In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day with the following words:

"To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…"

If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that this year God surprised me with a new friendship with a veteran who is making a HUGE impact in our community.

A few weeks back, I had the honor sharing a long lunch with Judge Bob Miller.  I asked him to honor me by telling me the story of his service in the military. By the time Judge Miller finished, I recognized I was in a holy moment.  His story marked me.  More than that, his story is now shaping mine. 

Today I offer him my gratitude, respect, and honor.

Judge,

I wanted to thank you for the lunch, but most of all your example.  As your story unfolded, I felt humbled and grateful to call you a partner and friend.  I have read extensively about WW2 and watched many documentaries.  None of that compares to being in the presence of a vet as they tell their story. I have a growing sense of debt to your generation.  We stand on your shoulders.  Your sacrifice pushed back the night that was sweeping the world.  You paid the price. It was a costly sacrifice.  You paid that price with your own blood. Near the end of our conversation you said, “Shedding blood for my country was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

I will not forget those words.  They are etched on my heart.

The character that was forged in you while you faced the furnace of the Depression and WW2 is sorely lacking in our current culture.  That character carried our nation through those perilous moments, when our very future was at stake. My hope is that in my vocation God will use me to facilitate that kind of character transformation in the lives of men and woman all over this community and around the world.

Gratefully Yours,

Rob

If you know a vet, please take the time today to look them in the eyes and thank them.

"...never be condescending but make real friends with the poor."   Romans 12:15  

The poor don't need our pity, but our respect & friendship. Respect and friendship involve seeking first to understand. These insights from the workshop, Class Matters, were illuminating to me and expanding my understanding.

• When middle class people think of food, they ask, "will it be good?" When people in poverty think of food, they ask, "will there be enough?"
• People in the middle class take hygiene for granted. Yet we pay a great deal for cleanliness: water, a place to have privacy, all the items needed to clean our clothes and our bodies. People in chronic poverty often do not have access to those items we deem essential.
• Morality is abstract. Survival is concrete. Chronic poverty is about survival.
• The role of men in poverty: lover & fighter. Not provider. The role of women in poverty: martyr & rescuer.
• People in the middle class look to achievement as a measure of success or happiness. People in chronic poverty look to relationships instead.

Which one of these stood out for you?

Thanks to Talbot David for the sharing!

My buddy from Tampa sent me a text this morning, “I saw a quote from you in St Petersburg Times today.”  It appears an AP article about Online Churches is making the round in quite a few papers around the country.  Here’s the AP article.

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Internet believers: Pastors open online churches

By RACHEL ZOLL
AP Religion Writer

Church volunteers greet visitors entering the lobby. The worship band begins its set and a pastor offers to pray privately with anyone during the service.

When the sermon is done, it's time for communion, and the pastor guides attendees through the ritual. Later, worshippers exchange Facebook and e-mail addresses so they can stay in touch.

There is nothing remarkable about this encounter, which is replicated countless times each weekend at churches around the world. It's all happening online.

The World Wide Web has become the hottest place to build a church. A growing number of congregations are creating Internet offshoots that go far beyond streaming weekly services.

The sites are fully interactive, with a dedicated Internet pastor, live chat in an online "lobby," Bible study, one-on-one prayer through IM and communion. (Viewers use their own bread and wine or water from home.) On one site, viewers can click on a tab during worship to accept Christ as their savior. Flamingo Road Church, based in Cooper City, Fla., twice conducted long-distance baptisms through the Internet.

"The goal is to not let people at home feel like they're watching what's happening, but they're part of it. They're participating," said Brian Vasil, Flamingo Road's Internet pastor.

The move online is forcing Christians to re-examine their idea of church. It's a complex discussion involving theology, tradition and cultural expectations of how Christians should worship and relate. Even developers of Internet church sites disagree over how far they should go. Many, for example, will only conduct baptisms in person.

The staunchest critics say that true Christian community ultimately requires in-person interaction. They deride the sites as religious fast food or Christianity lite.

But advocates consider the Internet just another neighborhood where real relationships can be built. Rob Wegner, a pastor at Granger Community Church of Indiana, which will soon launch its Internet campus, calls the Web the church's "front porch." Pastors who back the sites say they feel a religious duty to harness this new way for reaching the spiritually lost.

"We live in a day and age and a culture where people go to school online, bank online, date online and do other things online," said Kurt Ervin, who oversees the Internet campus for Central Christian Church, based in Henderson, Nev. "Why not create a platform for them to go to church online?" Central Christian started a new church service this fall on Facebook.

The sites share the same basic approach: rock-style worship music and a sermon recorded at the in-person weekend service that is quickly mixed with live or recorded greetings expressly for online viewers. Volunteers on live chat emphasize that day's Bible teaching and block inappropriate posts. (During one recent service, a man who said he was logged on from India wrote that he was looking for a Christian wife.)

Still, each has individual features.

At Seacoast Church, based in Mount Pleasant, S.C., online viewers can repent by posting a private record of their sins on a cross. Thumbnails of viewers' Facebook profiles appear during worship on Central Christian's Facebook Church so people can click on each others' pages to quickly connect. On the Granger site, visitors will be able to choose "seats" in an auditorium, then click on surrounding seats to exchange Facebook and Twitter addresses.

In this environment, evangelizing is nearly effortless. Regular viewers and volunteers post messages to their entire online network inviting them to the Web service in progress.

"Fifty years ago you could expect everyone to come to you," said Tim Stevens, Granger's executive pastor. "Now, we have to meet people where they are."

The phenomenon is so new that no one has an exact count of interactive online campuses. The Leadership Network, which studies and supports innovative churches, has found at least 40. Churches with the sites say they regularly receive calls from other pastors starting their own.

An Oklahoma megachurch named LifeChurch.tv in a nod to its use of technology is considered the pioneer of the form. The congregation had already expanded to physical sites in several cities when in 2006, pastors launched what they now call Church Online.

LifeChurch.tv now broadcasts more than 25 online services each week and plans more. The services collectively draw up to 60,000 unique views weekly, although the number of new computers that log on for several minutes is about 5,000, LifeChurch leaders say. Broadcasts are listed in Greenwich Mean Time, drawing viewers from more than 140 countries.

LifeChurch.tv has even found a way to attract people surfing for experiences that are far from pious. The congregation buys Google ad words so that a person searching for "sex" or "naked ladies" sees an ad inviting them to a live worship service instead.

Bobby Gruenewald, a pastor who oversees the online efforts at LifeChurch.tv, said the goal is to move people into some in-person Christian experience, in church, a small Bible group or even a group that watches online services together. He noted that many people watch online and attend a local church.

But he said some people are so transient that they have little opportunity to join a brick-and-mortar congregation. In countries where Christians are persecuted, a Web church is often the only way they can be reached, he said.

Amanda Sims, 38, of Starkville, Miss., was on Twitter during Christmas Eve last year when a friend posted that he was watching a LifeChurch.tv service.

She logged on and kept coming back, soon offering to volunteer online. She now works for LifeChurch as an online volunteer coordinator, managing a team of people from across the world who help with online worship.

One new friend whom she and her husband met online is a South Carolina-based truck driver who started watching LifeChurch.tv because he's so often on the road. When he drives through Mississippi, he stops in for dinner. He now volunteers for the site.

"It started out as augmenting my spiritual life, and it gave me a way to be in fellowship with believers I never would have met otherwise," said Sims, who still belongs to a local church. "They're like my family."

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On the Net:

Flamingo Road Church: http://www.frclive.tv/

LifeChurch.tv: http://internet.lifechurch.tv/

Central Christian Church: http://www.centralchristian.com/onlinecampus/

Granger Community Church: http://www.gccwired.com/

Seacoast Church: http://www.seacoast.org/

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy.

You go back to the caves, you’ll see the cave dwellers painting their stories on the walls of the caves.

All through the OT, the people of God are called to “remember” and tell the Story of deliverance.

In your family, there is a story that needs to be told.

In the African American tradition, we are well aware of story telling because we had to pass on our history through the oral tradition.

The preacher pulls you into the Story in a fresh way.

Samuel DeWitt Parker, The Sound of the Trumpet.

Five Types of Preachers

1. The Comfort Dispenser. The Tylenol to get rid of the pain. But, we need more.

2. The Scholar. The one who wants to be known by how smart they are. They have a cemetery degree and like to use $5 words.  If you would have went up like you came down, you would have came up like you went down.

3. The Social Prophet. Every Sunday they provide commentary on the social deterioration. We need the watchman on the wall. 

4. The Bible Repository. Knowing the Book is necessary, but knowing the God of the Bible is more important.

5. The Preacher Who Embodies All Of These. They Hybrid. We need all of these in the right balance, at the right moment, with the right understanding of the Scripture, with the power of the right Spirit.

Keep a sermon in your pocket and a sermon in your heart.

Karl Barth, “When you prepare a sermon, you have to have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.”

Now, you have to a Bible in one hand and an iphone in the other.

A hand in God’s Word and the finger on the pulse of society.

Jesus was so cool he would be talking about you and you didn’t even know He was talking about you until you realized, “Hey, he’s talking about me.”

We have to blow the dust of the text, so people can see, “This is my Story!” Jesus did this primarily through story and parables.

Where do we find many of these today? Facebook, YouTube, Movies, Songs, and Twitter.

Put the people in the movie. Jesus stories were a portal for people to walk through. You got to get people so in the story, so build up the character in the story, break down their life, so people can find themselves in that character.

You got to have a twist. What’s the twist. Inevitable, in a good story there is a twist.  A common thread in every sermon with a twist that takes them back to the Gospel, every time.  Everything means something in the Text. Nothing is wasted. Moses staff is not wasted. When Jesus was writing in the dirt. Nothing is wasted.  Bring the twist, waste nothing, surprise them when the ordinary takes on extraordinary meaning. 

You got to have Redemption in your story. I don’t need a horror. I can read the paper if I want horror.  I need something at the end that shows me the Hope of Redemption. Hope is a dangerous thing. Shawshank…he got out spoonful by spoonful.  He crawled through 200 yards of sewage to get to his freedom. He need a spoonful of redemption, he go through 200 feet of garbage to get to where we are free.

Once upon a time…I would start my stories.

Tell us another Pesty story. I would make these stories up. The character was wacky and wild. She was my alternative self. The brave and crazy girl I wish I could be. My sister and brother were captivated. I learned the wonder of those magical works, “Once upon a time…”

I have always treasured a story. Then it was neighborhood plays. Dramas at school.  Early on, as a followed Jesus, I began to wonder if I could make a difference for God as a storyteller.

Fredrick Buechner. My favorite author. His books awakened me to the high calling of telling the Redemption Story. My favorite book by him, Telling the Truth, the Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairytale.  this book has given me my framework.

It is possible to thin of the gospel and our preaching of it as, above all and at no matter what risk, a speaking of the truth about the way things are And it is possible to think of it as a tragedy, a comedy, and a fairy tale.

The gospel is bad news before it is good news.  We are sinners and we are broken. Tragedy.

It is also the news he is loved anyway, cherished, and forgiven. Good news.

So, what if even in his in the slob and loved and forgiven

The news of the Gospel is that extraordinary things happen to him just as in fairy tales.

The stories we tell from the pulpit need to be grounded in both tragedy and comedy.  Suffering and Redemption, Joy and Pain, Life and Death…two sides of the same coin.

When Matthew tried to explain the way Jesus taught, he quote Psalm 78, “He spoke in stories.”

Are we being truthful as we steward this treasure we call The Gospel?

Do tell tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale?

Do we avoid the tragedy because of the discomfort it creates in us?  If we don’t speak the truth of tragedy, our offerings of grace come across as premature, naive, out of touch, and not nearly as wonderful.

We all respond to “once upon a time.” No matter how dark human history gets, people still tell fairy tales where it begins…once upon a time. With those words come the hope of breakthrough in the darkness. The mark of a good fairy tale is that turn, the catching of the breathe.

You wake up on a winter morning, what you looked at last night is gone. The old gray grass, the old lawn furniture, the kids toys in the yard, etc are all gone. Now it is the first snow and it glistens with beauty. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than you have ever known or seen.

How do I acknowledge the darkness and then introduce the light against that backdrop?

Nancy Beach gave 12 minutes of her talk to Bob’s daughter, Holli Laurent, who shared a story she had written that will be the center of Willow’s Christmas celebration this year.

The very best stories awaken our Faith in God and remind us that we are not alone.

John is one of my heroes. Enough said.

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How do you know if someone is a follower of Jesus?

We live in a world that is tired of Christians with Christian bumper stickers, t-shirts, music, catch-phrases, building their own little subculture that does not reflect the Mission of Jesus in a broken world. 

How do you know if someone is a follower of Jesus? They actually seek to do the things He lived to do. They seek to be with Him and then do what He said to do in a world that is full of pain and brokenness.

There’s no way to think of God’s story without thinking about the world He loved so much that He send His one and only Son.

Every story of every hurting and hungry child is the story of Jesus.

Jesus said however you respond to the little child, you respond to me. Whatever way you do not respond to them, you ignore me.

How can we ignore those words?

Am I willing to hear the story of this world?  In all it’s pain, hunger, brokenness, darkness, disease, and atrocity.  We want happy stories to surround us. Jesus calls us into the story of pain in this world.

If I were going to talk about my worse sin in a general way, i would say it is selfishness. I live in a world where I think it is about me and my story.  Follow YOUR dreams! It’s all about the pursuit of my dream.  I want to get into dream school, to get my dream job, to buy my dream house, to marry my dream spouse, to have my dream kids, to go on our dream vacation to get away from our dream kids, to have my dream 401k, to have my dream retirement, so i can have my dream death, in my dream plot of dirt.

We don’t live aware of that much. We use to teach kids to pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the LOrd my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake…”

That’s quite a load to drop on a kid at bedtime.  Good night, honey. Sweet dreams.

We don’t talk about the end of that dream life.

Then, there is God. God becomes the genie who makes my dreams come true. God fits into my story.  God fits in by accomplishing my dreams. If it doesn’t go that way, then I blamed God. Why aren’t you giving me my dream?

WE can’t give up dreams. We need dreams.  But instead of asking God to fulfill my dream, I am being asked to join into God’s dream.

The dream of God: SHALOM

To us it’s a greeting card word. It get’s translated peace, but it’s much bigger than that. Shalom is where things are how God wants them to be.

The prophets dreamed God’s dreamed and changed the world with words. They used images and metaphors to change the world.

Tell us that story. The dream of God. 

NO prophet ever says ,”Wouldn’t it be wonderful if…” It’s always, “In that day…”

In other words, SHALOM IS COMING!!

A billion live in hunger. A child dies from hunger every six seconds. Prophets say, Shalom is coming!

We live in the pain between the way things are now and the way they are suppose to be.

Jesus didn’t teach us to pray, “God get us out of this story. This bad story. Take us out of here.”  He taught us to pray, “Let they Kingdom come!  On earth as it is in Heaven. In my body. In my family. In our church. In every dark place on the planet.”

We give our lives, not to the fulfillment of our story, but to His story. 

Die to your little story and come alive to God’s story. Embrace Jesus story.

Because “up there” is coming “down here.”

Chris Seay, pastor of Ecclesia missional community in Houston, was on deck for Session 3.  He delivered a great talk on the value of Story over proposition.

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We need a larger view of the Scriptures and what God’s story is.  God has revealed to us in the Scripture. There is nothing better to fight over than the Bible. This message of love and reconciliation, now let’s beat the hell out of each other over it.

We love the Bible not because it is an object that brings us joy, but because it points us to a relationships with a loving and living God.

For example, the Creation story gives us our identity and purpose. What do we do with it?  We spend a lot of time arguing about how long a day is.

We need to keep the bigger purpose of God’s story in mind.

In the beginning was the Word. Logos. The Word. The Word is not the Bible. The Word is Jesus. John is saying, “It’s more than word. It is active. Before time itself was active. The voice was God. His speech created the entire cosmos. His breathe filled all things with a living breathing light. Light that blazes in the murky darkness. It cannot be drenched.”

It centers where?  Jesus.

Our lives are meaningless outside of God’s story. We’re just a little, nothing, disconnected narrative without God’s story defining it. To often we read the Bible for principles only, like we are outside the Story.  We are in the Story. In it we see in it we are broken and sinful. We are in need of rescue. We can be redeemed. WE can join God in the redemption of this planet.

The way we teach history in the US is deeply broken. The reason the way we teach it in US is because we are totally and completely focused on the proposition. There are facts we need to drill in for the test.  After the test, we lose it forever.  Why do we loose it? They have never heard the story.

Propositions will not save you. We need the Story.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Facts (recommended reading) Wineburg.

You can’t just tell a story. You have to tell a story that invites people into inquiry and detection.

Jesus told stories that never made you feel like you had the answers. They humble you. They cause you to pray. They make you wonder.

At seminary, we teach people to break down Jesus stories into a couple principles, like he couldn’t have done it himself.

We are called to be apart of the Logos, God’s active word in the world.

We wither in anger, sin, and institutionalism.

Jesus says, Come to me all who is weary and I’ll give you rest. we like that part. He’s calling us to the spa.  But, he doesn’t stop there. How?

Take my yoke upon you.  A big massive yoke that you would put on an ox. Put this massive thing on you like you are plowing the ground. But it is perfectly made for you. We’re not tired because we are doing to much. We are tired because we are doing the wrong things. When we are doing God’s mission, we are more energized than ever. But when we live in other narratives like consumerism, we are exhausted all the time.

Instead of looking down on people, we are the ones who say every brokenness is an opportunity for God to be about His restoration.

We believe as we put Jesus yoke on us, something comes alive!

Until we bring the Whole Gospel to the Whole World, we are missing something.

The first session started with Creation and the topic of Creativity. Second session we move into the Fall and our own brokenness.  Dave Gibbons, author of Monkey and the Fish and pastor of Newsong church, was spot on.

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Stumps and Holy Seed

Each generation has a different starting point for the gospel conversation.

Each generation culture changes and therefore language changes. 

I think the starting point in every generation is pain.

The church has defined success by size of church and the strength of the budget.  Right now, 80% of our budgets go to staff and buildings.  What if we could turn that around.  What if we spent 80% our our money on the poor in the city? 

What kind of platform would that give us in the city for the gospel conversation?

What if we were measuring less people in poverty?  Less people heading into divorce?  More people being loved on, the elderly and the orphan?

If every church in Orange county would care for one orphan, we could eradicate the foster care system.

When the eastern world sees how we treat our elderly, they wonder if we are barbarians. 

Isaiah 6

¹ In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. ² Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. ³ And they were calling to one another:
       "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
       the whole earth is full of his glory."

⁴ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

⁵ "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

⁶ Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. ⁷ With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."

⁸ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?"
      And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

How many times have we heard this preached in terms of going to the world?

It usually stops at verse 8.  Have you seen what is after these verses?   He actually give Isaiah the message to preach. “You will hear my words, but you will not understand.  You will see what I do and not understand it.”

Not a popular message.

How long to preach it? “Do not stop until Israel remains a stump.  But it will be s stump that will grow again.”

When there is personal revelation of your weakness it releases more fully the power of the Holy Spirit.

If we don’t talk about the stump and pain, we will have problems.  We will see consumerism continue to propagate in our churches and context.  If we are prophetic in our pain, the seed is planted that will grow.

Think about how we do ministry placement. We evaluate their SHAPE and then we tell them where they can serve in our church. Do we really think they are all suppose to serve in our church? 

What about if we just listen to the narrative of their life story. Those assessment tools are just windows to see their story. The story of their life is what matters.  If we look at those windows as the end, we will miss the story. The story is what shows us their ministry.

Spiritual formation is about listening to their story and helping them see where the Holy Spirit is speaking and intersecting. Spiritual formation can not have the end goal of simply plugging them into “our system.”

You customize according to their story.

What do we do?  Ideas for application.

1. Lets reassess our assessment process

2. Make their story central to the assessment

3. Customize their path according to that  narrative. Be willing to look outside your local church for resources' and opportunity.

4. Lets develop a theology of suffering.  We typically ask, “What makes people comfortable?” in the attractional model. We also need to ask, ,”What makes people uncomfortable?”  The disequilibrium is the seed for something Holy to grow in them.

I’m headed to the Story conference this afternoon.

Interestingly enough, I’m currently building a team to develop a STORY-BASED theology capacity building initiative for our 600 plus pastors/church planters in India.

As we have moved deeper into the local church-based community development initiatives, the complex and difficult nature of this work has surfaced some underlying theological issues.   We find ourselves in a very similar situation in which Paul found himself in relationship to the churches he planted.  It’s pretty amazing to realize that GCC is living out the apostolic role we see played out in the book of Acts.  So, it’s time for an “epistle” that will lovingly help strengthen the Jesus movement in Tamil Nadu.

Concept: The Five Stories that Hold The Story Together

Considering the nature of the Scripture and the cultural context of India, I am suggesting that we build the initiative on a story approach to theology over a strictly systematic approach. 

Kingdom: Moving from Creation to New Creation

Global Glory: Moving from Israel to Every Nation

Exodus: Moving from the Slavery to Freedom

Exile: Moving from the Margins to the Center (or maybe from Isolation to Community)

Priestly: Moving from Guilt to Innocence (or maybe from Brokenness to Wholeness)

In my personal journey and understanding of Scripture, these five stories are "THE STORIES THAT HOLD THE STORY TOGETHER."  All the stories overlap and interact, each story needs the other, and all together they help us see THE STORY rightly. All the stories woven together like a braded rope. All together they helps us understand the Gospel in its fullness.  Elements of other forms of theology (for example, systematic) can be integrated, as well, where it is necessary, helpful, and organic. 

Practical Concerns on the Ground:

Raj, our director in Tamil Nadu,  believes that that the following issues are the “bad fruit” that is being produced by a corrupted theology/lack of knowledge that is quite prevalent among the pastors and church planters.  Our current training provides a basic framework for church based on the five purposes.  But many of the pastors are still running the PD “software” on a hardware (theological framework) that is faulty.  Raj loves the story approach and the five metanarratives.  He would like for us to find a way to weave each of these into the appropriate metanarrative as an application point.

1. Lack of understanding about church / God's vision for humanity.
2. Relationship with the society (can they be friends with non Christians?)
3. External change is over emphasized (changing of names, not wearing jewels, not using flowers..., internal change is neglected.
4. Lack of understanding about Kingdom / kingdom life
5. Self centeredness / vs / led by the holy Spirit
6. Caring for people only spiritually, not meeting other needs (that is not our business).
7. Neglect by vocational pastors of involving women in meaningful ministry.
8. Family (absentee husband and father for sake of “the ministry”)
9. Over emphasis of personal experience over Bible. No plan for proper teaching.
10. Not knowing how they are trapped by the evil.

Two questions for you:

1. How do you see the Jesus life, teachings, and ministry interacting/reflecting the five stories?

2. Where do see these practical concerns intersecting the five stories?

Would love your input.