I will build my church

Jesus is very clear who is responsible for building his church.  He is.  The promise Jesus makes is in Matthew 16:18,  “I will build my church.”  There is so much wrapped up in this promise. Here are a couple of things about the promise that I would like to highlight:

First, Jesus builds his church. This is important because it helps us understand his role and our role in his church.  Our role is to be faithful to what God has called us to do and leave the results to him. I do not have to put pressure on myself to build a program or create a pretty church so people will come. My job is to be faithful to the task God has asked of me and leave the results up to him no matter what the outcome might be.

Second, the “will” in “I will build my church”is future and ongoing.  He is building it right now and he will continue to build it until he comes back. Colossians 1:5b-6 says,

“This you have heard before in the work of truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing-as it also does among you, since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in truth…”

So Jesus is building his church through the gospel which is growing day by day throughout the whole world. And these little communities of light or churches are growing because of God not us.

Jesus is the glorious one who will build the church so we do not have to try and manipulate people or perform to create a beautiful church to ‘get’ people. God is the glorious one and we are his bride. Our churches do not have to outperform Hollywood to impress people or compromise the message to get people into church. We just need to be faithful to the task God has asked us to do and participate faithfully with him as he builds his church.

We have to move from the thinking that if we just had this program or if this was just a certain way our church would grow and accept and love those who God brings into our lives. The person in front of you is the one God wants you to love and give yourself to. The results are in his hands and we can be confident that he will build his church.

Lastly, its important we understand Jesus is not just saving individuals but parts for his church. His project or strategy is to build a church who will be a light to the world. We are not simply saved and waiting to die so we can go to heaven. We are saved to be a functional part of a body of believers to reach the world. The church is that community who will show the reality of the kingdom to a lost world.

My Heart is full and I am Thankful

About a week a ago doctors found a large growth on the brain of Matt Chandler from the village church.

He is in surgery today and I thought his blog today was amazing. Here it is:

My Heart is full and I am Thankful.

faux community

“If you want to know about water don’t ask a fish.”

Individualism-  belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence is the water we swim in.

This is the context or setting we find ourselves in in the West, especially in the United States. At an early age we learn to be self-reliant and independent. We believe that if we learn to live this way we will protect ourselves because we will not be dependent on anyone else. If our lives ‘fail’ it will be because we ‘failed.’ We also do not want to be a burden to anyone. My concern here is to introduce you to this ‘water’ you are swimming in and how it might impact how you function in the church.

Worship services in churches have become a sort of corporate individualism where we worship with someone next to us who we may have never seen before and will most likely ever get to know. Have you ever thought how weird it is when someone up front asks you to turn around and greet the people next to you? That’s because it is weird. But it also shows our attempt to retro-fit community into something that by its very nature is not communal but corporate. And we ‘prefer’ these services and pseudo-communities because they let us maintain our individualism. So we choose to stay as individuals, independent from others with the guise of being in community because we show up once a week and meet in a corporate setting.

Steve Timmis makes a great point when he says “our services and churches are really just loose affiliations of ‘me.’ There is no functional ‘we’.” What he means is we do not understand our identity as ‘we’ instead of ‘me’ within the church.

If we are going to think about church biblically we must see ourselves more like a part than an individual. Each of us is a “part of a body” the Apostle Paul says (I Cor. 12).  When each of us is saved we are a part waiting to fit into a body who God is using. We are like a puzzle piece waiting to fit into a body of other believers for mission to the world. Here is another section from I Corinthians where Paul is writing to the early church in Corinth. Here is what Paul says:

“God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body” (I Corinthians 12:18-19).

So a true body (church) operates as a ‘we’ and not loose connections of ‘me’. Functionally, we will strive more and more to live life together and devote ourselves to one another (Romans 12:10).

I actually believe there is a place for worship services in the functional part of local churches but the nature of the service is important to understand. We cannot give people the idea they ‘attend church’ once a week and they are a functional part of the body of Christ. We must start with our churches understanding they are saved to be a part of a body in an intimate way. The worship service should just be a celebration of what God is doing during the entire week in these intimate communities doing the mission of God in their neighborhoods and cities.

grande vanilla Church…no whip.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to host a Pastor from Albania here in the States. In a conversation I asked him what he thought would be some of the challenges facing the American Church. His answer surprised me.  But over the last eight years of pastoral ministry I have found his words to be more and more true.

The Pastor from Albania told me the greatest obstacle in the American church would be ‘choice’. Choice? Really? I was taken off-guard. With everything else that could possibly hinder the church how could ‘choice’ be that important? He went on to explain that in his country, one of the poorest in the world, he does not have  many choices. Take something basic, like shopping for meat in the store. He purchases whatever the store has on that particular day. Sometimes the store has two kinds but usually there is just one. In contrast in here in the United States think about how many different choices of cuts, types and grades of meats we can choose from. Or what about toothpaste? Do we really need hundreds of different kinds of toothpaste?

While choice in an of itself is not wrong living a consumer lifestyle can have a negative impact on our spiritual lives. In our minds we tend to think more choice is better because it ‘frees’ us. But the Albanian Pastor’s point was American’s live with the illusion of control. And our lives and choices are built around our personal preferences on a constant basis. Without even realizing it we operate in a “I get what I want” world down to the smallest minutiae.

And our right to ‘choice’ doesn’t stop in the supermarket but infiltrates how we think about church. ‘Church shopping’ is common phenomena in the American church. Church shopping is when someone shops around for a church that meets their needs. By needs church shoppers mean preferences. They ’shop’ for a church that meets their needs.  Church ’shoppers’ are choosing a  church like shopping for anything else. Isn’t it ironic that people think they have the ability to choose something for their own needs. Almost as though they best know how to meet those needs and need to be in control.

The result of our consumer lifestyle and having access to so many choices is we start to believe we are actually in control of our lives. And our will is what matters. We tend to have a difficult time submitting to someone else’s will. Whether it’s God’s or the leadership in our church we believe we deserve to choose everything. And if we disagree with someone in the church we just move to another church where more of our needs are met.

One of the most beautiful parts of following God is releasing control of our needs to Him and letting him have control. We are not actually letting him but acknowledging that in reality he already has control we are just trying to take his place. He is the only one who can meet our deepest longings and he knows them better than we do. He is the creator and we are the creatures.

The church does not exist to meet your need but to be a light to the world. We all have desires the church should fulfill WHILE we are on mission. Desires like being a part of a body or giving of ourselves to a purposeful community.  But that is not the purpose of the church.  If people lift up those things or other things as the reason why we a part of a church people will continue to ‘church shop’ because no church is designed to meet those needs. The purpose of the church is to be a light to the world. The color of the pews really doesn’t matter that much.

“Not by will but yours be done…” – Jesus, praying to the Father

Who God is using

The church community is God’s plan to reach the world.

Not individual believers, although they make up a part, but the body of Christ together is what God is using to draw people to himself. But it’s not just any church community that God is creating but it’s the sort of church community that is living out the truths of the gospel in everyday life together. Not just knowing the right truths intellecutally but living them out with others on street level. These types of church communities are how God displays himself. The nature of  these communities is unique to the world because they are communities of light which display the gospel in their everyday lives together. Their devotion and love for one another is the church throughout their daily lives. Meeting once a week corporately can lead us to believe we have intimacy with God and each other but if that is all we do it produces a deficient body who are not really ‘devoted.’ . Being devoted to one another within these unique communities is Gods missionary project.

This is the way God is reaching the world through our intimate love and devotion to one another in community through the Spirit.

Since the beginning God has been using a group of people to reach the world. Israel was a people God chose to bless the world. The nation would draw people to God through their unique national identity as God’s people.  But in the wilderness they showed their true colors and they failed. The people God chose failed to hold their end of the bargain. The prophets, over and over called back God’s people to be faithful to God while prophesying about a new age when God through his Messiah would create a new kind of people (Jeremiah 31:31). When Christ came he fulfilled the role of God’s people perfectly. He made it through the wilderness without failing and chose for him 12 men symbolic of the 12 tribes, to create a new people of God who could be the light to the world just as he was.

Then Christ leaves and says he will make the church the light of the world through the Holy Spirit. We actually become the light of the world in The body of Christ, his church. The church is now the light of the world. Not Christians individually but corporately the church is the body of Christ. This new Israel or new people of God is displaying the light of God by how they live together for the gospel. Not only on two week mission trips but by their entire lives together. Closer, as Jesus says, then even a biological family.

Jesus is coming back. Stop and ask yourself, if you really believe this: Jesus is coming back. He will set things right as in the days of Adam. And that is our great hope as a community, our King Jesus has begun the kingdom in a new way with his arrival. And the church is expanding his kingdom through the power of the Holy Spirit. And that spirit is a deposit guaranteeing our participation with him the day he returns. This is why Paul even in prison can write, “Rejoice and again I say rejoice (Philippians).

And the world will know that we are of God because of our unity (John 17:22).Just as Jesus said, “if you want to see the father look at me” (John 17). Now in the age of the Spirit, he says, “do you want to   see me? Look at the church.” The church is now the light of the world.

How does your church measure up?

Are you doing church in way where you actually share your life with one another as the bible talks about?

My so called ‘faith’

So many of us want to pray or read the Bible more often but it feels like another obligation alongside a list of other obligations in our lives. But the spiritual disciplines are not meant to be an end in themselves but a way to open us up to God for the purpose of the mission he has for us.

No one needs to tell Kobe Bryant of the world champion Los Angeles Lakers that he needs to exercise. While it us true, he needs exercise like the rest of us, he would not even be able to function on the basketball court without being in shape. He cannot afford to sit around putting down double-doubles at In-n-out and not exercising if he wants to win another NBA championship. The mission of winning a championship will necessitate him being in shape. Exercise is something he will do because of what he is trying to accomplish. Exercise is not the end but for Kobe a means to an end.

Spiritual disciplines are a means to an end. How would a verse like, “pray without ceasing”(I Thess. 5:17) make any sense if prayer was the goal? To accomplish that as an end in a of itself we would have to quit our jobs and leave everything so we could pray. Unless Paul is talking about praying while we are living our lives. We are to depend on God through prayer while we are living our ordinary lives.

I believe so many of us struggle spending time with the Lord in prayer or reading his Word because we don’t put ourselves in situations where we need it. Most of our lives are just fine without God or at least that is what we perceive. How much of our life really requires God to be a part of it otherwise it would fail? I know how much the Bible says but practically how much of your life would just go on like it is just fine without God. Most of us in the church are not on a mission that requires that kind of dependence on God.

God calls us to be a people that LIVE by faith. When you are living by faith spending time with God and practicing spiritual disciplines is a necessity not an option. The disciplines put us in a place where we can be fueled by God for the mission. Without making ourselves available to God through the disciplines our life of faith would fail. Unless of course, we are not people of faith, then the spiritual disciplines are something I must do out of obligation.

What are you doing today that requires faith? What are you doing today, this week, that without God showing up would fail?

“…man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” – Deuteronomy 8:3

Church at street level

Being the church verses doing church is an important distinction. I am practicing being the church in my ordinary life, letting the gospel infuse the ordinary  events of  life. I am no longer living for spectacular mountain top experiences that give me life until the next ‘big’ event. But living out the amazing, eternal gospel in ordinary life.

Below are some of the moments this week that I am praising God for. They are not spectacular theoretical gospel-moments but simple ordinary street level moments of living out the gospel in ordinary life. And that is what is so spectacular.

Ordinary life with gospel intentionality in Lakewood, California

Going out on a date with Laurel to a restaurant where one of the guys in our church works instead of our favorite one to encourage him and eat!

Aaron Palmer taking home ribs from work and instead of eating them himself he gave them to his neighbor. By the way they were ribs from Naples rib company so the sacrifice was great!

Attending my neighbors Halloween party and leaving more drinks and food with them than we took.

Seeing one of the women in our church lose her home and understand everyone in the church is responsible to help. In one sense, we all (the body) lost a home.

Texting everyone in our church when Laurel and walk to the park to give them the opportunity to join us.

Praying for love for my neighbor because I really don’t like him.

Walking home from school and picking a piece of grass up and showing my son Isaac that God takes care of the grass and the Bible says he will also take care of us!

The Body: it’s One Anothers by Malone Dunlavy

Many times and in many ways, we have been taught the “one anothers” of Scripture. Every time we focus on one or two and their biblical passages and seek to understand how that might apply to our lives. Whether it be to love each other, be at peace with one another, or to bear one anothers burdens, we listen, we read, and we try to apply the principle to our daily interactions. My question is this:

Are we applying the one anothers to our lives and living them out with people (a common question asked), or are we, as the body, applying them with each other for the purpose of displaying God, glorifying him, and making his name known?

Me to you, and you to me, together; seeking to fill the purpose Scripture calls us to obey for. That is, to make God’s name known, to bring glory to him, and to display him to the world. I think more often than not, we apply these things to our individual lives, and there is good in that, but we are missing the point. They are called one anothers for a reason.

I was talking with a friend of mine, Kyle, the other night about life and our need for guidance in it. We agreed that most Christians do try to seek God’s guidance in their lives, and even do this in the most powerful way, prayer. But as we discussed the different aspects of a Christian’s search for guidance, we noticed that more often than not, we pray for guidance in the things we are already doing or seeking after. Our prayers go something like this: “God, money is tight right now but you seem to have given me an opportunity to do this or that (read, ‘you have shown me personally something to do that has not been shown to everyone else yet). God I need your guidance, whether I should go here or here, and I need your provision to do so. Please allow me to listen to your Spirit’s guidance.” Kyle and I mused for a second at how selfish we pray this, with our own ends in mind, our own plans to fulfill our lives and do it in a God glorifying way. It is as though we tack God on the side of our lives. We realized that there is already a purpose we are here for, there is already a direction we are to head. That direction is the mission. The mission of God to display his glory, to make his name known, bringing salvation and eternal hope by the Gospel, the Story of God. Kyle and I both prayed, noting the difference between praying with ourselves in mind, and praying with mission in mind. Our pursuit of guidance will never, and ought never be the same.

With the one anothers, it is a similar story. We turn them into a checklist to make sure we are ‘good’ Christians. We lose sight of the fact that there is not only a purpose we do them for, and an extremely specific way we ought to go about doing them.

John 13:31-35 is the ‘New Commandment’ passage. This is the one that says we should love one another as he loved us, and by that all people will know that we are his disciples. What we normally don’t notice is the beginning of the passage. “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him at once.” Jesus goes on to say that we can’t follow him to where he is going, but he gives us the commandment as a means of fulfilling the end that he established in the first two verses. We love one another, as Christ loved us (which is deep in and of itself) and all the people will know that Christ was legitimate, and that we are his disciples, and that by fellowship with us, together, we have fellowship with God, bringing glory to him. 1 John 1:1-3, 4:7-21 aids in this understanding, explaining that as we love one another, we abide in God and him in us (corporately) thereby bring him glory. By loving one another, not only do we display him but he abides in us, and we glorify him, making his name known by displaying his love.

A common response to this that I have had is one of obligation. I tend to think that my obligation as a Christian is to love my brothers and by that, God does his own thing. I proceed to apply the principle by making sure I am giving a genuine concern to the people I talk to as I leave the service, I go home and try to make sure I am loving everyone. I believe and firmly commit to you, that this application is a few marks lower than complete. We are not to individually and superficially love our Christian brothers and sisters, not allowing for intimate relationship because of fear of confrontation by keeping our relationships on the surface.
Even still, were I to develop a deeper relationship with a few and confess to them my sins, I have only made my ‘12′, neglecting the fact that I am supposed to live life daily, all day as a part of the body. We want to be like Christ and we forget that he lived his life on earth 24 hours a day with his disciples, and we give the Body a measly 3 hours Sunday morning, with an optional extra credit lunch session. The commandment is not a submission to make ourselves a little vulnerable and then to pat ourselves on the back. The commandment is for us to leave our ‘thrones’ and descend to the earth below and live life together. To live daily life together daily, to share not only the deepest part of ourselves with each other but to wrap our lives around the Body, not the Body around our lives.

Time for a little story. Over a year ago, I went to Vietnam with a team of 8 others to teach English to High School kids. We spent two weeks in training, spending all day together, learning how to teach, communicate, and love one another as a team. When we got to Vietnam we started teaching almost immediately and were teaching 6 days a week. We were 9 American college students in a very foreign country and we had to rely on each other to survive, encouraging each other in our mission, our work, reminding each other of the importance of our work and that as we suffered from not being in our home, we would be home one day and for now, had work to do. We ate together, we prayed together, we studied together, we worshiped together, we went everywhere, together. One day, I had made plans to go meet with a student for breakfast. I forgot to let 6 of my team members know and when breakfast came around, the flow of their day was altered, they missed me, they were a little worried, and did not know what to do. This would have been the case if any one of us were to do the same. The reason was that we were functioning as the body, and part of the body seemed to be momentarily cut off. This is how we ought to be everywhere, we are in a foreign world, we are supposed to be living as intimately as this, where our seemingly trivial decisions actually affect one another. That is crazy, and hard, and so… Anti-American, but it is what the bible calls us to, everywhere, all the time, on mission overseas or on mission in our neighborhoods.

We, as Christians, need to realize that we are no longer our own (nor have we really ever been), we are God’s, and not as individuals but as His Body, His temple. We are a Body, and I am a part. I am the finger. The finger does not say to the hand, “I am touching here, here and here, and you need to bless me in that.” The finger is absolutely incapable of moving without the hand moving first. That is how we ought to live our lives, and as we take a deeper look at the one anothers of Scripture, we ought to recognize the big picture.
Everything is for God’s glory. As an individual, I have a personal relationship with Jesus, God, but I can only function as a part of the body. Jesus is where we find our identity, and that identity is a corporate identity. As we live our lives, WE are living our lives.

by Malone Dunlavy

I love you even though I don’t like you

“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” – Matthew 5:46

The tax collectors in Jesus day were known as the scum of society for a couple of reasons. First, scum to their own people because they collected money from their own to give to the Romans. So they were seen as partners with the occupying force who ruled the land that belonged to their own people. They usually collected a little extra money to skim off the top for themselves. Secondly, the Romans treated them like dirt because they were seen as greedy sellouts to their own people. So the trade off for tax collectors was they became rich but lost everyone’s respect.

Most of the time when we love people we have certain hidden expectations about how they are supposed to be loved in return. It’s as if we expect all of our relationships to be 50/50 type relationships. Subconsciously we keep tally in our head of how much we have put in the relationship versus how much we have received. This way, we protect ourselves from making an investment into a relationship without receiving a return. Over time if we feel as though we are putting too much in the relationship and not receiving anything from it we begin to look for other options.

This is the kind of love Jesus says even the scum of society do well. It is a natural thing for people to “love” this way.

But if we look at how God loved us [Christians] and how he asks us to love its a much different kind of love. God loved us before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4); before we could even love him back he loved us one-hundred percent. He blessed us with every spiritual blessing (1:3) again, before we could even love him back. He also promises to be with us and love us until the end of the ages no matter what we do. So God loved us and is currently loving us unconditionally, no strings attached.

And because of this love we can love others one hundred percent without requiring anything from them. We don’t need love from others because we have received everything we need and more from God. This sort of love gives us the ability to love people without any requirements on how they might love us in return.

Think about what your relationships with your friends, family, or spouse would be like if you could truly love as God has loved you.  As we commit to not keeping score in our relationships but love people unconditionally we put the love of God on display.

Do you believe you are unconditionally loved and accepted by God? Who has God put in your life that he us calling you to love unconditionally?

The gospel says: We are unconditionally loved by and God himself because of his great love.

So we will devote ourselves to loving a few people unconditionally to put God on display.

church in missional communities

Church just got easier and harder.

Easier, because it saves time and is more natural. Church is not an extra program of set or events I add to my schedule (if you are a pastor you especially understand this). If I am being the church in my normal life I don’t have to burden myself to be busy with ‘events’ or ‘church activities.’ I just do the things I normally do with a few believers who I am committed to and say no to everything else. The target is much smaller and more attainable. I say ‘no’ much more now days because I have said ‘yes’ to a few.

The hard part is applying the cross to those same normal activities of life because I am used to living life autonomously. Here is where the real work of church comes now because I am used to choosing what I want to do based on my desires. I want to hang out with a certain group of people and not as much with other ones. A conflict arises and instead of being committed to a certain group I start hanging out with another one of my group of friends for while. With so many friendship groups it allows me to remain at a superficial level with people instead of really doing life with people.

So I choose death to find life. Death to what I want or what might be comfortable so I can be more purposeful in ordinary life. And the deaths are minute-by-minute; day-by-day. We hear this invitation from Jesus to “come and die” and we tend to think of these deaths as spectacular events. But the invitation is to do it daily or consistently. This can only happen if we are applying death to our desires in our ordinary life.

The other night my wife and I talked about going out to dinner at our favorite restaurant. But we remembered our commitment to being more intentional in our neighborhood and open our lives to our neighbors. So instead we chose to hang out and have dinner together on our front porch where we were accessible. Not because we want to but because we are loving our neighbor and that trumps what we want. But we can still love our neighbors and have dinner (normal life). During our time together three different neighbors came by to talk. These are neighbors we have been praying for and asking that God would give us opportunities to talk with.

We choose to celebrate this as an important work of God. We didn’t force our agenda down their throat by giving them a tract or handing out Bibles but just treated them like real people who we want to get to know-because that is what we want. We want to know them so we can love them and have a natural context to share the gospel at an appropriate time.