Wonder...permeates these resurrection stories...And if Jesus' resurrection is at the center of the Spirit's work of forming our lives, which I am convinced it is, then a sense of wonder is a big part of what goes on: surprise, puzzlement, astonishment - God at work. And right here - in Jesus, in you, in me! (Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places)
Just before the Passover Feast, Jesus knew that the time had come to leave this world to go to the Father. Having loved his dear companions, he continued to love them right to the end...Jesus knew that the Father had put him in complete charge of everything, that he came from God and was on his way back to God. So he got up from the supper table, set aside his robe, and put on an apron. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the feet of the disciples, drying them with his apron...
Jesus said, "Let me give you a new command: Love one another. In the same way I loved you, you love one another. This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples - when they see the love you have for each other." (John 13, The Message)
From Leadership Journal:
"I was working with a church that was planning a new building," said McNeal. "They started with the facilities, budget, calendars, needs. I broke in and asked, 'Can we talk about the community around us? About the people who aren't here? When a missionary moves in, and the town needs a well, we expect the missionary to dig a well. We are sitting in a mission field but thinking like club members. We expect differently of our missionaries, why don't we expect differently from ourselves?'"
Had dinner at Legal Sea Foods last night. Their menus say:
At Legal Sea Foods, we are not just a restaurant selling fish. Rather we are a fish company in the restaurant business. This philosophy drives everything that we do...
This may just be marketing, but they sure serve up good fish. Got me thinking about not just being a church selling God. It's much better to be a God group of people who happen to be in the church business. It's more about God than it is about the church.
Eugene Peterson in Christianity Today:
But many Christians would look at this church and say it's dead, merely an institutional expression of the faith.What other church is there besides institutional? There's nobody who doesn't have problems with the church, because there's sin in the church. But there's no other place to be a Christian except the church. There's sin in the local bank. There's sin in the grocery stores. I really don't understand this naïve criticism of the institution. I really don't get it.
Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There's no life in the bark. It's dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it's prone to disease, dehydration, death.
So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn't last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it's prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.
In my writing, I hope to recover a sense of the reality of congregation—what it is. It's a gift of the Holy Spirit. Why are we always idealizing what the Holy Spirit doesn't idealize? There's no idealization of the church in the Bible—none. We've got two thousand years of history now. Why are we so dumb?
Since the Reformation, though, we've championed the idea that the church can be reformed.
Hasn't happened. I'm for always reforming, but to think that we can get a church that's reformed is just silliness.
I think the besetting sin of pastors, maybe especially evangelical pastors, is impatience. We have a goal. We have a mission. We're going to save the world. We're going to evangelize everybody, and we're going to do all this good stuff and fill our churches. This is wonderful. All the goals are right. But this is slow, slow work, this soul work, this bringing people into a life of obedience and love and joy before God.
And we get impatient and start taking shortcuts and use any means available. We talk about benefits. We manipulate people. We bully them. We use language that is just incredibly impersonal—bullying language, manipulative language.
