gospel – Page 2 – Salvaged Faith

Proclaiming the Word

Posted on August 23, 2009Leave a comment

In our passage from Ephesians this morning, we hear two very important, complimentary lessons.

First – God is One. There is One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One Spirit, One Hope, One Body, ONE!

A few weeks ago, as I first introduced these elements of worship, we looked at the very simple message that Isaiah heard proclaimed in his vision. I forgive you, I love you, and I have a job for you. It’s short, It’s simple, in some ways, It is a summary of the entire Biblical tradition. Repeat it with me. I forgive you, I love you, and I have a job for you.

All of those “ONE’s” that we just heard about – they each have to do with this core message. We are forgiven by One Lord, through our One Faith, and in our One Baptism. We experience God’s love through the One Body. And empowered by the One Spirit, we are called to One common Hope.

That call is the Second lesson for this morning. The Word of God gave each of us a gift – a task – a calling… and these gifts, though united in purpose, are as varied as we are.

At annual conference this year, our resident artist, Ted Lyddon Hatten, created a color wheel out of chairs. Each one of the 16 chairs represented a different part of the color wheel.

Now, when we talk about light and color, we may remember from our childhood that white light is made up of many different wavelengths. Blues and Reds and Greens and Yellows all come together to create what we see as white. But in certain situations, that light is broken up, it is refracted, and we see a rainbow. We see the beauty of difference in what once appeared to be unified.

The color wheel is in some ways like that. If we mixed them all together, we would get a muddled and icky brown color – but individually, if we allow them to be in relationship, to compliment one another, our pictures become more vivid and brighter and full of life.

God’s Word – rather than being black and white words on a page that never change – is alive and varied and moving among us – as different as each of these sixteen chairs and sixteen colors. And the Word of God who is Jesus Christ chose us to carry the word to one another.

As The Message translation interprets this passage: You were all called to travel on the same road and in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly… BUT that doesn’t mean you should all look and speak and act the same. Out of the generosity of Christ, each of us is given his own gift.

In different times, in different places, and to different people, the Word of God is revealed.

In part, that’s what we saw in our children’s time today.

Each one of our senses, though different, experience the same God – they just do it in different ways.

Each sense is like a chair around this table. And when we put all of those messages together: the smells of Christmas, the taste of bread, the sight of the empty cross, the feel of cleansing water, the sounds of love – we find we have written one story: We are forgiven, We are Loved, and We have a job to do.

The One Body of Christ is a lot like this circle of chairs also. Because each of us are different people. We are each called and gifted and blessed in different ways. We each have unique and beautiful life experiences to share. Some of us have spent our whole lives working with the soil. Some of us have spent our entire lives helping and serving others. Some of us are young and have fresh eyes with which to look at the world. Some of us have experienced profound pain in our lives. Some of us work with machines, and others of us work with our minds.

And in all of those very different experiences, we have each felt the love and grace of God, although none of us in quite the same way.

Because of our difference – we are all a part of the Body of Christ. Because of our difference – we all have a seat at this table. Because of our difference – we all are called to proclaim the Word of God.

What I notice about this list of gifts here in Ephesians, is that none of these gifts call for silence. As Paul begs the people of Epheses to live up to their calling, he says that some of us are apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers… but NONE of us are benchwarmers. NONE of us get to watch. ALL of us have something to share in ministry, all of us have to build up one another up, all of us are needed. The circle of chairs isn’t complete without the Word that each of us has to offer.

When Paul writes this letter to the Ephesians, he’s locked up in jail because of proclaiming the Word. And what does he have to say as a word of encouragement: Get out there and walk – better yet, run! – on the road God has called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands. I don’t want anyone strolling off, down some path that goes no where… Grow up! Know the truth that is in your heart and tell it in love. (adapted from The Message)

In many ways, that is what the Roundtable Pulpit conversations are about every Tuesday morning. It’s a chance to sit together with the scriptures and for me to hear the truth that each of you has to speak around that table. It’s an acknowledgement that even though I am the pastor, I don’t have a monopoly on the Word of God – we all have something to contribute.

It is the same spirit behind a very old tradition called Lectio Divina, or Holy Reading, that has been transformed into a new practice in some congregations. All of those who gather around the table are invited to hear the word of God, ponder it in their hearts and then speak the truths that they have received. And as we celebrate the word this morning, I want to invite you to practice this with me.

First of all, I need for all of us to find here in the sanctuary a small group of people – five or six is a good size, and make sure you are close enough to hear one another speak. Once we are all settled, I’ll have a few more instructions =)

Lectio Divina has four parts and the easy way to remember is that they all have something to do with eating. First, we take a bite of the scripture, we pay attention to a word or phrase that jumps out at us as we hear and read it. Second, we chew on that word or phrase as we hear the scripture a second time – why did it speak to us? what does it have to say? Third, we savor and celebrate the Word that has come to us by sharing it with others. Fourth, we digest the Word and make it a part of our lives.

We will go through each of these four stages together, and before each one, I will read our scripture, and then invite you to share with those around you how you would respond to the question on the screens.

t.v. is taking over my life!

Posted on August 12, 2009Leave a comment

So, I will be the first to admit that I love television. I’m a sucker for an hour long episode (well, 42 minutes). I like to just relax in front of our t.v. and slip away to another world for a while.

The beauty of a television show – especially those “hour long” epi’s is that you slowly, chunk by chunk make your way through a story. Yet they are short enough that when my ADD (self-diagnosed) gets the better of my I can hop away and mow the lawn or wash dishes.

This summer, my husband and I have made our way through seasons 1 & 2 of Dexter – a showtime series about a serial killer who only kills murderers and works forensics for the police department. In some ways, it’s just an escape, but as a theologian and as a philospher, I also see so many themes that we need to deal with in our everyday lives: redemption, good and evil, morality and sin, what it means to be human.

Our instant play for Dexter isn’t available for season 3 so we are waiting for it to be released. And instead, we began to watch Lost.

Now, in the whole time that Lost was on the air, I maybe watched one episode. I didn’t want to get into the hype. But now that I have been watching it for a solid week (we just started season 3) I’m hooked. There is so much symbolism and many of the same themes that came through in Dexter – good and evil, redemption, and others – our purpose/destiny/fate, what it means to be family/community, questions of whether there is a God.

For the past few days now I’ve been thinking about blogging through the series and taking some notes – kind of a gospel according to lost type of thing. As far as I can tell, no one has really done it yet – aside from an article published by the Christian Research Institute. We’ll see if I have time to go back through some episdoes and really do it or not.

Three Simple Rules: Do No Harm

Posted on July 6, 2008Leave a comment

Once upon a time, a small group of Christians approached their teacher. “Mr. Wesley,” they said timidly, “you have been preaching to us over and over again about the wrath is to come. We want to follow Jesus, we want to experience God’s salvation. But how do we get from here…. To there?”

Well that teacher, Mr. Wesley himself, was a man who had struggled with that very question. You see, growing up, he thought that he always had to be doing something in order to prove himself worthy of God. He was always looking for some method, some way, some path that he was supposed to walk on in order to get to God. Or maybe, it was that he was looking for some way of finding the assurance of his salvation. You see, for Wesley and that small group that approached him, it seemed like the wrath of God was always hanging over their heads, just waiting for some little sin to come along so that it could pounce.

In his younger years, Wesley had tried all sorts of things to bring him that assurance, to prove that he was safely in the arms of God’s love. He meticulously kept a journal of all the things that he did in a day – as a way of measuring his progress. He fasted two days a week. He got up at 4 am to pray and study. He spent time in prisons visiting those who were lost and in orphanages visiting those who were abandoned. And he met with fellow believers, always seeking to learn more about what God demands of our lives.

But you see, Wesley had a little problem as well. As much as his type A personality didn’t want to admit it, he found multiple places in the scriptures where it says “faith and not works” is what saves us. Sometimes he was trying too hard. Making the path more difficult than it really had to be.

Out of all of that straining and trying and pushing and pulling of his own experience, when this small group of people came to him and asked “what should we do,” Wesley had an idea. He arranged a time when they could all gather together to pray. And then weekly they continued together to pray, they gathered together to hear the gospel – to hear over and over again that they are beloved children of God and that God would provide the grace they needed to be transformed. And they gathered together to watch over one another in love – to point out when another was starting down the wrong path and to encourage faithful steps.

And when they did so, there were three things that they focused on – three rules that all people in the societies had to follow. Three ways to measure how they were in fact doing: First – Are you doing harm to others? Second – Are you doing good to others? Third – are you staying in love with God?

This week, we are going to focus on “doing no harm.” For Wesley, these included a number of things like: taking the name of God in vain; fighting, quarreling, taking your brother or sister to court; slaveholding; gossip; wearing gold and costly apparel; buying on credit things you cannot afford to pay for; and singing songs and reading books that don’t tend to the knowledge or love of God.

From the looks of it – it almost appears that Wesley’s rules are yet another addition to the 10 commandments, an attempt like those of the Pharisees to make things harder than they have to be – to place more obstacles between us and God’s love and grace. Don’t do this, Don’t do that. Lead boring lives of strict obedience and puritanical faith.

But that’s not what these are at all. In this first rule – that we should do no harm, is about taking the time to think about who is harmed and where is injustice done through our everyday actions.

Doing no harm is about taking the time to see other people as children of God and asking how they are affected by our decisions.

Because the truth of the matter is, even as Christians, we still make mistakes. We still take the wrong path at one time or another, We still have slips of the tongue and do hurtful things to the people we love. We still sin. The question is – how to we keep from doing it again? How do we prevent those things from eating us alive and enslaving us?

This is the same question that Paul is wrestling with in Romans. After all of his talk about living under grace now instead of the law, after all his talk about being free in Christ to choose the good he has a confession to make: No matter how hard I try, I still do those very things that I don’t want to do. Try as I might, I keep doing bad things.

And the old Paul – the Saul who lived under the law and whose faith required complete obedience… who taught that those who broke the law had punishment awaiting them… the old Saul would have been mortified by his sins. The old Saul may not have been able to live with himself – or would have lived in a state of denial and making excuses, always trying to avoid the truth about his failures.

But the new Paul… the new Paul who now lives under grace freely acknowledges what he has done wrong because he knows it’s the only way to let go it. It is the only way to forgive himself and to freely rest in God’s grace. We can only experience grace by accepting our lives as a whole – the good and the bad – and in the process, acknowledging where we are moving towards God.

There was once a Native American elder who described his own inner struggles, his inner war, in this manner: “Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.” When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, “The one I feed the most.”

Making the simple precept of “do no harm” one of our most important goals in daily living is making the decision not to feed the mean dog. It is making the decision not to encourage the sort of behavior in ourselves or in others that will eventually lead to hurt and disappointment.

In our roundtable group this week, we talked about ways that some of these things are harmful – ways that they hurt rather than heal relationships. One of the group shared about a time when children were playing… got hurt… parent wanted to sue… offered to pay… not about hurting others, but taking the time to make things right… how foreign that was to the other person.

We live in a society where we are always looking for ways to hurt one another, to get to the top of the heap… it’s a dog eat dog world out there and you’ve got to get ahead.

If that means working on Sundays or making other’s work on Sundays – so be it. If that means finding tax breaks and worming your way through the law to get the cheapest goods- so be it. If that means buying expensive jewelry and the best clothes so that you can show just how successful you are and separate yourselves from the rest – so be it. If it means paying your employees as little as possible so that you can make an extra buck – so be it. If it means putting down others so you can look better – so be it.

That’s the way our world works. Or at least, that’s the way we try to make it work. But the truth of the matter is, we all just end up more bruised and battered and damaged than when we started.

And because that is the way that we have always done it, there just doesn’t seem to be another way. Paul laments about his sinful state, about his struggle to do good and his inevitable failure and like a lightbulb going off in his head he cries out: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?… I Thank God… through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We struggle and we wrestle and on our own spend so much time focusing on all the bad things that we have done and continue to do in our life. But we need to be reminded that Christ himself promised he would teach us. “take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” so stop beating yourself up over not doing the good. walk with me, become my apprentice, cease from doing harm, and lay aside that burden of guilt.

For too long, we have focused on the wrath of God that hangs over us. When we do so, then all of these “simple rules” become hoops to jump through. They become things we do or don’t do to maintain our standing in an organization – to keep our membership. They become things we d oor don’t do because someone told us to. When we focus on the wrath of God, we are focusing on the law and following the law, and our lives become hollow – empty – cold.

But salvation is a gift from God… it is freely offered, without question, without cost, to anyone and everyone. Grace is a gift from God, always preceding us, always moving us, always ready to be given. The trouble is, we are always looking for the catch. We are always making excuses: I’m not worthy enough, I’m not ready yet, I have all of this guilt and past hanging over me.

That is the load that we have been carrying on our own. That is what we have yoked ourselves to and that is why Jesus calls out to his disciples: come to me, take my yoke of grace upon you, and let your soul be at rest. We have let so much come between us and God’s grace. Denial, guilt, other obligations. We need to set that yoke and those chains aside and finally rest in the peace of God’s love.

The gospel message is so hard to absorb because it seems too good to be true, to easy to be really real. We want to live in a world of black and white, good and bad, where those who do wrong are punished and justice is had for all.

But what Jesus says to us is: come to me, all of you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. My burden is easy, my yoke is light.

What we want, are rules to follow – clear simple directions. Do this, don’t do that. And we want to know what the rewards and consequences are. We want to know what the ends are.

What is so hard to believe is that Jesus actually makes it very simple. I will give you rest from your burden – your burden of guilt, your burden of sin, your burden of despair. I will take all of that from you and teach you a new way. A new way to live. And I do this all freely – without cost.

Come to me, come to this table, come and take this life that I am freely giving you. Come and eat this bread and drink of this cup and remember that I have already taken your sin away. I have already died so that you may live. Come and find rest for your soul. Amen.

Priorities

Posted on June 22, 2008Leave a comment

This morning’s gospel passage is not one of those that tend to make us all warm and fuzzy inside. On the surface, it appears to offer no real “good news” at all.

But that is because the gospels have this fantastic ability to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable all at the same time. To those who are facing persecution and pressure because of their faith – this passage from Matthew offers encouragement, and offers hope – it is a reminder that while those around them might be able to destroy their bodies, their lives in the fullest sense, rest with God and not man. Jesus tells those who are persecuted three times in this passage to not be afraid. As our missionaries minister to people in China, a place where there are real persecutions because of the name of the Lord, this message is one of comfort.

But here in the United States, we don’t typically face that kind of conflict. As much as we hear it being lamented on television these days, Christianity really isn’t under attack in this nation. There are isolated instances where someone is forced to confess or deny their faith under threat of death, like the young woman whose admitted faith in Christ propelled another young man to kill her in the Columbine shootings. And those events stay with us – but they are not our daily experience.

Brian Stoffregen is a Lutheran pastor in Arizona and in his weekly reflections upon the scripture, he brought these questions forward: “Does the lack of opposition to our faith mean that it is strong or that it is weak? … If we aren’t suffering in some way, why not? Is it because we are surrounded by people who are already in Jesus’ “household,” or because we are failing to be witnesses?”

Let me repeat that: is it because we are surrounded by people who are already in Jesus’ “household” or because we are failing to be witnesses?

I think the answer to that question is both. We are not daily facing persecution because we are both surrounded by people who are already “in” and because we fail to be witnesses.

For a long time, we have thought of ourselves as a Christian nation. There is a strong Judeo-Christian ethic and language that is used in politics and government and in the culture in general.

In these last few decades however, that unity between Christians and the nation has started to unravel a bit. The United States today is one of the biggest mission fields in the world with many who are not only unchurched, but to whom church is a strange and scary place. And the alliances between various flavors of Christianity and political parties is beginning to dissolve as many evangelicals find themselves looking at both moral and social issues.

While many people are feeling very anxious about this separation, about being one religious group among many, about not having the “in” with the state, I for one, am celebrating. I cherish our separation between church and state, not only in politics, but also in our schools, and in the various other places where the state and church act together – and it’s for a very simple reason: I don’t trust the state to do church.

When the state or government and the church are in bed together, things get complicated. You suddenly have multiple duties’ pulling you this way and that, and I think in the end, the church loses. We lose precisely because of this passage from Matthew this morning – we lose because we are already surrounded by people who are supposedly “in” and we also fail to be witnesses – we let the state tell us what to believe and we lose our prophetic voice.

Above all, we get confused about who we are serving.

At the very beginning of this passage from Matthew we find ourselves in the midst of a discussion about servants and masters, disciples and slaves… the question being asked of disciples in Matthew’s community, in Matthew’s time would have been: Whom do you serve? It is a question that is very pointed, very direct and gets us to the heart of the problem.

As we wrestle with that question today, I want us to really think about it personally. And as we start to do so, we need to think about the multiple things that demand time and energy and commitment from us.

At the end of each set of rows, there is a pad of paper and some pencils or pens. Take one of these and pass them down the row and then I want us to take some time to really think about the five things in your life right now that you are called to be faithful to – that demand something of your life. They may be things like your job, your family, the country… or something much more specific to your calling. What are the things that you feel like you have some responsibility to in this world? Write them down and then order them 1-5, with 1 being the thing that is the most important to you.

(5 minutes)

I don’t know about you, but writing down those things was extremely difficult – and tiresome. There are so many things that demand something from us and I think that most of us, most of the time, feel stretched and pulled in so many different directions that it is hard to know which way is up. It is hard to know which is the most important and it seems to change with the circumstance.

We are all here this morning, however, because of a shared commitment to follow God and to follow Christ. Let me just cut straight to the point and ask how many of you have God or Jesus on that list of five things?

This morning’s scripture is about allegiances, it’s about priorities, and it’s also about what happens when those priorities conflict.

Matthew was writing to a community that followed Christ, and they did so at their own peril. Day after day, they kept getting into trouble for the same kinds of things that Jesus did – because they were trying to live out the Kingdom of God in the face of a different kind of kingdom.

Sarah Dylan Bruer writes:

“They believed that only God could claim the kind of power over others that so many [like the Emperor, the family patriarch, the slave owner had taken] — and so they proclaimed Jesus’ teaching, “Call no one father on earth, for you have one father — the one in heaven” (Matthew 23:9). Their belief that God was calling every person — male and female, slave and free, of every nation — led them the build a community in which women and slaves were received as human beings with agency to make their own decisions and gifts to offer the community — and they didn’t ask anyone’s husband, father, or owner for permission to do so. They built pockets of community living into a radical new order that looked more like chaos to many onlookers, and that threatened to undermine the order of the Empire. And so their neighbors, their friends, and sometimes their own family turned them in, hauling them before governors as agitators, to be flogged, or worse.”

In their attempts to follow Christ faithfully, to make that allegiance the first priority in their lives, they came into conflict with the Empire and their roles as citizens, and they came into conflict with their families. But they were clear as to which of those things were the most important, and they were willing to sacrifice, even their own lives to be faithful to Christ.

In my own experience, these kinds of conflicts are messy and painful. In March of 2003, our country started to go to war with Iraq and I was a naïve college student. I kept thinking about all of those things that I had learned from Jesus and felt deep in my bones that this military venture was wrong. And in conversations with my roommates and other friends, we all found ourselves similarly moved. Matthew 10:27 reads “what I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”

And so, as Christians, we stood in opposition to the war. We kept coming back to the notion that all human beings were children of God, the hairs on all of our heads are numbered and we are all valuable in God’s eyes. If that was true, any life lost, was something to be mourned. A group of us got together and began to erect crosses on the lawn in front of the chapel – as a reminder that there was a real human price to this conflict.

The morning after the crosses had all been put up, we walked onto campus to see one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. The crosses were torn down, many broken apart, and some of the broken pieces were used to spell out “God Bless the USA”

That day, I learned how messy our priorities can be. I learned what happens when we start to equate something like patriotism with faithfulness to God. And I also learned how important it was to be clear on who you serve.

Our campus was torn in two that semester. We learned what it meant that Christ brings a sword not peace. The truth is that we are faced with a choice and that we must choose who we will serve. We must choose which one of those things that pull on us, and that we love, which of those things that are in and of themselves good, which one will be the guiding force for everything else.

And it will cause conflict. Any of you who have chose at one time or another to put your family before your job knows what a strain that puts on work relationships, or vice versa. Priorities and allegiances matter. Who we serve matters. But Christ tells us that if we chose to serve him. If we chose to be known as his followers, then we are in the palm of God’s hand. We should not be afraid, because we have life in Christ. We will find our lives and our fullness, when we follow him.

It will not be easy. And it doesn’t mean that we give up everything else. It means that when we make our relationship with Christ our first priority, all of those other relationships change, and we learn how to witness, we learn how to love, and we learn how to truly live God’s kingdom in this world. Do not be afraid and follow him. Amen, and amen.

attractional or missional? programmatic or project driven?

Posted on October 14, 2007Leave a comment

At emergingumc: a gathering we talked a lot about becoming, or reclaiming the idea of a missional church. There are all sorts of really neat diagrams to help visualize what this would me, but basically, in an attractional church, 80% of the church resources and offerings and what happens in the life of the church happens within its four walls. and maybe 20% is spent outside the church with missions or outreach or evangelism. In the missional model, that is reversed… 80% of the church’s time, energy and resources are spent out there in the community and the world and only 20% within the four walls of the church.

I got to thinking about that in relation to Albert Tofflers description of first wave (agricultural), second wave (industrial) and third wave (informational) churches. A first wave church emphasizes the place that they are in. A second wave church emphasizes the programs (usually denominationally based) that it offers. And a third wave church, the coming church in Toffler’s work, emphasizes projects. I think that the attractional model is really based in that modern, 19th and 20th century program church. We have great programs like sunday school and bible studies and choir and this and that and the other, and we want you to come to our church and experience them. While we offer lots of different programs, in some senses it is still a “one-size-fits-all” model of being church. Once you have been a part of the program, you become like the rest of us in the church.

I’m not quite sure if the move to a missional church would entail the “project” driven model that Toffler describes. But it might. He describes this as churches that take on as projects a local health care center, or a homeless ministry – something to meet the needs that they see within the community they are situated. Yet Diana Butler Bass emphasizes that the churches who are really thriving and moving forward right now are “practice” based churches. It is what they do together that matters, not where they do it. Do organic groups fit better under a notion of practice (practicing community, fellowship, open-minded theological discussions) or projects? I think that emphasizing projects can easily slip into a consumer driven mindset… whereas practices might just be the way we need to move forward in the missional church.

We are called to be with the poor. We are called to visit those in prison. We are called to feed the hungry. We are called to break bread with one another. We are called to witness to the love of God in our lives. None of those things speak of a church building. YET – the church building provides the ideal resting place for all of us as we are out in the world doing mission, practicing our faith. We can come together once a week and sing, pray, laugh and eat with one another. And we can find the energy and resources we need to go back out there and do it all again. That is what church is all about – and I hope in my new church I can help them think in terms of mission and being out there instead of what kinds of programs we need to offer the community.

e-word #3

Posted on July 3, 20071 Comment

In the last e-word, I shared that there are two kinds of good news: the news that Jesus brings to us, and the news about Jesus the Christ. But what do you do with that good news? How do you even begin to share it with the world?

You may have noticed that West End has a new ministry called “Water at the Well.” It is an eclectic mix of events designed to help us experience God in new ways, but it comes with a commission as well: to take those experiences and share them with others. I was able to participate in the “prayer for the city” event on July 2, and in the spirit of those experiences and in the spirit of this column, I want to share with you my experience.

As a few of us sat in the Church Street Park downtown, I have to admit that I felt awkward. We had come into the heart of the city to pray for whatever we saw and experienced, and yet, in such a public place, it was also a very overt form of witness. I kept asking myself, do I have good news for these people? And how do I share it with them?

Interestingly, the park we sat in was filled with beautiful foliage, green grass, a flowing fountain; and yet the only people who took the time to stop and rest inside this space were the homeless of downtown (and the occasional dog walker). Everyone else rushed by on their lunch breaks on the hot pavement just outside the park. Which group needed the good news?

I felt incredibly voyeuristic and out of place. Who was I to bring good news to these people? Who was I to assume that they didn’t have a bit of good news already? Who is to say that they didn’t have good news to share with me!

Sensing we all felt that way, our little group simply sat on the bench in the park for about 15 minutes soaking it all in. One of us led a simple prayer – praying that we might experience God in the city during our time in that place. Almost immediately, people around us began to interact with us. We had been present for long enough that we became safe and approachable. We had been present long enough to not be a strange element in this community’s midst.

All of the recent stuff I have been reading about evangelism talks about building relationships and in the process sharing good news. We really need to get to know someone, know where they are at, and be honest about where we are as well, in order to share our stories. And we need to be a real presence in someone’s life. That is not to say that there isn’t a time and a place for random encounters with people, and that’s not to say that we can’t share the good news of God with complete strangers. But to really know what to say, you need names, you need stories and you need to be vulnerable yourself.

So what did we share with this group of people? We stopped for long enough to hear their stories and to share a bit about ourselves. We listened for long enough to hear that the good news that Christ brings to the world is needed in this community: there is addiction and mental illness and broken relationships that need healing. Yet we also listened for long enough to hear that the good news of God was present in their midst. They were a community that loved and cared for one another, and in the spirit of water at the well, they shared what they had received with one another and were able to tell another hungry beggar where to find food.

And that is precisely how Daniel Niles describes evangelism: “Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food. The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty. He is simply guest at his Master’s table and, as evangelist, he calls others too.” The good news that I gained from being present in this community was realizing that the good news God gives us to share is a gift. It does not come from our abundance or knowledge or higher moral standing. It comes in spite of us and it is meant for everyone, including ourselves. We are all hungry, and when we find a morsel of food, we should share it with others.

the e-word #2

Posted on July 1, 2007Leave a comment

At the end of my last column, I wrote, “to be an evangelist is simply to share the good news of God with the world.” But before we even look at how we do that sharing, what exactly is the good news? If we looked to the culture, if we tuned into any sporting event, the answer seems to be simple: John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

But I want to take a step back. I do think that John 3:16 is part of the good news about Jesus and about God, but not the only part. If you were to do a concordance search of the phrase “good news” in the Bible – you would find about 40 different hits (try it out at biblegateway.com). Believe it or not, a third of them are from the Old Testament, sometimes using good news in terms of the Davidic Kingdom and deliverance from enemies.

The New Testament references to good news could easily be divided into two categories, or two different types of good news. One you could call the good news of Jesus or what Jesus came to proclaim and initiate. As Jesus begins his ministry, he enters the synagogue and reads from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). Elsewhere it is referred to as the good news of the kingdom – a new order is to be established of the last and the least and the lost and that in and of itself is good news.

The second sort of reference to good news is the kind we typically think of: the good news about Jesus. Mark’s gospel begins, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and it is clear that what follows is good news about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The book of Acts goes back and forth when it comes to the phrase, a tension caught in this passage from chapter 8, verse 12: “they believed Philip as he preached the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ.” It seems the good news is both that this new reign is to be established AND that Jesus is the one who has been sent to bring it about.

If we stick to simply a John 3:16 version of the good news, we find that we are missing half the picture. And from the way that we see that scripture used today, simply proclaiming the sentence is enough! Put it on a billboard, shout it from the mountaintops, knock on someone’s door, share that message and people will follow God. But evangelism will change when the message becomes about the kingdom of God and about the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The ways in which we become part of sharing that story… we’ll talk about that on another day.

the e-word #1

Posted on June 29, 2007Leave a comment

I’m going to post here as well an article series that I am doing for the church on evangelism – the “e-word”

This summer, my ministry here at West End is shifting, as I focus less on our young adults and college students and more on that unfortunate ministry of evangelism. I say unfortunate, because I believe today it is one of the most misunderstood, misused, and mistrusted ministry of the church. We, mainline Protestants, have almost altogether sworn off the word and try to find other euphemisms like “faith sharing.”

I, too, have long harbored anxiety about this ministry of evangelism. To be honest it had become a sort of dirty word in my mind. It was something “those” people did. I found my justification for not engaging in the ministry in the letters of Paul; if it was a spiritual gift, it certainly wasn’t one given to me! I was very disappointed to learn that I was required to take a class in evangelism as a part of my requirements for ordination in the United Methodist Church, but resigned myself to bearing through it.

In the course of 12 weeks, I not only learned to trust the “e-word” again, but I have felt called to reclaim it. I have come to understand what evangelism is in the life of the church and what it is not. Throughout this summer and fall, I will be sharing some of these insights, some of the struggles I have, and I will be inviting you to rethink what evangelism means in your own life. In each edition of the West End Report, you will be able to find this column, but also look for a class being offered in the fall on conversion and evangelism.

To give you just a morsel to chew on in the coming weeks, remember that evangelism is rooted in the Greek word euangélion, which simply means – good news. To be an evangelist is simply to share the good news of God with the world. How we do that, and what we claim that good news to be are topics for another day.