get more money back from the celestial slot machine known as "God" and you have rightly rejected that view. But, there are many other less auspicious versions of this ancient heresy.

Whenever I enter into some type of agreement with God based on an "if/then" covenant, then I am buying into a potential/prosperity theology. I am saying that there is some form of blessig out there that God will give me if I just do my part. If I pray enough or obey enough or exercise enough faith for follow the right principles, then my best life is ready to be grasped. If I have problems in my life it is because I have not applied some principle well enough or I was not faithful enough or I somehow missed God.  To be truly walking with God means that the blessings will flow and my life will be pretty awesome. The presence of heartache, pain, and suffering is a life marked by the absence of God and Jesus didn't go to a cross so I could be miserable or experience lack.

These views are different versions of what Luther called a "Theology of Glory."  Under this view, the goal of the Christian life (and all religions for that matter) is our return to glory.  We came from glory and to glory we will return. Sure, things are not now as they will be - we have problems. But, our biggest problem is that we have not realized our true potential and destiny.  Through the work of Christ, we are restored to our true destiny and we can really begin to live.  We now begin to experience the purpose for our creation, which is to live out our destiny as loved children of God who have a glorious destiny. The destiny can begin to be realized now if we just have enough faith or obedience or skill or effort or strength to apply all that God has given us. So, we bring in experts to help us be successful at managing and applying the Christian life. The Cross of Christ is the method by which we attain our best life now. It is a means to an end. There might not seem like there is much wrong with this. Surely, God loves us and has good plans for us. But, the problem is the emphasis on US - on our comfort and our destiny and our blessings. We want, want, want, and God is the way that we get our wants satisfied. Again, God becomes the means to some other end and that end always involves our glory and prosperity and freedom from pain. It is a bootstrap religion because we think we are capable of securing success by following the prescription. When we fail, we either try harder or give up in desperation and try something else that will work because our hearts were never changed - the object of our affection was always us and our way of life.

The "Theology of the Cross" is the perspective that God fully revealed Himself on the Cross as Christ was executed for our sins.  "It was my sin that held Him there." My problem is not that I have failed to realize my potential or destiny. It is not that I have struggled with self esteem or that my life is not what I want it to be. My problem is not my marriage or my children or my job or the fact that people don't love me enough or overlook me. My problem is me and how I relate to a holy God. I have sinned and I continue to sin and I am eaten up with sin - rebellion against God and His ways. I want my way and I will kill to get it. I see myself as autonomous and I think I can do what I want. I think that I have power to secure the life that I want and I don't want to be accountable to anyone. It was my sin that held him there. At the Cross, I meet Jesus, whose blood was shed for me. The Cross is what God has done and is doing in the world, where He who knew no sin becamse sin for us that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. At the Cross, I die. I am crucified with Christ. I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I now live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.

Look at it. Stare at the Cross. See Jesus suffering, bearing the penalty and death that was due you. That is what God thinks of your effort and grasping and attempt to secure blessing and prosperity and unending desire for pleasure and comfort. That is what God thinks of your potential and obedience. It all fails at the Cross. All striving for glory and success and comfort and prosperity and blessing come crashing down. We can't make it. The Cross, at this point, is not some means to another end, but it is the end of human effort and sin and striving to grab hold of the life that we want or think we deserve. We are all laid low. It is also the end of God's wrath against us and our sin as as God's wrath was literally exhausted on Christ as He bore the full penalty for us trying to live our best life in our own way.

All of our aspirations and expectations must die at the Cross. All of our strategies for successful living and for securing prominence and the way of life that we think we deserve must meet their end at Calvary. All other identities and dependencies and desires for approval must die at the Cross. God has forever declared them all pointless. Only in looking upon our Suffering Savior do we see what God really had in mind. He was going to take our sin and separation and our best effort and He was going to die and take all of that with Him to the grave. Only then could we be reconciled to God through Christ.

"You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:6-8.

Jesus died for the ungodly. It is when I lay down my pretense and self righteousness and best attempts at grasping and pulling myself up by my bootstraps and claiming of blessing and favor because of how awesome I am or how worthy I think I am or how much faith I think I have or how obedient I've been - it is only when I am undone and laid low and gaze upon the Cross and see my Savior hanging there with all my sin upon Him as He bears the penalty due me - it is only at that point that I begin to get what God is doing in the world. It is when I am consumed by the Cross and entrust myself to what God has done through Jesus and not what I can do that I see that God's way is the way of suffering and that real life comes out of death. I must die to my dreams and aspirations and all the claims I have on the life I think I am supposed to have or even want to have. It is only when I stand there before the Cross and realize that Christ is all in all and all things are being reconciled back to God through Him that I begin to live.

This is why Paul said that He only preached Christ crucified and that the Cross was foolishness and a stumbling block. It messes us up. It frustrates us. We can't control it, so we try to alter its meaning. Still it looms over us. Our object of veneration is actually an execution device.

The Resurrection came and Jesus did not stay dead. The Cross was not the end of the story. But, it is still how God revealed Himself to us. We see God most clearly when we see that Jesus freely went to the Cross in obedience to the Father to deal with our sin and separation and restore us to God. The Cross is not a means to the end of gaining some kind of blessing from God. It is the place of meeting with God and that is blessing enough. The Cross is where we die to our desire for glory and it is where we meet Jesus, who is our truly great reward and blessing. The Cross is not the means to some other end - it is the End of sin and death and shame and God's wrath towards us and it is where we find God and He is enough.

For further reading on the Theology of the Cross, check out Gerhard O. Forde's On Becoming a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518.  

What They Omitted From the Declaration of Independence

"We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." ~ Thomas Jefferson

This was Jefferson's view, and the view of many others, on the institution of slavery in the early days of America. On the one hand, it was deplorable. On the other hand, they could not live without it and the financial prosperity that it provided was like an addictive drug. Even though Jefferson owned slaves, he was a sharp critic of slavery and worked to abolish it. Below is a paragraph that was in his initial draft of the Declaration, but it was not accepted by Southern slaveholders.

   "He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people for whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another."

Those who claim the defense of ignorance regarding slavery and the resulting racism and segregation that followed miss that there were many voices, both in the North and the South that we're saying that the practice was evil. Jefferson was one of them and in America's foundational document he tried to denounce the practice. Another voice would arise during the Constitutional Convention a decade later. However, Americans chose to ignore those voices and instead sided with an institution that would provide financial prosperity and independence to them, despite the moral and human toll it extracted.

You can't serve both God and Mammon. You will love one and hate the other.

What/who are we serving today?

The SBC Founded on the Wrong Side of History

I am working on a book that deals with the history of white evangelicals in the South in regard to racial division and how many of the underlying issues that led them to be racists are still with us today, just manifesting in different forms. These forms are still very destructive and dramatically effect our ability to make disciples, be faithful to Christ, and live missional lives. The conventional wisdom is that the SBC was begun in Augusta, Georgia in 1845 because of missions. In reality, it was because the Baptists in the north would not recognize slaveholders as missionaries and the Baptists in the South did not approve of their decision. They wanted to appoint who they wanted to and thus protect their way of life. So, they started their own movement to recognize and support slaveholding missionaries. But, the flow of history in the 1800's was clearly flowing AGAINST slavery everywhere but in the American South. For a group of Christians to be so out of tune, not only with Scripture, but also with the global flow of history everywhere except in their immediate cultural context could only mean that Baptists in the South (as well as Methodists and Presbyterians) were fully captive to the larger culture that they were members of.

Take a look at this timeline of the abolition of slavery in the 1800's (the founding of the SBC is added in 1845):

1802: The First Consul Napoleon re-introduces slavery on French colonies growing sugarcane.[14]
1803: Denmark-Norway abolition of transatlantic slave trade takes effect 1 January 1803
1804: New Jersey begins a gradual abolition of slavery, freeing future children of slaves.[21] Those born prior to the Act remain enslaved for life
1804: Haiti declares independence and abolishes slavery[16]
1805: Britain: bill for Abolition passed in Commons, rejected in the House of Lords.
1807, 2 March: Thomas Jefferson signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves into law in the U.S. which took effect January 1, 1808.
1807, 25 March: Abolition of the Slave Trade Act abolished slave trading in British Empire. Captains fined £120 per slave transported.
1807: British begin patrols of African coast to arrest slaving vessels. West Africa Squadron (Royal Navy) established to suppress slave trading; by 1865, nearly 150,000 people freed by anti-slavery operations[27]
1807: Abolition of serfdom in Prussia through the Stein-Hardenberg Reforms.
1808: In United States, Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves takes effect 1 Jan.[28]
1810: In Mexico, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla declares slavery abolished. In the following years, during the Mexican War of Independence, gradually comprehensive steps will end slavery in the new country.
1811: Slave trading made a felony in the British Empire punishable by transportation for British subjects and foreigners.
1811: Spain abolishes slavery at home and in all colonies except Cuba,[14] Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo
1811: The First National Congress of Chile approves a proposal drafted by Manuel de Salas that declares the Freedom of wombs, which sets free the sons of slaves born on Chilean territory, no matter the conditions of the parents; it prohibited the slave trade and recognized as freedmen those who, passing in transit through Chilean territory, stayed there for six months.
1813: In Argentina, the Law of Wombs was passed on February 2, by the Assembly of Year XIII. The law stated that those born after January 31, 1813 would be granted freedom when contracting matrimony, or on their 16th birthday for women and 20th for men, and upon their manumission would be given land and tools to work it. In 1853, slavery was completely abolished.
1814: Uruguay, before its independence, declares all those born of slaves in their territories are free from that day forward.
1814: Dutch outlaw slave trade.
1815: British pay Portugal £750,000 to cease their trade north of the Equator[29]
1815: Congress of Vienna. 8 Victorious powers declared their opposition to slavery
1816: Serfdom abolished in Estonia.
1817: Serfdom abolished in Courland.
1817: Spain paid £400,000 by British to cease trade to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo[29]
1817: New York State sets a date of July 4, 1827 to free all its slaves.[30]
1818: Treaty between Britain and Spain to abolish slave trade [31]
1818: Treaty between Britain and Portugal to abolish slave trade [31]
1818: France and Netherlands abolish slave trading
1818: teaty between Britain and Netherlands to abolish slave trade [31]
1819: Serfdom abolished in Livonia.
1820: Mexico formally abolishes slavery with the Plan of Iguala, proposed by Agustín de Iturbide and ratified the following year by him and the Viceroy, Juan O'Donojú
1820: Compromise of 1820 in U.S. prohibits slavery north of a line (36°30')
1821: Gran Colombia (Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama) declares free the sons and daughters born to slave mothers, sets up program for compensated emancipation [32]
1822: Liberia founded by American Colonization Society (USA) as a colony for emancipated slaves.
1822: Greece abolishes slavery
1823: Chile abolishes slavery[16]
1824: Mexico's new Constitution (1824 Constitution of Mexico) effectively frees existing slaves.
1824: The Federal Republic of Central America abolishes slavery.
1825: Uruguay declares independence from Brazil and prohibits the traffic of slaves from foreign countries.
1827: Treaty between Britain and Sweden to abolish slave trade [31]
1828: New York State abolishes slavery. Children born between 1799 and 1827 are indentured until age 25 (females) or age 28 (males).[33]
1829: Last slaves are freed in Mexico.[16]
1830: Mexican president Anastasio Bustamante orders the abolition of slavery to be implemented also in Mexican Texas. To circumvent the law, many Anglo colonists convert their slaves into "indentured servants for life", and later break away from Mexico - delaying the end of slavery in Texas until 1865.
1830: The first Constitution of Uruguay declares the abolition of slavery.
1831: Bolivia abolishes slavery[16]
1834: The British Slavery Abolition Act comes into force, abolishing slavery throughout most of the British Empire. Legally frees 700,000 in West Indies, 20,000 in Mauritius, 40,000 in South Africa. The exceptions, territories controlled by the Honourable East India Company and Ceylon, were liberated in 1843 when they became part of the British Empire. [34]
1835: Treaty between Britain and France to abolish slave trade [31]
1835: Treaty between Britain and Denmark to abolish slave trade [31]
1836: Portugal abolishes transatlantic slave trade
1838, 1 August: Enslaved men, women and children in the British Empire finally became free after a period of forced apprenticeship following the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833
1839: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society founded, now called Anti-Slavery International
1839: Indian indenture system made illegal (reversed in 1842)
1840: Treaty between Britain and Venezuela to abolish slave trade [31]
1841: Quintuple Treaty is signed; Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria agree to suppress slave trade[16]
1842: Treaty between Britain and Portugal to extend the enforcement of the ban on slave trade to Portuguese ships sailing south of the Equator.
1843: Honourable East India Company becomes increasingly controlled by Britain and abolishes slavery in India by the Indian Slavery Act V. of 1843.
1843: Treaty between Britain and Uruguay to suppress slave trade [31]
1843: Treaty between Britain and Mexico to suppress slave trade [31]
1843: Treaty between Britain and Chile to suppress slave trade [31]
1843: Treaty between Britain and Bolivia to abolish slave trade [31]
1845: 36 British Royal Navy ships are assigned to the Anti-Slavery Squadron, making it one of the largest fleets in the world.
1845: FOUNDING OF THE SBC IN AUGUSTA, GEORGIA TO ALLOW SLAVEHOLDERS TO BE MISSIONARIES
1846: Tunisia abolishes slavery
1847: Ottoman Empire abolishes slave trade from Africa.[35]
1847: Sweden abolishes slavery [36]
1847: Slavery ends in Pennsylvania. Those born before 1780 (fewer than 100 in 1840 Census) are freed.[37]
1848: Slavery abolished in all French and Danish colonies [16][36]
1848: France founds Gabon for settlement of emancipated slaves.
1848: Treaty between Britain and Muscat to suppress slave trade [31]
1849: Treaty between Britain and Persian Gulf states to suppress slave trade [31]
[edit]1850–1899
1850: In the United States, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 requires return of escaped slaves
1851: New Granada (Colombia) abolishes slavery[32]
1852: The Hawaiian Kingdom abolishes kauwa system of serfdom.[38]
1853: Argentina abolishes slavery when promulgating the 1853 Constitution
1854: Peru abolishes slavery[16]
1854: Venezuela abolishes slavery[16][32]
1855: Moldavia partially abolishes slavery.[39]
1856: Wallachia partially abolishes slavery.[39]
1860: Indenture system abolished within British-occupied India.
1861: Russia frees its serfs in the Emancipation reform of 1861.[40]
1862: Treaty between United States and Britain for the suppression of the slave trade (African Slave Trade Treaty Act).[31]
1862: Cuba abolishes slave trade[16]
1863: Slavery abolished in Dutch colonies.[41]
1863: In the United States, Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation which declared slaves in Confederate-controlled areas to be freed. Most slaves in "border states" are freed by state action; separate law freed the slaves in Washington, D.C.
1865: December: U.S. abolishes slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; about 40,000 remaining slaves are affected.[42]
1866: Slavery abolished in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).[43]
1869: Portugal abolishes slavery in the African colonies
1870: U.S. abolishes slavery among Indians in Alaska after purchasing it from Russia in 1867
1871: Brazil Rio Branco Law declares free the sons and daughters born to slave mothers after 28 September 1871.[44]
1873: Slavery abolished in Puerto Rico
1873: Treaty between Britain and Zanzibar and Madagascar to suppress slave trade [31]
1874: Britain abolishes slavery in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), following its annexation in 1874.[45]
1882: Ottoman firman abolishes all forms of slavery, white or black.[46]
1885: Brazil passes Sexagenarian Law freeing all slaves over the age of 60.
1886: Slavery abolished in Cuba[16]
1888: Brazil passes Golden Law, abolishing slavery without indemnities to slaveowners or aid to newly freed slaves.[47]
1890: Brussels Conference Act – a collection of anti-slavery measures to put an end to the slave trade on land and sea especially in the Congo Basin, the Ottoman Empire and the East African coast
1894: Korea abolishes slavery[48]
1896: France abolishes slavery in Madagascar
1897: Zanzibar abolishes slavery[49] following its becoming a British protectorate.
[edit]1900–today
1902: Ethiopian Empire abolishes slavery (though it was not legally and officially abolished by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1942)
1906: China formally abolishes slavery effective 31 January 1910, when all adult slaves were converted into hired labourers and the young were freed upon reaching age 25.[13]
1912: Siam (Thailand), formally abolishes all slavery. The act of selling a person into slavery was abolished in 1897 but slavery itself was not outlawed at that time.[50]

Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

So, the year before TUNISIA abolishes slavery, the SBC is formed to affirm the "right" of Christian missionaries to own slaves and take them with them on the mission field. The SBC started so slaveholders who wanted to be missionaries could take their slaves with them while they went and preached the gospel to Native Americans. The whole thing seems absurd now, even laughable, if it were not true. But, this timeline demonstrates well how out of step Southern Baptists were with world opinion on the issue. It is not as if they were ignorant of abolition movements. They knew all about them and patently rejected them.

I know that many in the SBC are embarrassed over this history and abhor it. I am not trying to pile on here. But, this is informative, especially when we see almost wholesale support for the Secession and the resulting Civil War just 15 years later by Baptists and even the adoption of a Theology of the Lost Cause by many after the war. The implications of being this wrong in relation to the larger culture in the South are quite serious and have not been adequately dealt with in my opinion.

In light of this, I wonder how we might be getting things wrong now?

Christ, a Priest in the Order of Melchizedek

This Sunday, I am preaching on the priesthood of Christ from Hebrews 4-5. Jesus, as our great high priest is incredibly significant. He intercedes for us, represents us to God and God to us. He is our Advocate and Intermediary. He does not offer sacrifices for us over and over, but he is our once-for-all sacrifice for sins in bringing us to God. His priesthood is unlike any other, transcending the Aaronic priesthood, all sacrificial systems, and all systems of religious worship and ritual. He is supreme over all. Hebrews 5:6 says that Jesus is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. He is mysterious, greater than Abraham and the Patriarchs, and everything submits to Him. Charles Spurgeon says this:

"Thou art, "i.e., thou wast and art and art to come, in all ages a priestly King. The order of Melchizedek's priesthood was the most ancient and primitive, the most free from ritual and ceremony, the most natural and simple, and at the same time the most honourable. That ancient patriarch was the father of his people, and at the same time ruled and taught them; he swayed both the sceptre and the censer, reigned in righteousness, and offered sacrifice before the Lord. There has never arisen another like to him since his days, for whenever the kings of Judah attempted to seize the sacerdotal office they were driven back to their confusion: God would have no king priest save Iris son. Melchizedek's office was exceptional none preceded or succeeded him; he comes upon the page of history mysteriously; no pedigree is given, no date of birth, or mention of death; he blesses Abraham, receives tithe and vanishes from the scene amid honours which show that he was greater than the founder of the chosen nation. He is seen but once, and that once suffices. Aaron and his seed came and went; their imperfect sacrifice continued for many generations, because it had no finality in it, and could never make the comers thereunto perfect. Our Lord Jesus, like Melchizedek, stands forth before us as a priest of divine ordaining; not made a priest by fleshly birth, as the sons of Aaron: he mentions neither father, mother, nor descent, as his right to the sacred office; he stands upon his personal merits, by himself alone; as no man came before him in his work, so none can follow after; his order begins and ends in his own person, and in himself it is eternal, "having neither beginning of days nor end of years The King Priest has been here and left his blessing upon the believing, and now he sits in glory in his complete character, stoning for us by the merit of his blood, and exercising all power on our behalf."

Jesus is THE way to God, our great high priest who opens the way to Heaven for us. Our hope is found in Christ alone. As Hebrews shows us, Jesus is superior to angels, Moses, Joshua, the Promised Land, and the Sabbath instituted at the very foundation of Creation. Jesus is our true rest. We now see that He is superior to any priesthood that has ever been devised. He is the only way, not just one way. Our sincerity in following our religious beliefs does not save us or help us. Christ Himself, selected by God, is our only salvation.

Humanism tells us that we are our own guide and salvation, whatever that means. That we are to forge our own path and find our own destiny. What matters most is our sincerity, effort, and being true to ourselves. Under this perspective, pleasure, power, and personal satisfaction are the foundation of our existence. We try to figure out what is most valuable to us and society helps to shape and form that perspective through pooling collected wisdom and telling stories to portray that wisdom. We end up exalting the "self" and everything depends on us - what kind of life can we secure for ourselves?

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) was an English poet who wrote "Invictus" as a young man. It clearly explains the humanistic ethos. We are adrift and our survival and thriving depends on us. We are our own priest, so to speak:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

This perspective exalts man to a place of eradication. Under the weight of full responsibility, we disappear. We are not able to handle it. We fail and readjust reality to fit what we desire and find important. But, that does not satisfy either. So, like ghosts, we are left to keep wandering and looking for a place of rest - for home. But, we never stop searching or fighting. As U2 says, we still have not found what we are looking for.

An understanding of the High Priesthood of Christ explodes this myth. We are incapable of saving ourselves or of devising any other approach to God or life or hope or pleasure - nothing that lasts or works. So, Christ has come to rule over all and bering men to Himself through sacrificing Himself and taking all the separation and dealing with it. We forsake all other dependencies.

What seems like an abstract doctrinal point actually becomes the sustenance of life itself. All that I am looking for through my striving and grasping and fighting, I find in Christ alone - my only true priest. In Him, my soul finds rest.

Military Ministry at Gateway Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL

I have had the privilege of serving as pastor of a church (Gateway Baptist) that is colocated in a city with a major military base.  Maxwell-Gunter AFB, here in Montgomery, hosts Air University, which is the academic training facility for the Air Force and members from other branches of service who particpate in these training schools. For the past twelve years, first serving as Associate Pastor of Ministries and then serving as Senior Pastor, we have seen hundreds of military personnel and their families come through our church.  We have learned what it means to be a church that not only ministers to the military, but also ministers with the military as we help equip them to go to their next assignments with a missional focus. Gateway Baptist has had a long history of Military Ministry before I came on staff here over a decade ago and that ministry has continued strongly up until the present day.  

Our desire has been to love and care for military families during their assignments here as well as during frequent deployments as families have been separated for extended periods of time. We have sought to see military members grow in their faith in Christ and participate in ministry in a local church that is embedded in ministry context that is diverse socially, economically, and racially.  In addition, our previous pastor whom I worked with as his associate for almost five years, Gary Sanders, helped us develop the perspective that ministry to the military is actually a great strategy for reaching the world, as God sovereignly places His people where He wants them to be for His purposes. He worked to develop Military Missions Network while pastor of Gateway and has gone on to lead this national ministry.  The idea is that as military personnel and their families fellowship with Gateway for a year or three or longer, our desire has been to help them discover how God might have shaped them and wants to enable them to reflect His glory through their vocation, their family life, and through all of the good works that He has prepared for them to do.

I say all of this because we recognize that being a church that ministers to and with the military is a great privilege and responsibility. We get to meet great people from all over America who have given their lives to serve our country.  We also get to learn from them and be enriched by the experiences that they have had in their lives and through their relationship with God. In addition, we also get to invest in their lives our heart for the Lord, love for His Word, and desire to see the nations come to Christ as we Love God and Love People to the Ends of the Earth. 

Churches talk a lot about missions, but we sometimes forget that God wants to send people our way so that we can share life together, minister to one another, and explore how God might use those relationsihps to help spread the gospel all over the world for generations to come. That is how we see the privilege of being a local church in a military town and we praise God for the opportunity to serve Him and His people in this way.

Please pray for us as we continue to minister to and with military members and their families through the Air Force at Maxwell-Gunter.  We need God's grace desperately to be able to do anything for His Kingdom and to be able to love others sacrificially. On our own, we don't have the ability to minister to the military the way that we desire and the way that we know that we are called to.   

How "The Hunger Games" Reflects Biblical Truth

I found a lot of Biblical truth in The Hunger Games trilogy. I finished reading it yesterday and think that some of the story does a better job of depicting Biblical truth than much that passes for "Christian" literature or film.  It is not a shiny, neat, tidy story. It is full of violence, treachery, pride, oppression, greed, indifference, tyranny, and the misuse of power. It kind of looks like parts of the Bible that way. It displays what happens when an individual/group tries to create a perfect society using power, fear, and violence as their means to control others.  It also shows what happens when people have no hope, how they can turn on one another, and how the desire for personal success, safety, and survival can cause us to do deplorable things to one another and how that evil can drive us mad.  Basically, it is a picture of a world without any good news, without any Gospel.  It is exactly the world that we would be living in, and that some do live in, if Jesus had not come.

Most Christian "art" presents us with a problem and then rapidly moves toward a solution which usually has something to do with the problem being presented to Jesus or the person becoming a Christian. It is "Sit-Com" theology that presents the problem and resolves it in a tidy 30 minute episode (including commercials).  Unfortunately, serious problems do not resolve easily and in providing simplistic solutions to the evil that besets us through encouraging people to "pray a prayer," we actually tell a less than truthful or realistic story. Evil is persistent, even among those who have turned to Jesus, and while Christ's salvation is complete, the rooting out of evil from both the world's systems and our own hearts requires more than we might initially expect. But, The Hunger Games, while having no intention whatsoever of being Biblical that I am aware of, actually approaches being a truthful story. It does not resolve the problem of human evil that is both individualistic and embedded in systems.  It shows how this evil is entrenched in our systems of government, industry, and entertainment and how it also warps our best motives.  It is a treatise on human depravity.

I could not help but think of Ephesians 6:12 as I read this: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."  There are forces of evil that establish themselves as authorities and rulers over us.  They embed themselves in human systems and tempt us to live warped and twisted lives focused on the exaltation of self.  When you see the extravagance and excess of the citizens of the Capitol as they feast on the resources of the Districts while cheering on the violence of the Hunger Games where innocents are left to war against one another for their own survival, you are left to wonder if the story is not intending to target real people in a real place and time. I read somewhere that the author, Suzanne Collins, was motivated to write these books while seeing the invasion of Iraq where civilians were dying and flipping the channel to see reality shows where people were cheering on banality in its highest forms. It seems as though she is saying that we have been desensitized to the violence and death going on around us because we have filled our lives with entertainment to numb our own boredom and shut out the voices of the oppressed. We just don't want to deal with our meaningless lives or the problems that our abundance has either created or ignores. 

Are we entertaining ourselves to death with things that do not matter while we cheer on wars and economic policies that protect our way of life? What if our "way of life" is immoral and selfish?  What if we are enriching ourselves at the expense of others? What if our economic system, our entertainment, and our political and military decisions are actually hurting people?  What if the things that benefit us actually damage others? Do we care about others or just about ourselves? These are some of the questions that I see Collins asking through these books.

Ultimately, redemption in The Hunger Games, if it exists at all, is found through self-sacrifice, which does approach the way that Jesus brings redemption to humanity.  It is only through laying down your life for others that life has any meaning or purpose at all. But, in this trilogy, even that has consequences and things never quite work out the way the characters want them too. Even self-sacrifice is flawed. Our motives are mixed, our best intentions are questionable, and we cling to survival and our own safety and comfort at the expense of others - even those we love - even without meaning to.  The Hunger Games would feel very hopeless if it was not so human - so Real to our everyday experience. The story isn't hopeless, however, because we live in a version of it and yet, we feel hope and love and meaning coming from Somewhere - even if we don't understand where. I think that we read our own sense of hope into an otherwise hopeless story as we wait for deliverance to eventually come.

Even though there is no religion or a Savior (Katniss Everdeen, the main character, is not a Christ-figure) I see many Biblical parallels in The Hunger Games because it is a REAL story. I do not think they are intentional. I would not use it for Bible studies or a sermon series. The Gospel is not present. But, if you read Ecclesiastes or Judges in the Bible and you see the meaninglessness of wealth and power and the presence of human depravity and violence on display, you will recognize what Collins is saying in her novels. She is telling our story of lostness and it is one that we are intimately familiar with. It is a REAL story and because of that, people are drawn to it. The Bible is nothing if not realistic in describing the human condition.

Maybe people are not drawn to the stories we tell as Christians because our stories are not real - because they are shiny and sanitized and because people intuitively know that they are manipulative and false. They are too simplistic. We should tell the real story of our human condition and then display the good news that there is a real Savior who has broken into our oppressive and deadly story to rescue us and establish a new way of living through His own sacrifice as He invites us to join Him.  Jesus makes sense of all of our Lesser Stories, but we cannot experience His freedom if we keep clinging to the myth that life would be better if we could just be in power or have abundance or live in the Capitol or win the Hunger Games, whatever they might be.

Millions are going to read these very depressing stories and see these movies, not because they give a shiny, happy picture of life, but because they hint at something that all of us know to be true - that in our shiny, plastic world we are craving the REAL. There is evil and greed and violence and oppression in the world and we are all conflicted and we are all to blame. Deep down, we all know this. But, there is also love and sacrfice and hope, even if it struggles to break through.

I am glad that, as Christians, we have the full story. That Hope does indeed break through and that the REAL is more beautiful than we ever imagined. We will be talking about that on Easter Sunday at our church - and every day after.   

Blessed to Be a Blessing: A Personal Story

“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” (Matthew 18:32-35 NIV84)

This past week, I had a jarring experience with God. On Friday, my feelings were hurt by the actions of another person and instead of forgiving them and letting it go, I buried the hurt, felt justified in my anger, and celebrated my victimhood. In short, I fell into self-pity and felt good about it. I was quiet. No one knew. But, my hurt was doing a work on my heart.

That night, God poured out His Spirit on me in a powerful way. I sensed God's nearness and comfort in a deep way. It was unusual. I interpreted this experience in prayer as God comforting me because of my hurt and showing me how much He loved me. I thought that God was affirming my status as a victim. But, the experience was not transformative for me. I was wrong.

The next day, I was angry and the hurt was turning into bitterness and resentment. Like an infection, it was burrowing deep into my soul. I suppressed it. I said that I forgave the person and I had that great experience in prayer where I sensed God's comfort. I was good. Plus, I had been right about the situation, I thought. Sure, I was withdrawing and shoving stuff down and I was using soulish defense mechanisms, but I was right so my actions were justified. Again, no one even knew what was going on inside. I didn't even know. That night, we had a men's ministry gathering that was really good, but internally, I was feeling more and more hollow.

I went to bed angry. I woke up on Sunday angry. I lashed out at Erika over something completely inconsequential. I felt like I was coming apart and it was really weird. I had no peace or joy. It seemed like I was going through a heavy dose of spiritual warfare. I apologized to Erika and asked her to pray for me. She was gracious to forgive me, but now I had to go to church and preach a message on fixing your thoughts on Jesus and not hardening your heart to God from Hebrews 3. After the weekend of hurt, anger,and frustration, I felt like the last person who should be talking about such things.

When I got in the car, I started praying about what was going on inside of me and God spoke in one of those ways where knowing transcends words. He showed me that I had interpreted the experience in prayer on Friday night wrong. I thought it was about God comforting me, but instead, God was wanting to conform me to the likeness of His Son (Romans 8:29). He was giving me grace to truly forgive from the heart. I ignored him and thought that God's blessing in prayer was all about me and how special and right I was and how even God could see it. Disgusting, isn't it?

When I did not avail myself of God's grace and truly forgive - from the heart - then God, in His love, allowed me to be tormented. Matthew 18:21-35 was happening in my life. He let my unforgiveness and bitterness do its work on me until I was broken of my pride and saw my own sin in lashing out against Erika over nothing right before I was going to preach a message to our church. God turned me over to be tormented so I would be humbled, see my own depravity, and cry out to Christ for mercy for myself and truly forgive from the heart. God's will for me and the whole purpose of the experience I had in prayer on Friday night was not to comfort me in my hurt, but was to give me the grace to release it and truly forgive, so that I would be more like Jesus. I had been so blinded and convinced of my rightness, but it took me almost 48 hours to see it, with God dealing with me every step of the way, even with His discipline.

In that moment of clarity, with eyes to see what God really intended, the hurt inflicted upon me by the other person - the hurt that I had held onto and that was burrowing into my soul - completely evaporated. I saw myself as the sinner. I was in the wrong. But, the mercy of Christ overwhelmed me and not only was I able to truly forgive, but it made no sense not to. I had been forgiven so much! I saw that being WITH Christ was greater than anything and I understood that God's greatest purpose for me was to reveal Christ to me and to conform me to Him in every situation. As soon as I could, I took the appropriate steps to express true forgiveness and confess my own failure in the situation more appropriately. God's grace was abundant for all of that and true reconciliation occurred beautifully.

Genesis 12:1-3 says that Abram was blessed to be a blessing. I think that we are too. God blesses us so that we will know Him and worship Him and submit our lives to Him in obedience. His kindness leads us to repentance. Then, He wants us to be a blessing to others as well with the grace that we have received. Even as believers who pray, read Scripture, and devote ourselves to the Lord, we can be so prideful and blind to what is really going on in our hearts. We need God to work in our lives over and over again in all kinds of ways. And, we need to see that God's greatest purpose for us is not that we be happy and feel good, but that we be like Jesus.

Interesting lessons.

Cultivating Loneliness, Travel Writing, & Connecting With People

In 2006, Robert Kaplan wrote an article for the Columba Journalism Review called "Cultivating Loneliness." I cannot find the article online, but like a web archaeologist, I can cull excerpts from it in various places. His insights on how to get a story, write thoughtfully, listen to others, and ultimately connect with people where they are in their own context are helpful, not just for writing, but for life. These insights are especially helpful for the Christian who might seek to come alongside people and hear their stories as they tell them stories of Another Kingdom. Perhaps we should take the time to listen before we talk.

“Reporting — one of history’s oldest professions, even as it has gone under different names — will survive and prosper, while “journalism” as a respected discipline threatens to dissolve into another branch of the entertainment industry. How will good reporting survive? Individual men and women will slip away from the crowd — away from the panels and seminars, the courses and conferences, away from the writers’ hangouts and e-mail networks — to cultivate loneliness. They will demand of themselves not to write a word about a place or a subject until they know it firsthand. And they will do this out of curiosity — for as the illusion of knowledge grows daily, the reality of places themselves becomes more of a mystery.”

“Just listening to people, to their stories — rather than cutting them off to ask probing, impolite questions — forms the essence of…good travel books. I learned this over two decades ago while trying to interview a refugee in Greece who had just escaped from Stalinist Albania. I had a list of questions to ask this refugee, but instead he preferred to tell me the story of his life. It was only after listening to him for several hours that the information I sought began to slip out.

“But such a leisurely approach goes against the grain of journalism as it is commonly practiced. Reporting emphasizes the intrusive, tape-recorded interview; travel writing emphasizes the art of good conversation, and the experience of how it comes about in the first place. It has long been a cliché among correspondents that in Africa 10 percent of journalism is doing interviews, and 90 percent is the hassles and adventures of arranging them. But while the former fits within the narrow strictures of daily news articles, it is the latter that tells you so much more about the continent.

“The travel writer knows that people are least themselves when being tape-recorded. You’ll never truly understand anybody by asking a direct question, especially someone you don’t know very well. Rather than interrogate strangers, which is essentially what reporters do, the travel writer gets to know people, and reveals them as they reveal themselves. After being with a battalion of marines for several weeks in Iraq, I noticed that they suddenly stopped using profane language when some journalists arrived and turned on their tape recorders. Whatever the marines were in front of the journalists, they were less real than they had been before.”

–Robert D. Kaplan, “Cultivating Loneliness“, Columbia Journalism Review, Jan-Feb 2006

More on the discipline of effective travel writing can be found here: http://sites.google.com/site/pennsylvaniajournal/Home/winter-2009-issue/travel-writers-as-policy-wonks-robert-kaplan-ted-rall-rory-stewart

Steinbeck's Rules for Writers and Creatives

I am back to studying the writing process and engaging in actually trying to be productive again in that area. Atlantic Monthly as an article out that lists Pulitzer Prize winning author John Steinbeck's 6 rules for writers:

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Steinbeck goes on to say this about the writing process:

"If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story."

I think that this applies to all creatives, not just writers. Keep going. Just write. Don't get bogged down in analysis. Produce something each day. Persevere. I am wanting to learn these lessons.

Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/03/6-writing-tips-from-john-steinbeck/254351/

Whatever Happened to the GCR? (And how we can still have one).

The Great Commission Resurgence. This was the rallying cry of the new SBC 2-3 years ago. Southern Baptists had a task force that met for a year and made recommendations to the convention that dealt with funding mechanisms, an emphasis on church planting, and a suggestion to get more money from state conventions to the International and North American Mission Boards. These are good suggestions, but they weren't exactly the things that would lead to a true, grassroots resurgence of the Great Commission on the front lines of Southern Baptist life - the local church. We've had some tinkering with our entities, some coalescing of power in the upper echelons of Baptist life, some more money flowing in particular directions - that's about it. I am not even saying that the changes approved 2 years ago are bad. Honestly, they might be fine suggestions for those entities. But, I can tell you that any movement toward a Great Commission "Resurgence" is not evident, nor do I see any real move toward it in the only place that matters - the local church.

The thing is, I am not hearing anything about the GCR. Not a thing. I haven't heard anything about it in over a year. No one is talking about it, nor are we talking about how local churches are going to lead the Convention. We just had a name change committee that met over the past year to give us a nickname - Great Commission Baptists, because they found out that it would be financially and legally irresponsible to actually change our name. So, we have a nickname now that is supposed to give us a better reputation. But, a self-appointed nickname does not make for a Great Commission Resurgence. It is almost as if we engaged in a lot of sound and fury to make some cosmetic changes and move some things around. But, cosmetics will not bring about revival or resurgence or a missional awakening or even greater personal devotion to Christ. Only faith and repentance will do that and the repentance we need is to turn from everything we have trusted in apart from Christ, including our size, wealth, influence, power, knowledge, strategic plans, and history. We need Jesus to stir our hearts.

But, by every possible metric, the decline continues.
Baptisms keep dropping.
Church attendance keeps dropping.
Giving keeps dropping.
People keep turning to idols in increasing numbers.

Maybe all of this is necessary. Perhaps it is all inevitable and maybe there is nothing that can be done - what is dying will die and that is all there is to it and there are cultural and social tsunamis happening that cannot be defended against. Maybe God is doing something different and the institutional church and the SBC is not meant to continue on as a strong convention of churches. Maybe a pruning is needed. Jesus Himself said he would cut off every branch that does not bear fruit (John 15). Maybe. Some might say that.

But, I still think that there is a call upon us to repent, return to the Lord as our only hope, and believe God to make all things new. I believe that God can do anything, even revive and awaken churches. I even think that God can cause churches to work together and support one another and be the hands and feet of Jesus in a community - together. So, because of this, I believe that there is hope for a real Great Commission Resurgence, one that happens in the hearts and hallways of every believer and church in the SBC and not just in the boardrooms of our agencies.

What if? What if, over the next 6 months to a year, all employees and executives of Baptist entities, state conventions, and local associations endeavored to meet with local pastors and church leaders in small groups in their communities for the purpose of finding ways that they could work together on the ground for the purpose of witnessing to Jesus where they are? What if, those same Baptist workers, also encouraged those local believers and leaders to talk about how they could work together globally? The IMB could then serve that movement. What if we tried to find ways that we could specifically demonstrate unity, sacrificial love, and support for other believers in our communities so that the world would know that Jesus is real? Then, we might take a step to fulfill both the Great Commandment AND the Great Commission.

What if the leadership of our seminaries, missions agencies, and other entities actually put real effort toward bringing us together relationally instead of just through the giving of money so that other people can do the work? What if stronger churches helped weaker churches with their mission instead of being content to receive their people because they offer better programs so they can grow their own churches at the expense of others? What if we all worked together to serve and love and preach and demonstrate the Gospel of Jesus to our communities?

I am sitting at the Alabama Baptist State Evangelism Conference and am listening to Frank Page speak about the state of evangelism in the SBC as I think about these things. He just said that personal evangelism is at an all-time low in Southern Baptist life at the highest levels - meaning the local church. He is saying that we now look at personal evangelism with aspersion. We think it is beneath us and that people are not interested in spiritual things. That is a heart issue. We are full of unbelief. Rearranging entity structures will not bring a resurgence and obviously, it has not. We need to actually meet with people, pray, listen, get involved with others, and speak the Word to one another to build our faith. But, we cannot do that when the main things that we want are power and more money. We cannot spread faith until we are willing to suffer alongside those who have lost it or have never had it in the first place.

We need to quit mobilizing, recruiting, and fundraising for our things and start healing, restoring, and journeying with one another, arm in arm. I truly believe that a real GCR, or the beginnings of it, could be just 6 to 12 months away if we would do the work of the ministry instead of just talking about it and expecting others to do it. If only 20% of SBC churches and pastors, participated and worked together, that would be over 8,000 churches working together in new and fresh ways. Something would happen in our communities. From that base, those churches could draw in others and plant new churches in areas of need. SBC entities need to stop dictating and directing the work and asking to be given more and more money and begin facilitating and serving the work that could only truly happen in the local church in unnamed and out of the way places. In an age of technological innovation that is making grassroots social entrepreneurship possible, the very best tool we have for reaching the world for Christ happens to be the very one that Jesus instituted - Hia church. What if we really believed that?

Then, we would not need to give ourselves a nickname. We would be known simply as those who follow Jesus and we might find a resurgence of many things that are needed.

The Deadly Danger of Being Hard to Impress

We live in a world that gets bored easily. We keep looking for the next big thing - for something spectacular. At any moment with a click, we can watch the greatest singers and athletes in the world. We can see every beautiful spot on the planet. We can hear the best music, read the best books, watch the best movies, and be visually, emotionally, and intellectually amazed constantly.

And, the result is that we are perpetually bored. We can't wait for the new iPhone or iPad to come out and a few months later when we hear about the next one, we are like little kids who forget the old toy at the introduction of a new one. We are disappointed with what we have because someone else has something newer. Nothing lasts and this approach isn't working. Even our ventures into nostalgia are usually just phases that we go through until we get tired of it. The pop superstar or star athlete of today is quickly forgotten when the next big sensation comes along as it is almost required that we move on in our affections. We can travel with ease and if we spend more than a month without taking a little trip somewhere, we begin to get despondent. What is happening to us? Our constant desire for entertainment has left us without the ability to think, process, relate to others, or produce much of lasting consequence. We are people craving the spectacular while continually being unimpressed with all that we see. In our constant boredom and rush for the "new thing," we are proving that, down deep, we know that there is more to life than what we can see, taste, or touch. Our simultaneous boredom and capacity to constantly grasp for something new tells us something, if we will listen. We have a deep desire to be ultimately satisfied and we continually confess that we cannot find it because we keep moving from one thing to another. Yet, we tend to believe that the next thing that comes our way will actually satisfy. When will we learn? 

CS Lewis said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

So, this boredom and lack of satisfaction with things actually tells us that we are made for another world. The boredom speaks to the idea that satisfaction does await us somewhere - but we cannot grasp it here. The problem comes in when Christians experience the same boredom. When Christians are not excited about what God is doing in the world, when we think we've seen it all before, when we become so sophisticated that we cannot rejoice in God's work in another person or be surprised by daily miracles, then we are experiencing a soul sickness that can be devastating. We might just be spiritually asleep, having been lulled to sleep by the siren song of the world that promises much but delivers little. 

Little kids are always excited. They dance around, play, laugh, and have big eyes and wide open mouths at almost everything. They believe things. We do not see their movement to dourness and cynicism as a sign of maturity. Instead, we see the loss of innocence and excitement as a tragedy, not as a coming of age. We need to be like little kids - dancing, playing, laughing with eyes and mouths wide open. We need to be people who are easily impressed, who can grasp and be amazed at what God has done in Christ, and who have hearts open with joy to the work of God! If we lose our sense of wonder, excitement, and praise to God for what He has done and promises to do, then what do we have left?  We are only left with our fears, failures, and our own strength, which is not much. But, if we truly look to the Lord and are willing to see God's work in the life of others, if we have eyes to see what God is doing, if we can actually accept that God is breaking in and doing a new thing everyday, then we will begin to be restored to a sense of wonder, joy, and excitement in life as we live it with God. We will see with eyes of faith!

Cynicism is a deadly solvent that can tear our lives apart. We need joy. Let us go back to the Source of life and joy, namely Jesus, and ask Him to break the hard crust of cynicism and allow us to see the wonder of His Creation and the beauty of His work in our lives. Let us see Him!

The End of the Christian Right in American Politics?

This election cycle is something of a disaster for what remains of the Christian Right in American politics. On the one one hand, you have Mitt Romney, a Mormon, running against Newt Gingrich, a thrice married, newly converted Catholic with a history of ethics violations including leaving 2 sick wives for mistresses. Rick Santorum is also a Catholic who has strong conservative moral credentials, but he cannot get any traction. Ron Paul, a Baptist, is a libertarian and he also cannot get any traction among Conservative Christians. He was booed in South Carolina for trying to apply the Golden Rule to international relations.

There are no Ronald Reagans, George W. Bush's, or even Mike Huckabee's out there. So, where does what is left of the Christian Right go this November in the presidential election?  If history is any guide, whoever is running against President Obama will be re-baptized as a legitimate conservative with bona fide religious right credentials and be voted for en masse. But, what has happened to the movement overall?

The New Republic has an article out by Michael Kazin that says that the Christian Right is dying and is no longer influential in American politics. He says, "In fact, the Christian Right is a fading force in American life, one which has little chance of achieving its cherished goals." A counterpoint to this is found in the Salon.com article by Peter Montgomery where he says that the Christian Right is alive and powerful. So, which is it? Is the Christian Right still a political force to be reckoned with, or is it a shell of its former self?

Pesonally, as a Baptist pastor in the Deep South, I think that there is no doubt that the "movement" as we once knew it is in steep decline. The energy of the 80's and 90's culminating in the election of George W. Bush and the Republican Senate and House in 2000 has given way to a great deal of apathy and resignation regarding the idea that taking over the political process is not the best way to "restore" America or even make much of a difference. The drum-beat towards America embracing a more liberal present and future continues on, almost unchecked. Sure, a law is passed here and there in a state legislature or in Congress, but overall, things are continuing to unravel for the Christian Conservative, at least according to the standards put forth by the Christian Right.

I remember when I was younger and The Christian Coalition led by Pat Robertson or the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell or Focus on the Family led by James Dobson would issue statements on the next big fight over abortion or gay rights or a supreme court justice nomination.  People would talk, letters would be written, preachers would preach, and rallies would occur. No more. Those days are gone. No longer do we believe that winning a battle over a piece of legislation is going to make a major difference.

There are still millions of Christian Conservatives out there. But, by and large, I think that they are disillusioned. While they still have enormous potential political power, they have lost their political will, by and large. I think that most Christians have realized that winning elections does not equal winning the hearts and minds of people, and that is where the battle must be fought and won.

I see a return to grass-roots activism and a more holistic witness among Christians. I think that we have finally realized that we cannot take America back for God, whatever that means. I am seeing a return to an embrace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as our only hope and a greater desire to live out the implications of our faith in real and tangible ways. Personally, I think that Christians should be involved in politics just like we should be involved in every arena, since we should all play a role in how we govern ourselves. But, I think that our future engagement is going to look much different than it did in the past.

No, the Christian Right is not dead in America. But, may be less Republican and less "Right" and perhaps it is more prophetic in that it is not as beholden to any political party or ideological perspective. Perhaps we are better off if we lose our power here on earth so that we can exert influence derived from God's Kingdom instead of man's. Maybe if we are not tied to one party, we can critique and offer alternatives rooted in the Way of Jesus to BOTH parties.

Maybe we can be more prophetic than political, and in that, point to Christ as our only hope and the Savior of the world.

Difficult People Are In Your Life for a Reason

I am becoming more and more convinced that the trials and struggles that we face in life, including the hurts and wounds and the people that we find hard to love, are all there for a reason. Perhaps the situations that we try to avoid are exactly what we need to grow up in Christ? Maybe, just maybe, the people we are trying to get away from or we don't want relationships with, are people that God brings into our life to teach us patience, long suffering, what it means to forgive, and how we are to love unconditionally. 1 John 3 & 4 tells us that if we love God, then we will and we should love people as well. But, we often don't. Perhaps we are pleasant enough with others, but we often just try to avoid people who are different from us or who do not affirm us or who are difficult. But, what if those people - the people who frustrate you and who you don't understand are in your life to serve as an object upon which the life of God can pour out of you? What if they are there so that you can exercise patience and compassion? So that you can fight for their hearts? So you can forgive? So you can demonstrate Jesus? What if we've had it all wrong regarding relationships and "safe" people? What if the goal is not escape but it is engagement? Perhaps our sin is not what is most true about us, but we are all made in the Image of God and there is something worth blessing and recovering in each of us and it only happens when we bump up against one another and love sacrificially. That is how Jesus is with us. Why aren't we that way with others? If we applied this view to our marriages, our churches, and our relationships and communities, maybe we would stop running away and start settling down with people for the long haul.

CS Lewis on What We Will One Day Be

I am working through the concept of "Loving People" for a series that we are starting in our church over the next few weeks as part 2 of our vision/mission movements through spiritual formation.  This week, I want to talk about Sacrificial Love and the Imago Dei.  We are the Beloved. We are greatly loved by God and we are loved sacrificially, without deserving it.  The love of God to us in Christ actually costs God something - it cost Him His Son.  True love - Agape Love - is love that costs.  We have been lavished with love from God and that love actually changes us. It restores us to who we were created to be.  It recognizes the Imago Dei - the "Image of God" upon each of us (Genesis 1:26-28).  Because we are made in God's image and because He has come after us to rescue us and restore us to Himself, we are freed from all that keeps us from living as creatures who bask in God's glory.  We are all far more than we think we are.

CS Lewis, when dealing with this concept in The Weight of Glory says this:

"It is a serious thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."

This is exciting and sobering at the same time.  The waitress who frustrated me because she was slow on my order; the mechanic who didn't fix my car the way I wanted; my child's teacher who did not perform to my expectations; my children, my spouse, my co-workers and friends - all of these people are made in the Image of God and are dearly loved by Him.  To fail to see them as God sees them - with incredible worth, potential, and an eternal destiny awaiting them of great splendor or unspeakable horror - is to fail to rightly value them as I should and thus, to fail to love them at all.  Furthermore, to not value the creation as I should is also to not worship the Creator correctly as well.  How I value and treat others says everything about how I see and worship, and yes, love God.

1 John 2:9-11

⁹ Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. ¹⁰ Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. ¹¹ But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.

May we walk in the light and see one another rightly.

Christmas Eve Truce of 1914: Peace, for a Night

Following is a fascinating story as told by Private Frederick W. Heath and reprinted by Alan Nothnagle of how World War One stopped on Christmas Eve almost 100 years ago and there was "Peace on Earth," at least for one night, in the trenches of France where the Germans, French, and British had been previously slaughtering one another. It was a Christmas miracle and a touching story of what happens when Christmas overcomes war. I think of Isaiah 2:4, which says,

"He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore."

That Christmas Truce

Written in the trenches by Private Frederick W. Heath

The night closed in early - the ghostly shadows that haunt the trenches came to keep us company as we stood to arms. Under a pale moon, one could just see the grave-like rise of ground which marked the German trenches two hundred yards away. Fires in the English lines had died down, and only the squelch of the sodden boots in the slushy mud, the whispered orders of the officers and the NCOs, and the moan of the wind broke the silence of the night. The soldiers' Christmas Eve had come at last, and it was hardly the time or place to feel grateful for it.

Memory in her shrine kept us in a trance of saddened silence. Back somewhere in England, the fires were burning in cosy rooms; in fancy I heard laughter and the thousand melodies of reunion on Christmas Eve. With overcoat thick with wet mud, hands cracked and sore with the frost, I leaned against the side of the trench, and, looking through my loophole, fixed weary eyes on the German trenches. Thoughts surged madly in my mind; but they had no sequence, no cohesion. Mostly they were of home as I had known it through the years that had brought me to this. I asked myself why I was in the trenches in misery at all, when I might have been in England warm and prosperous. That involuntary question was quickly answered. For is there not a multitude of houses in England, and has not someone to keep them intact? I thought of a shattered cottage in -- , and felt glad that I was in the trenches. That cottage was once somebody's home.

Still looking and dreaming, my eyes caught a flare in the darkness. A light in the enemy's trenches was so rare at that hour that I passed a message down the line. I had hardly spoken when light after light sprang up along the German front. Then quite near our dug-outs, so near as to make me start and clutch my rifle, I heard a voice. There was no mistaking that voice with its guttural ring. With ears strained, I listened, and then, all down our line of trenches there came to our ears a greeting unique in war: "English soldier, English soldier, a merry Christmas, a merry Christmas!"

 Friendly invitation

 Following that salute boomed the invitation from those harsh voices: "Come out, English soldier; come out here to us." For some little time we were cautious, and did not even answer. Officers, fearing treachery, ordered the men to be silent. But up and down our line one heard the men answering that Christmas greeting from the enemy. How could we resist wishing each other a Merry Christmas, even though we might be at each other's throats immediately afterwards? So we kept up a running conversation with the Germans, all the while our hands ready on our rifles. Blood and peace, enmity and fraternity - war's most amazing paradox. The night wore on to dawn - a night made easier by songs from the German trenches, the pipings of piccolos and from our broad lines laughter and Christmas carols. Not a shot was fired, except for down on our right, where the French artillery were at work.

Came the dawn, pencilling the sky with grey and pink. Under the early light we saw our foes moving recklessly about on top of their trenches. Here, indeed, was courage; no seeking the security of the shelter but a brazen invitation to us to shoot and kill with deadly certainty. But did we shoot? Not likely! We stood up ourselves and called benisons {blessings} on the Germans. Then came the invitation to fall out of the trenches and meet half way.

Still cautious we hung back. Not so the others. They ran forward in little groups, with hands held up above their heads, asking us to do the same. Not for long could such an appeal be resisted - beside, was not the courage up to now all on one side? Jumping up onto the parapet, a few of us advanced to meet the on-coming Germans. Out went the hands and tightened in the grip of friendship. Christmas had made the bitterest foes friends.

The Gift of Gifts

Here was no desire to kill, but just the wish of a few simple soldiers (and no one is quite so simple as a soldier) that on Christmas Day, at any rate, the force of fire should cease. We gave each other cigarettes and exchanged all manner of things. We wrote our names and addresses on the field service postcards, and exchanged them for German ones. We cut the buttons off our coats and took in exchange the Imperial Arms of Germany. But the gift of gifts was Christmas pudding. The sight of it made the Germans' eyes grow wide with hungry wonder, and at the first bite of it they were our friends for ever. Given a sufficient quantity of Christmas puddings, every German in the trenches before ours would have surrendered.

And so we stayed together for a while and talked, even though all the time there was a strained feeling of suspicion which rather spoilt this Christmas armistice. We could not help remembering that we were enemies, even though we had shaken hands. We dare not advance too near their trenches lest we saw too much, nor could the Germans come beyond the barbed wire which lay before ours. After we had chatted, we turned back to our respective trenches for breakfast.

All through the day no shot was fired, and all we did was talk to each other and make confessions which, perhaps, were truer at that curious moment than in the normal times of war. How far this unofficial truce extended along the lines I do not know, but I do know that what I have written here applies to the -- on our side and the 158th German Brigade, composed of Westphalians.

As I finish this short and scrappy description of a strangely human event, we are pouring rapid fire into the German trenches, and they are returning the compliment just as fiercely. Screeching through the air above us are the shattering shells of rival batteries of artillery. So we are back once more to the ordeal of fire.

---

While Some Churches Cancel Christmas Sunday Services, Christ Remains a Scandal

Christmas Day is on a Sunday this year, and just like in 2005, we hearing about churches cancelling their Sunday services because it is Christmas and they want to free people up to be with their families. I understand that the secular version of Christmas is about family and friends and gift giving and what not, and I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with that - those things are worth celebrating and Christians should celebrate them too. But, the Christian version of Christmas is obviously about Jesus and it just seems like a big cave to the secular nature of the holiday for churches to cancel their weekly Sunday worship service because it happens to also be Christmas Day.

Of course, the vast majority of churches ARE having worship on Sunday, but it is the ones that aren't that are attracting attention. Many of the churches that are not having worship are REALLY large - like of the 10,000 to 20,000 members variety. I say something about this here not to cast judgment on other churches (admittedly, I do not know every reason why every church cancels worship on a Sunday). But, since the megachurches usually set the trends for the rest of Evangelical Christianity (what the megas do one year, others seem to do in following years thinking that if the big churches do it it must be a good thing), I think that it is worth considering if this is the best approach.

My view is that it is better for churches to go ahead and have worship on Sunday (radical, I know), even if, perhaps ESPECIALLY if, that Sunday happens to be Christmas Day.  Christmas is the day that Christians have chosen to celebrate the birth of Christ. It is when we celebrate the Incarnation, when God put on flesh and made His dwelling among us, when Jesus

Who, being in very nature God,
   did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷ but made himself nothing,
   taking the very nature of a servant,
   being made in human likeness.
⁸ And being found in appearance as a man,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to death—
      even death on a cross!   (Phil. 2:6-8)

Jesus went through a great deal to be our Savior, including being born very, very small, as a human baby, to live among us and take our sins upon Himself and die so that our sins would die with Him and raise from the dead to give new life to all who believe in Him.  Worshiping Christ with the church on the day that we set aside to honor His birth, especially when that day is a Sunday, the day each week that we gather for worship to celebrate the Resurrection, seems like the appropriate thing to do.

It is not my intention to reduce our relationship with Christ to attendance at a worship service on a certain day. Obviously, that would be a mistake. I also do not take aim at individuals or families who, for different reasons, are genuinely not able to be in worship on Sunday - Christmas Day. I am not anyone's judge and do not intend to decide in every case whether an individual or family should or even could attend worship on Sunday. But, I do find it ironic that churches are cancelling their worship services on Sunday. Why would you cancel outright?  Maybe a reduced, scaled down worship service would be appropriate. Worship in church on Christmas used to be one of the biggest days of the year. Now, we are cancelling services because some pastors/leaders say that it is better to stay home with our families and enjoy the day. What if there are even better ways to celebrate than spending the entire day immersed in consumer electronics, wrapping paper, and rich food?  What if being in God's presence with the Body of Christ was actually better?

No, I don't think that you are going to hell if your church cancels worship on Christmas. But, I do think that it sends a message, as a church, about what your priorities are, and that is important too. I will not be looking around my church to see who is there or who isn't and judging anyone. I have no idea what each situation is and why people come and why they don't. But, I will worship God with whoever does come and thank Him for Jesus' birth and life and death and resurrection, as we do every Sunday as a worshipping community of Christ.

I know that some might say that I should not talk about this, that it is better to live and let live and not to make a big deal out of what others do. I am supposed to be positive all the time, especially at Christmas. Ok. But, I also know that Christ is a scandal, a stumbling block, and even an inconvenience. He messes with our traditions, customs, and cultural practices. He calls us to reorient around Him, not the other way around, and perhaps this seems strange to us. But, we are in good company if it does. 1 Corinthians 1:20-25 says, 

²⁰ Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹ For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. ²² Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, ²³ but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵ For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

We live in a country with complete freedom to worship how we choose and that can sometimes be a mixed blessing when choices are made according to what we prefer or what seems easiest to us. Everything is very convenient for us. We have air conditioning and heat and automobiles and comfortable seats and nice sound systems and messages tailored for us that are not too long with video and pastors who are entertaining and relevant and coffee and donuts and good friends and greeters and smiling faces and nothing that would make us uncomfortable. And, we have constructed a religion that does not really require us to sacrifice anything at all because it is all so wonderful and easy and hey, let's just spend time with our families at home in our pajamas and I'm sure that Jesus is okay with that.  Maybe He is and I've got it all wrong. Maybe it doesn't matter to God if we cancel worship on Sunday because it is Christmas Day. Maybe God doesn't care if we celebrate Christmas at all. I don't know. I'm not trying to speak for God here. But, it just strikes me as strange, odd even, that those who are known by the name of Christ, as Christ-followers, would be ones who find it too inconvenient to worship Christ together on the day we celebrate His birth.

It just seems to me, that if we are Christians and if we are going to do a bunch of Christmas stuff because it is the time that we celebrate the birth of Christ and we say that Jesus is the "Reason for the Season," that it is contradictory to cancel worship on Sunday because it happens to be Christmas Day and we are used to having that day off.  We only get a chance to have worship on Christmas day once every 6-8 years. Maybe instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, we could see it as a great blessing - something our children will remember and be thankful for. Perhaps we should see it as a chance to make a prophetic statement about what we value most - that we are people who orient our lives around Christ and the worship of the Saints together.

At the time of Christ's birth, there was no room for Him in the Inn and he was born in a stable among the animals. Let us make room for Christ in the midst of our traditions and festivities so that we can celebrate Him with the Body of Christ, His family, the children of God. Let us reorient around Christ, even at, no especially at Christmas.

"Let every heart prepare Him room . . ."