A new time - A new approach -A new paradigm

Gordon McDonald’s book: “Who stole my church” is a very helpful book for all of us struggling to make our message agreeable to a new generation of folk. A generation that is skeptical of too many words and eloquent speeches. In the age of information overload people are not looking for more knowledge but they are looking for authentic life-styles that they can follow. They are judging the words with the actions and will follow those who smack of the authentic. McDonald (note the burger) suggests that ‘belonging’ is the critical value and culture to create in the church. Through an open culture of belonging people freely come in and make up their own minds when the time is ready to believe. Gone are the days of neat packages and tight phraseology that bought you a ticket to that heavenly place. Yes, it is all about the relationship.

Apple Core – Organize better

Without fail the lapse into self assertive ministry is around every corner of our daily dealings. The temptation exists that we forget the workings of God in our daily life. The sense of working out our salvation with ‘fear and trembling’ is no doubt to be taken seriously in the light of our ‘to do’ lists and crammed calendars. The worst of it is that people take second place to projects, administration and important church deliberations. In the mass of the worlds guru’s helping us organize our lives the covenant of heart and soul to God and others needs to be constituted deep in our daily preparations and its out workings.

Immortality Sucks!

I am still reading Henri Nouwen’s book Reaching Out – The three movements of the spiritual life. For those who are yawing you will be happy to know I am in the last chapters! However, the last section of the book deals with our reaching out to God. He makes an interesting point that our sense of the ‘immortality’ of all things breeds insipid sentimentality and/or violent behaviour. When we mask our relationships with others with the illusion of immortality we create a sentimentality that creates false expectations of human relationships and when shattered brings about depression. Violence is bred when we start to own others, property and material goods as ours for eternity and when this is challenged it brings about violence as we try to perpetuate our ownership of them. Interesting thought, the idea that concepts like eternity and immortality can be as negative as they are positive in our faith journey.

Family Growth

Family - a model for Church growth. Amongst all the other ways we acknowledge we can do Church, the fundamental building blocks in a Church are the relationships that comprise the whole. It is better to strengthen relationships than it is to strengthen programmes. The family growth model could be the answer in creating a paradigm that continually puts the focus back onto the Church as family whose role is to equip each other to fulfill their part in the greater picture of things. When Melluish speaks about building the family unit he speaks about being a team, having family time, setting family jobs, create family traditions, being together. The translation into Church growth dynamics is obvious. When Church members work as a team, spend family time together, differentiate their Godly chores, establish traditions that bring family identity the roots of that Church would be strong and long lasting. The young would grow from that Church with a sense that it is family. They would be sad to leave its precincts and they would return each holiday to share their good and bad news. Family is family for life.

Strike it unlucky

We in South Africa are being crippled by a national strike. Today in Pietermaritzurg the headlines read “ Total City shutdown, 30 000 to march on CBD; fears municipal workers might join strike.” There are no children at school, there is barely a nurse left in the hospitals, the police and defense force are threatening sympathy strikes. This is a complete meltdown of an orderly society. I don’t want to chew too much on opinions already clichéd by editors of newspapers and social gossip columns. Who’s to blame is not an easy answer to give. There is a new elite in South Africa who if one can generalize have lined their pockets with tax payers money. Corruption and exploitations of government funds is rife. The few have again taken from the many. This is what the strike is all about for me. The forces that are in battle in South Africa are between the powers of opportunistic wealth and the powers of the disempowered working masses. It is an unprecedented voice against the greed of some. But, like all good stories the villains are not easily discernable. Power, in what ever clothes it likes to dress itself, can become as ugly as the powers it detests and tries to mitigate against. The worker who decides to go to work is threatened with her very life. The teacher’s who we entrust our children to are foaming rabid at the mouth. Hospital workers are dancing restlessly outside hospitals with jovial glances whilst bodies who’s hearts once beat are being wheeled down empty corridors into the morgues. The villain is also on the other foot by the looks of it. So where is the redemption is such a stalemate? Does justice have to be so cruel and to what ends will justice fight until it realizes it has turned face and become the one infringing on others rights?

These solutions do not lie in the answers constructed by well-heeled politicians and neither are they answered by those obsessed with equal footing. Justice in itself is not enough to heal a country. The religious will tell you that you are seeking for peace in the wrong quarters. Justice without love is not worthy of the glory it seeks. It might gain the world through all the protests its embarks upon, but without Love it is nothing. It is a Paul may say, a mere clashing gong, but it will lack the treasure it really seeks. The other lesson the religious would argue is that the desire for possessions above love is the cardinal mistake of the human soul. The soul that seeks for fulfillment in the values, hopes and dreams of the physical world will often find themselves in places of dire disappointment and disillusionment. This worldly dream is stilted and always has a end. The hope of a new world order needs to transcend the confines of this world, it needs to reach up into the beyond and declare a world that is not dependent on the human ego, but rather transformed and bent by a greater Justice system that calls on its adherents to lift the ‘rights of others’ above our own.
"Do justice ... love kindness ... walk humbly with your God" ... Micah 6:8

Father Son and Family Goat

The prodigal son parable is a picture of the typical family. It portrays the complexity of emotions and situations many families are threatened with. The human heart is volatile and restless for fulfillment and for acceptance. This human condition is a constant threat to the family structure. In reading the story one is aware of many incidents in ones own family that have similar trace elements. Not exactly the same, each family is a complex network of past, present and future happenings all playing themselves out with open and hidden agendas. Not one of the characters in reality can stand as a picture of absolute stability and integrity. The hopelessness often felt in family situations is the realization that we are all fracture beings trying to mend our lives whilst at the same time trying to mend our relationships and world. Where one son is finding life in the family another is cutting himself off. Lessons are learnt in each sons scenario, the first sons learnt humility through past mistakes and the second son learning a father’s ways of appreciation. A parable is limited in what it can say, but it should not go without the thought that the father may learn something from his sons too. In the next chapter of this parable it could be the father who learns how to show his feelings and celebrate the joy of a son that was always there with him. The prescribed meaning of this parable is the lesson of the lost soul returning home, but the unofficial version could be the lesson of how to celebrate the relationships that are constantly before our eyes.

A knowledge that can heal

To know God and to be known by God. That is the cornerstone of religious society. The journey of humble self disclosure and the fervent desire to embrace another’s admissions. God’s heart is not as invincible as you may think. The story of a much loved son wasted on the hills where things become nothing, betrays the notion of a steel hearted God. Knowing God is not just an awe in higher beings, respect for cloudy mounts, and a numb delight in sunlit thrones. There is a God to be know behind the cool exterior, a God with a past, a sad story to tell. To be known is the other half. The daily banishment of pride that holds our world in dark locked cages. To unlock the deepest secrets and anguished moments that lie as cargo in dank bilged hulls. The strength to drag to light the sticky hurt and sting. To open ports and hatch for God to see the mildewed crippled pain. In this religion, in this exchange the heavens touch the sinners stain. Two stories, one in friendship bind the Universe explained. A pain shared, a knowledge won, is this religion with a holy one.

A wide friendship

I hope to form real relationships with people around me. There cannot always be great friends but their can be healthy acquaintances and empowering connections. I pray I may embrace the multitude of different kinds of connections as important, each one profound. If we are not close friends we can still be distant friends, we don’t have to cut ourselves off from those we hear of no longer.

Friend, colleague, brother, sister, parent, wife, mentor, congregant, servant, complete stranger, elderly, teenager, baby, supposed enemy, real enemy, me, God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, creation. May I embrace all these relations with the attitude of Christ. That is, dying to save every last drop of my life to renew, restore, reinforce, recharge, rekindle, realign, readjust, recover, redeem, reconcile, resurrect into a covenant of divine Love.

Doors of intimacy

There is no way out, it is the way in. The way into the growth you desire. Grief and the emotions of sadness are not headaches to be exorcised with an aspirin. They are doorways of your cathedral, high arching, broad sided, thick wooded and with them on your shoulder you walk the path less traveled. Up and along the traitors hardened path between aisles towards the hill where black crows fly. The pain you feel splinters deep but when you reach the alter and collapse prostrate with grief's too heavy from doors so damn difficult. The cry of reason will echo in hallowed halls, repeating themselves from statues, martyrs, crosses and hard scrubbed floors. “I feel you, I cry with you, I am with you.”

Lasting friendships

True living comes with true friendship. The Gospel of John makes it obvious that if we are to have the “shalom” of God at the fire-place of our hearts we are to kindle the friendship with God in and through a friendship with the God-man Jesus. Through friendship Jesus opened the hearts of the early followers. There was not a curriculum or an operations based education system but merely a walking and talking friendship amongst them. To abide in the “Word” is often misunderstood as abiding only in the teachings of the bible. This is part truth but not the fullness of living in vibrant friendship with the creator partnership of three. The essence of this abiding is to do what Jesus asks of us. John’s Gospel stresses this by mentioning Jesus saying that if you love him you will obey what he commands. This is because and only because he himself does exactly the same with his parent God. He draws the emphasis even closer by mentioning that even the other part of the creation partners, the Spirit, will draw attention to what he commanded, that being the commands of God. Friendship with God is found in doing what Jesus instructed, and through this vital action we abide closer with God and the peace of God, the shalom, will rest deeply in our hearts pushing the chaotic mayhem of our world aside. The peace of the Lord be with you in 2007.