This year we found out about a big event hosted at a high school in one of the small rural communities just outside of our city. It was quite fantastic. There were jumpy castles, clowns, entertainment and more. Our kids had a blast. They were even serving a pizza/hot dog lunch in the cafeteria for a ridiculously low price. (this is starting to sound like an infomercial)

Around the school that day there were several local community groups helping out. One of the groups helping to serve the lunch was from a local church which I think is fantastic. What I found interesting was the t shirts the church group were wearing. They were very bright yellow and said

“Church Name (changed to protect the innocent) community outreach…..We Show Up!

While eating, my wife and I had a conversation about the “We Show Up” tag line on the shirts. To be honest I’m not sure what to think of it. I don’t mean to be hard on the group of people who were there on their holiday, giving up their time  serving my family lunch but I don’t understand the intent of the we show up. That’s why I’m writing this post. I need some help and want some outsiders opinion.

Were they trying to draw attention to the fact they were doing this good deed? Were they trying to draw attention to the fact other churches weren’t involved. Were they trying to state that “Hey we’re here for you, our community please count on us”?

I guess trying to guess their intention isn’t really possible (or fair) but I don’t understand what they would be trying to communicate with it, or to be honest how I feel about it. If you have any thoughts please comment them.

I know I am painting with a very broad brush here but it seems like a large majority of the time I hear believers talking about risks  and the need to take them it’s usually in the context of a short term missions trip or looking at financing a building project.

Not that there is anything wrong with those two things but we have a faith based on a God who sent His son to earth to die on a cross. He then rose from the dead so that we could be reconciled with God and live life to the full.  We then usually live safe little lives where we take very few risks. We sit nicely in our pews then go out into the world and blend right in. Large groups of us may raise our voice to complain about something we’re unhappy about (usually the government) but won’t allow God to speak into our lives beyond dealing with some surface level sin.

A lot of these thoughts come from my reaction to an interaction I had earlier today.  It was with a leader in a local church and there was just no excitement. There was no willingness to change anything from the status quo. There was no willingness to risk anything.  Everything is just fine the way it is and there is no reason to look at anything other than what they’re currently doing and how they’re doing it.

I’m not a fan of change for change sake but I believe we need to be open to God’s calling whenever it comes.  We need to be creative in our thinking as we seek to share the gospel.  We should be full of a holy mischief. We should make people a little uncomfortable because we live as people who have a hope. A hope that is worth dedicating our lives to and giving up everything for.

Again I know I’m painting with a very broad brush. I know there are people of faith who are taking huge risks for the kingdom of God.  I know there are believers who are creating beautiful art and others who are thinking and wrestling with the realities of living a life a faith. So I ask for your forgiveness as I gripe about the way we as Christians often settle for a bland way of living.

I’m posting this from my phone. I’ve never done this before so I’m hoping this works and is viewable.

I’m out doing some song writing and came across two fantastic definitions for the word “guide” that I wanted to share.

Guide
1) implies intimate knowledge of the way and of all it’s difficulties and dangers

2) to put or lead on a course or into the way to be followed

They’re nothing profound but I was really struck with the beautiful picture of God as our true guide. That in the struggles and realities of life He alone has an intimate knowledge of the way to be followed.

May God guide you!

It has now been about 10 months since Charlie left his position in church ministry and since that time we have been faced with the question of which church community we should call home.  Neither of us has ever really had a start-from-scratch church hunt before and it is a challenge.  It’s a question that lately has been on my mind the majority of the time.  I think it’s really important to be an involved and committed member of a church family and this search is leading me to ask a lot of questions about what a church should be, what it should look like and what things are most important to me in a church.

We’ve kind of nailed our decision down to two possible church families and are now really evaluating where would be the best fit.  We’re asking what I think are legitimate questions in this process and I’ve been getting frustrated at not sensing clear answers.  Until I was doing the dishes the other day…

It struck me that maybe we’re not asking a big enough question.  The questions flying through my mind have included things like:

“Where will we be most fed by the sermon content?”

“Where will our children be able to make strong connections with other children who love Jesus?”  “Where we will gain a strong social network?”

“What types of ministries are there to get involved in?”

“Where are these churches headed?  What are their core values”

and the list goes on.

Good questions, right?  Maybe not the one God wants to answer.  It flew into my mind that if life is about glorifying God then the question we should be asking is this:

“Which church community does God want us to be part of so that His kingdom will be furthered?”

I believe that if we start praying that, then God will clearly lead where he wants us to go.  I also believe that if we go where God wants us, then all of those other questions will be answered on the way.  He’ll meet our needs because that is what God does.  I just seem to forget it all too often.

So, that’s the thought from the Mrs.  Remember… it was Charlie’s idea.

“I have tried to develop a habit of having a “quiet time”. Sometimes it would stick. Sometimes it would not. Guilt would be thick when it would not. But for a long period it became what I did first thing every day. It was beauty. The internal joy it brought was overwhelming. Then at some point it went hollow. It’s not that it was a bad idea to form a habit of a quiet time, but the habit had slyly begun to suck the life out of my relationship with God. I had fallen in love with my spirituality rather than with the one whom I sought, and in the end it left me void and wanting. A frightening aspect of habit attached to our spiritual formation is that inherent in the idea of habit is the possibility for meaningless ritual. With the formation of habit there is a subtle abdication of consciousness in our actions. This can twist things that were intended to bring life into cold and empty ritualistic experiences. Indeed we are broken. We do bad things without thinking and when we try to do good things they often end up warped. How can we maintain life in our spiritual formation?”

One of the things that lead to me needing to leave ministry was the exhaustion I was feeling about planning worship services.  Both the planning and leading of the services became such a “cold ritual”. What was suppose to be moving me closer to God had “begun to suck the life out of my relationship with God.” I worked really hard to prevent that by trying to keep things in our services fresh and by making sure I was ready spiritually to lead but I couldn’t do it anymore. The confines of planning worship times for a large group of people who all have their own needs and expectations was too much.

Don’t get me wrong I loved my job. LOVED IT.  I loved trying to create new experiences for us as a congregation and shaping where we were going, I really loved working with and engaging the young people we had involved and I really miss it.  But I became bitter. I felt that I was just a dealer providing junkies an empty ritualistic experience.  (I don’t believe that was true but it was how I felt)

Now I’m thinking through the things I do and things we (universally) do as a church and really trying to examine what has become old and stale (even if it started with right intentions)? What habits or ways of thinking are holding me back from moving closer to God? Or am I just crazy (don’t answer that) and making bigger issues of things that aren’t important?

_                     

So here’s the scoop. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things and have a lot of things I’d like to say here on wanting-more but as the title states I hate typing.

I thought to myself “I own a recording studio for crying out loud.  Just record what you want to say  and put that up.” Not really switching it to a podcast as I’d like to occasionally type somethings. So I’ve spent a chunk of time the last two weeks  figuring out how to best implement this in WordPress and it was going to be too big of a pain and probably cause me to have to change my web hosting package. Not really interested in all this.

Then it was pointed out to me I have a camcorder. Why not do video posts then embed them from Vimeo or Youtube.  I could even do it from my iPhone and upload from there.

While I really don’t like the idea of my face being on here it will allow me to share my thoughts a lot easier, quicker and without all the poor grammar.  I do a lot of work with a video producer so overtime I might work on making it higher quality but we’ll see.

Don’t worry they won’t be long videos. Just short 2 minutes clips. It will probably be quicker to watch then to read. So over the next few days I’ll try it out and see how it goes.

Blessings

On a side note I just noticed according to the spell checker in WordPress, WordPress  is spelled wrong.

The timing is kind of ironic to me since I’m about half way through Frank Viola’s book Pagan Christianity.

Now go join the discussion!

Every year around this time we all start saying that summer just flew by faster than any other summer.  Apparently summer is once again defying the laws of time and continuing to speed up.

It was an interesting  summer for me and my family. I said bye to a grandma and a young man I use to spend a lot of time with. I realized how fast my children are growing up as I watched both of them learning to swim and my son play his first season of t-ball. During my baseball games I once again displayed a wonderful and positive attitude (note sarcasm).  I grew an extra limb in the shape of an iPhone.  I became busier and busier with work as my business continues to grow but am wearing down a little as lots of it is not in the core area I want to be focusing on.  (Not that I’m complaining. Lots of people are without work all together right now and I realize how blessed I am to be working steadily as a full-time freelance artist).

As a family we decided it was time to once again begin committing to a family of believers and we chose a congregation we were going to investigate and begin worshiping with. We promptly followed that up by missing four Sunday services in a row. Oops. (I’ve missed more Sunday worship times  in the last 7 months than I have in the last 10 years)

It’s now been 7 months since I finished my time in paid ministry. In some ways it seems like yesterday I was done and other ways it seems like ages ago. Some of that time has been spent in lowly places filled with struggle and resentment. However, I “tweeted” the other day that I’ve been feeling some rumbling in my spirit  (For those of you that replied to that tweet I mean spirit not stomach).  I am all about doing things full out, 100 percent and wanting to do them as correctly as I can and since I left paid ministry I’ve been having troubles figuring out how that works for me in my journey and as we look at getting seriously connected to a church somewhere.  I am in no way saying you need to be staff at a church to be full out for God or the church, not in the slightest. But I’ve spent the majority of the last 10 years leading in some form or another on staff at a church so I’m trying to figure out my place.

So I’m declaring right here and now that I want to rejoin the conversation.  I want to regain the passion in my faith and spiritual walk and do my part for God’s kingdom. I want to be part of the larger church community as we together wrestle with what a journey of faith looks like and how the church is called to minister to the world. I want more (sorry I know that last sentence was pure cheese).