Beer at Church?

by Tony Campolo

via Red Letter Christians

I found a church in England, not far outside of London, in a very densely urban community, a congregation that took up every seat in the sanctuary. What’s more, they had to have multiple services in order to hold the crowds.

When I preached there, my driver couldn’t find a parking place. I asked the pastor, “With so many people, what room do you have for parking?” The pastor told me that almost everyone in the church came from walking distance. That amazed me because I wondered how a church could get so many people from such a small area.

The pastor explained to me that every other Saturday night they make arrangements to rope off a city block. The police cooperate. They bring in a barrel of beer and a barrel of wine. They add to this a good band. He then went on to say that a hundred of his young people come to this block party and start dancing. It doesn’t take long before people come out of their houses and join them. After a night of dancing and having a good-time party, these young church members say to the people they have been partying with, “How about coming to church with me tomorrow? If you are willing, I will stop by and pick you up.” In reality, it happens and the pastor said, “Every week we pick up about 30 or 40 people who come to our church for the first time. Church growth goes on easily from that point.”

Some may see this as a dangerous outreach method for a church to utilize. Questions like surrounding the image of the church in the public eye or “Won’t people drink to much and get drunk” are sure to arise. But the beauty of this is that people are being met where they are at and told about the life changing relationship they can have with Jesus Christ.I say Praise God!

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Centerpiece

by Jamie the Very Worst Missionary

There’s this beach way up in Northern California, where they used to dump all the city garbage and crap right into the water. Like, they would literally back the garbage trucks up to the bluffs and launch their shit into the sea. Household trash, appliances, logging refuse, cars, everything…. So messed up, right?! It got so polluted that they finally closed the area in the 60’s - just roped the whole place off because it was just too dang gross to be out there.

The first time I hiked down to that same beach with El Chupacabra was more than 40 years after its closure, after it had been reopened as a state park. We had to pass by piles of rotting kelp, and beyond the smelly, high tide deposits of dead fish and empty beer cans and layers of mucky brown foam. Really, everything about the trip toward the water screamed, “Um. Dump! You’re visiting a dump!!” And I felt more and more skeptical about the sand filling my shoes, thinking, “Is this toxic sand?...It smells toxic….Great. Now I have Chernobyl feet. My toes are gonna fall off….Welcome to Mendocino County, everybody! Where a Great White shark will eat your head and toxic beaches will kill the rest of you!…. God, oh, God, why are we here? Why are we heeeere....Crap….” And so on, and so forth.

We finally slid down the (toxic!) sand embankment, to where the water was swishing against the shore, and the sun glistened and danced across the wet surfaces of the rocks. And that’s when I realized that the beach was covered, like covered, in glass. Green and brown and red, with flecks of blue and bits of turquoise nestled among what looks like billions of white diamonds. All of it rounded off into smooth stones from so many years of tumbling along in the surf. It was a stunning sight - One of those crazy beautiful moments in life that catches you off guard and takes your breath away, because you never ever expected it to be just…so…. perfect… Ya know?

Anyway. We stayed the day there, looking for treats in what used to be trash. Imagining if this had been the handle of a teacup, or if that was the rim of a medicine bottle. Sincerely amazed at how the sea could turn our error around on us, and delight us by taking what was a recipe for disaster and, instead, serving up a national treasure.

Since that day, I’ve kept a wooden tray full of “Glass Beach” on the dining room table. I guess it’s a centerpiece of sorts. Sometimes I scatter a couple of tea light candles in with the collection of milky colored stones, but I prefer it ‘as is’. Just a few handfuls of beach that El Chupacabra and I scooped up with our bare hands and brought home in an empty McDonald’s bag.

Our centerpiece has become a little bit of a monument to our loved ones over the years. All of our dearest friends have sat with us around the sea glass, at one time or another, sorting it, swirling it, searching through it with distracted fingertips while their souls found the right words to share their stories. That little pile of rocks has been privy to a crap-ton of secrets over the years, as our table became a safe place for our friends to spill their guts. I recently got an email from a friend, stateside, that says with longing, “I need to talk. Can I come over and sort the rocks while I put my whole heart on the table?”

I would swear that these little glass rocks have some sort of therapeutic quality, except that I know they don’t. The truth is, it’s not the rocks that have drawn us back to the table to talk, again and again. I think it’s an altogether different centerpiece that calls us to sit and talk awhile…

That first time I stood on Glass Beach, I cried - I cried, and I thought, “This is what God does!”… God takes our crap offerings, our messed up lives and all of our garbage, and He turns it around. He makes it Beautiful, somehow. Against all odds and despite our own easy skepticism, He Redeems what seems hopelessly trashed, He Rebuilds what seems irreparably broken. Somewhere along the line, this God - the God who will make all things new - became the centerpiece of our lives.

He is the real centerpiece around which we invite our friends to sit and talk. The glass rocks only serve as a quiet reminder that we should delight in the unexpectedness of what God can do when we give Him our shit and let Him transform it. Because, seriously you guys, this is what God does….

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Why Worship Jesus? (part 2)

by Bonar Crump

Previously: part 1

As I ponder and discuss the tiny seed which seems to be taking root in my mind, that “Jesus worship” is a thing of our own creation, I am realizing vast possibilities which I’d never considered before. It seems that the wooden box I’ve carefully constructed over the past 3 decades which serves as a place to hold my faith is being shaken, stretched, and pulled apart at the joints. I wouldn’t say I love this box of mine, but I have invested a great deal of my life in the “perfecting” of my understanding of this belief system we call Christianity. If my box proves to be useless from this point forward then I know that I am better off. I know that a greater, more dynamic, incredibly more diverse understanding of God, faith, and love is to be cherished. However, this is my box…it’s been with me for a long time…I’m comfortable with this box…I never thought I’d outgrow it.

Think I’m sounding overly dramatic? Try this on for size: What if the “second coming of Christ” weren’t a time set apart in the future, but had already happened? What if Pentecost was the “second coming”? Sound crazy enough to weaken the corners of your faith box yet? Hear me out…

At Pentecost the disciples were “filled” with the Holy Spirit. Undeniably, Pentecost was a very specific moment in time that the closest followers of Jesus were inhabited by this “spirit of God” and became very different from that day forward. These men were reportedly transformed in an instant and collectively into a powerful group of Jesus freaks destined to launch the era of Christianity. Dare I say that this group of men “filled with the Spirit” represented the “second coming” of Christ? I just can’t understand why Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened (Matt 24:34).”

Jesus was the Son of God…we are all children of God…Holy Spirit of God fills His children…

It’s very non-linear. It’s very dynamic. It’s very “unboxable” at this level so don’t venture any further in the discussion unless you are confident enough in your own fundamental understanding of who you are as it relates to God. I don’t want to lead anyone astray or warp the truth or proclaim a new paradigm. I’m just trying to observe some of the hardwired belief systems I’ve been taught from a completely new perspective.

For instance, if you look at “second coming” from the perspective that I’ve touched on in the paragraph above, Revelations takes on an entirely different meaning. Is the prophecy of Revelations speaking of a time to come…or…have we been living in the time of Revelations for the past 2,000 years? I know it seems stupid at the moment, but think on it for a bit. What if one of the seals that were broken represented the Holocaust of WWII? All I’m saying is that I’m not scared to spin the kaleidoscope a bit and check out the different patterns being generated by the very same light source.

What I think I’d like to delve into in Part 3 of this topic is the dynamic ways we envision Satan and evil and how they contrast with the views most of us have of Jesus and righteousness. What I’ll argue is that at a deeply collective level we view Jesus as quite passive, weak, and solitary while we view Satan as very dynamic, prolific, virulent, and deeply influential. I think we’ve been duped by our conventional modes of language, icons, and culturally acceptable presentations of Christ within organized religion.

“Hi, my name is Bonar and I’m a heretic.”

Series--> part 1--part 3--part 4--part 5

Why Worship Jesus?

by Bonar Crump

I’ve really been ruminating on something for a couple weeks now that is close to becoming an obsession. Plainly stated it is this: Where in scripture does Jesus direct us to worship Him?

I’ve often thought about why, in John 7, Jesus didn’t perform a miracle. He’s at the temple, rumors are swirling among the crowd about this man that’s been stirring up trouble amongst the religious folk, and, finaly, as Jesus gets up to teach, he addresses the folks about who he is and tries to put the rumors to rest. If he’s the Son of God then why doesn’t he call angels down to hoist him above the crowd to do his teachings? If Jesus is who he says he is then why not, with a ready crowd at hand, amaze them with a spectacular feat of supernatural activity to prove to these people and to generations to come that he is indeed the Messiah they’ve been looking for? I just don’t get it…I’ve always thought he missed his opportunity with that one. As Jesus’s publicist and PR director, I would have staged an elaborate affair in that moment complete with angels, trumpets, brilliant lighting, and possibly an earthquake thrown in for good measure. He blew it!

All my life as a protestant evangelical I’ve been guided to worship Jesus. I’ve sung songs about “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…There’s just something about that name…” I’ve knelt at the foot of decorative crosses, both big and small, meant to represent the death of Christ for our sins. I’ve read books upon books about the best ways to honor Jesus and the sacrifices he made on our behalf. I’ve gone to foreign countries with the primary intent to introduce, clarify, and present Jesus to financially less fortunate people than myself. I’ve listened to pastors, teachers, laypeople, scholars, professors, and friends profess undying gratefulness to Jesus through prayer, fasting, and lives lived with a keen eye toward avoidance of sin and wrongful lifestyles. It all seems very reverent. It all seems very well-intentioned. It all seems quite holy.

Let me repeat my question I’m becoming obsessed with: Where in scripture does Jesus direct us to worship Him?

I can’t find it anywhere. I can find lots and lots of red letters directing us to live lives of love even towards our enemies, but I can’t find any red letters telling me I should worship Jesus. I can infer this meaning by connecting the dots but Jesus seems to have had a tendency to be quite direct about the simple ways in which we should function and facilitate our love for God and others…why not be direct, candid, and forthcoming about worshipping himself if that had been a primary concern for us?

What if the teachings of Jesus are more important than the person of Jesus? What if the images of Jesus, icons representing Jesus, and songs sung in praise of Jesus weren’t all that important? What if, instead, it’s the instructions of Jesus that are to be held aloft as the banner of our cause? What if our professed love, praise, and worship of Jesus were nothing more than the body paint of an Australian Aborigine…distinctive and undeniably denoting a “christian-like” person, but quite silly and useless if you don’t live in the Outback?

My theory is this: As we busy ourselves with all the ways that we can make ourselves holy, righteous, and blameless via the worship, reverence, and praise of the person of Jesus that in a very very very devious way we are ultimately blinded to the fact that we’re not living in the Outback. That we are made impotent by our overwhelming well-intentioned desire to honor the person we call Jesus…to know him better…to walk with him longer…to have a deeper more sophisticated relationship with him via workshops, prayer, and study.

I would love to hear some people’s take on this subject…

Series--> part 2--part 3--part 4--part 5

How to Partner with God in His Work

by Donald Miller

I’ve heard plenty of Christians talking about partnering with God in His work. I think this is a great concept, but usually when that work is explained it’s incredibly limited. When people partner with God in his work, they’re often talking about building the church, and even then the church is so narrowly defined you’d think God’s work was exclusively about building small, academic institutions in which people study theories about God. I think God is truly working to build those small academic communities we commonly think of as church, but the whole church is much larger and less easily defined. God can see the church but we can only feel around in the dark and recognize it when we see a common Jesus in a neighbors heart.

That said, I think God is working on much, much more than building the church. If we look at the work God has done, we see God has made beauty, so I think creating beauty is Gods work. We see that God has created structure and order, so cultivating a place is God’s work, too. God created love, and seeks to protect love, so creating and protecting love is Gods work and we can partner with him in that work. God created brains that can solve problems, so science is God’s work as well as theater and literature.

When we narrowly define God’s work, we end up channeling people into working for the church, often motivated by guilt, rather than partnering with God in whatever skill or passion he has given to them as a gift, as a way of bonding with him.

So, do you really believe planting a garden is a way to partner with God in his work? Do you believe writing and performing a play is partnering with God in his work? What about studying micro-organisms? What about baking a cake? It’s all God’s world, and in everything we do we can partner with him in his love for it. How do you partner with God?

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