Broom Fight In Bethlehem?

Monks battling it out with brooms at the birthplace of Christ?  Sounds like the opening for a bad joke, but it was actually a headlining story in last weeks news.  Apparently the "Church of the Nativity" built over 1500 years ago, at the site history claims to be the birthplace of Jesus, is maintained by monks and priests from the Catholic, Greek and Armenian churches.  Apparently, the arrangement for this historic landmark is that whatever space you clean, is the space you own. (Not a bad idea for those of us raising teenagers!).  The news story is that a fight of tremendous proportions broke out among the Greek and Armenian monks who began beating each other with the brooms they were using.  Palestinian security forces were called in to settle the dispute.  The irony of the story is that this historic landmark suffers a leaking roof which has been in disrepair for years and as a result has ruined much of the priceless artwork inside the church.  The reason the roof has not been repaired?  The three churches have been fighting over who will pay for it!  (According to the newstory I read, a deal has finally been brokered to address this).

Perhaps what this story illustrates best is what religion void of spirit will ultimately devolve into: broom fights over territorial rights.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer perhaps said it best when he wrote: "Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church.  It is far too easy for us to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in doing so utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea." While the ridiculousness of this story is apparent on many levels, it may hold the key to understanding why so many mainline denominational churches today are being forced to close their doors and turn their historic spaces into condominiums or posh restaurants. 

Churches have forgotten how to feed the soul.  In a culture that is perhaps the most spiritually hungry in centuries, the church is in danger of becoming the last place people will look for a spiritual meal.  The church has allowed political platforms, marketing gimmicks, and territorialism to replace that which originally gave it life: the Spirit of God setting hearts on fire with a revolutionary message of God's kingdom flourishing "on earth as it is in heaven;" a kingdom that transcends denominational boundaries, ethnic/cultural differences, gender bias, and most importantly of all, a kingdom that is not limited by the shortcomings and imperfections of each one of us. When we allow our focus to become territorial and political it is at the expense of that which is truly priceless: the artwork of the church - the spiritual choreography that orders our steps into a thing of beauty which dances hope and inspiration to a hurting humanity.

While it may be easy to throw stones at the men of God involved in this news story, weilding brooms for battles; perhaps we need to search our own hearts and ask where we have perhaps been fighting for territorial rights rather than surrendering to the Spirit.  Perhaps it's time for each of us to allow the Spirit to clean house and to lay down the broomstick battles we have been waging for an open heart of surrender to the Spirit which brings life and healing and which is the only thing able to transform the brokenness of each of us into a thing of beauty, a priceless work of art.

Wrestling With Angels - The Second Act

There are times when life demands that we change - profoundly change. Moments that demand of us the courage to face our failures, our fears, our betrayals. Moments when we can see the vision on the horizon that beckons us with an inner longing to journey forward and yet paralyzes us with a profound dread as we realize that all that has brought us to this place is insufficient to move us into our destiny.

It may be the reality of crossing the threshold from mid-life into our Senior years, it may be the milestone of having to deal with the loss of a spouse or the horror of losing a child, it may be the triumph of having survived cancer, it may be the brutal adjustment of divorce or the hopeful anticipation of re-marriage.   This is not the milestone of the young, filled with the optimistic idealism of youth.  This is the milestone for those of us who have already lived a great deal of our lives, who have a history to look back on and come to grips with, for those of us who have experienced both the triumphs and the tragedies of life and who want to move into the next part of our journey somehow changed and prepared to build a future that transcends the mistakes and shortcomings of our past.

This is the second act.  The place where the stage has been set, the conflict has been revealed and we move forward into the hopeful resolution.  It is a place where we must wrestle with angels in order to see the face of God.  It is the place where, if we refuse to let go; we will leave with a blessing and yet we will walk with a limp, for dust can not look on the face of divinity without being forever marked by it. 

This is perhaps, the most difficult place to be in. That place where we know we must relinquish what has brought us to this point in order to move beyond it into the place that the Spirit is calling us to.  It is these places where, like Jacob, we need to see the face of God, for what is required is more transformation than change.  It is a place where our souls are marked with the fingerprint of the transcendent and we exchange the name our past has given us for the name our future destiny demands.  It is these places where we must face the terrifying beauty of the divine, and refuse to let go until we have received our blessing.  It is these places where our broken humanity wrestles with the angelic. 

If life finds you at one of these places, that Jacob called "Penial" "for I have seen God face to face and my life is preseved," may you be encouraged to refuse to let go until you have received your blessing. May you have the courage to come face to face with the terrifying truth and be set free to move forward into a future filled with promise, grace and magnificent wonder.  May you begin the "Second Act" from a place of transcendent transformation that has wrought beauty from ashes, turned your mourning into dancing and with face to the horizon, may you move forward into your unique destiny.

Would Jesus Go To an Ugly Sweater Party?

I realize Apple is making the news with it's new version of ipad textbook apps that has everyone clamoring to voice an opinion or get on board the financial bandwagon of profiting from this technogical innovation, but I'd like to shine the social media spotlight on an equally culture changing innovation that has been in the closet for far too long.  By in the closet, I'm speaking literally.  Who would have thought that finally, we would have a purpose for that one thing we all keep hidden, relegated to the depths of our closets, embarrassed to bring out into the light of day,  yet unwilling to relinquish to the Good Will Bin or the trash can - the ubiquitous ugly sweater.

We all have our rationalizations for hanging onto them: they were a gift from a family member, they were handmade for us by a friend, they're too comfortable to get rid of.  Perhaps we should start a support group for those of us struggling to justify why we hold onto these items, that simply take up needed closet space, and that we keep buried like ugly secrets in the depths of our wardrobes. Judging from the social media invites, ugly Christmas sweater parties were all the rage this year.  Just the invitation alone brings a smile to your face.  Why is that?  Perhaps because ugly sweaters are something we all have in common and something we all feel just a bit foolish for admitting we have.  Maybe because it's therapeutic to confess and to realize that we are not alone, apparently ugly sweaters are a mass pandemic.

The question remains however, what would Jesus do?  Would we find him at an ugly sweater party?  Having recently hosted an ugly sweater party, I can speak from personal experience.  I hosted my ugly sweater party in a part of the country that is statistically the least "churched" state in the nation and where believers are referred to as the "frozen chosen."  With very little promotion, no marketing campaign, and no arm twisting,we had a terrific turn out of people, young and old, children, teenagers, adults and seniors.  Everyone showed up on a cold New England winter night with a hot meal to contribute to the potluck dinner, a smile and an ugly sweater.


 As I sat, proudly wearing my ugly sweater and looked around the room, I realized that the question of would Jesus go to an ugly sweater party was irrelevant.  He was already here.  In our midst.  Emmanuel - God With Us. I saw Him as I watched teenagers talking with seniors and laughing as they swapped stories of their ugly sweaters and compared stories of their lives.  I saw Him in the reminiscent smiles on the Seniors faces as they delighted in the young children dashing under folding tables, giggling as they chased each other around the room.  I heard Him as I listened to the conversations of parents with young children sharing empathetic laughter with parents from a by-gone era the trials of child-rearing and laughing together at the tragedies and the triumphs that come with parenting.

Perhaps finding the courage to bring our ugly sweaters into the light of day, laugh together and realize that we are not alone - is a step towards recognizing that all of us have broken humanity in common and that the same God who wrapped divinity in swaddling clothes in order to reach out to us, is smiling with us as we dare to don our ugly sweaters and share the joys and journeys of our lives.

How Not Enough Money Could Be All You Need to Succeed

It was a disaster. The production was scheduled to go in two days.  When I walked into the auditorium to check on the set design - I felt the panic rise in my throat.  It was a nightmare.  The artistic team who had assured me they "had it all under control" had done the best they could to design a set that went with our dramatic theme of overcoming the hardships of life - but the stage looked like someone's living room the morning after a big party - not an artistic representation of a battlefield. We had no time to start over, we had no budget to purchase anything, and we were expecting hundreds to come to the debut  in 48 hours. I collapsed into a seat in the front row of the gothic cathedral auditorium, put my head in my hands, took a deep breath, whispered a silent prayer of "HELP!" and did what years of experience had taught me to do: looked for a creative solution.

Too often we admit defeat because we "don't have enough money." We put our dreams in a straitjacket due to the limitations of a restricted budget, but we sell ourselves short if we allow our goals to be limited by a dollar sign.  Perhaps the issue is not a lack of money, but a lack of creativity.  Years of successfully leading non-profits with very limited budgets, have shown me that there is always a way around not having enough money, but it will require thinking outside the box, being flexible, and being willing to work up a sweat.

If you find yourself in a situation where you have a fantastic idea, but not enough money to carry it out; perhaps it is a blessing in disguise.  You may simply need to develop a more creative approach to bring it into reality.  Here are some of the steps in the process that may help you unlock a more creative solution.

1.  Start by looking at the resources you HAVE (not what you don't have).  Be creative with this - you may be overlooking some key resources.  Example:  We didn't have any budget for marketing/advertising.  Solution: I wrote an interesting newsworthy story to run as a press release in the local papers and put it out on Facebook where it spread like wildfire.

2.  Brainstorm how you can maximize/build on what you have.  Example: For the set design disaster I mentioned in my opening, I sent teenagers on a frantic scramble for what little props we had in our props closet.  They were carrying down a couple of Greek columns that had been made out of styrofoam/cardboard and accidentally broke one of them.  I put our artistic crew to work re-designing the stage with broken columns and fires made out of old metal trash cans, cheap fans, colored floodlights and toilet paper. 

3. Be flexible enough to reshape your goals to work creatively with what you have.  Example: I had scheduled a major Christmas presentation and had written a beautiful vocal choral piece into the script.  Three weeks out from the production date the choir director told me they couldn't pull off this piece which was essential to the story line and artistic content of the production.  I took the recorded vocal piece and choreographed a dance to it instead.  It ended up being one of the highlights of the production.

Creativity costs nothing.  A creative approach will set you apart from all the rest who may simply be throwing dollars at a problem.  What is it that you have written off because you don't have enough money?  Perhaps it's worth a second look, from a different perspective.  Maybe all that's needed is a little more creativity.

Oh, what happened to the theatrical disaster I mentioned at the start of this? With absolutely no budget, but a very creative and hardworking team, we pulled off an incredible inspirational production with a dramatic set and packed out the 900 seat auditorium with over 1,000 showing up for a standing room only crowd.

Tell me about a creative solution you have come up with - I'd love to hear about it!

Leadership Lessons From A Crazy Old Man

In today's culture of megachurch marketing, rockstar worship teams, multi-million dollar Christian conferences and tv personality pastors, I want to pay tribute to someone who,  while he never wrote a best-seller or had his own television ministry, was one of the single greatest leaders I have ever had the privilege of knowing. He forever impacted my life not only by what he taught, but by how he lived. 

   The only thing older than he was, were his suits; which never matched and could perhaps have been carbondated to the Mesopotamian era.  He had a thin gray goatee which he stroked with one hand while holding his elbow whenever he was deep in thought, which was often.  He drove his beat-up excuse for a car around our college campus never going over 25 mph and stopping every few yards to talk to students through its rolled down windows.  

Leadership Principle One: Who you are is more important than how you appear.

Leadership Principle Two: Always move slowly enough to communicate value to the ones you lead. 

   He was a bit of a rebel, or at least anti-establishment. When the college administration insisted all professors wear suits and ties reflective of the slick business approach they were trying to replicate, he decided to model his absolutely outrageous collection of bowties.  It was always one of the highlights of the day to see what horribly mismatched bowtie he would be wearing.   It was not uncommon for him to announce that we were all going to cut class (himself included) and then proceed to treat the whole class to hot chocolate in the student lounge where he would regale us with stories or engage us in a theological debate.

Leadership Principle Three: Sometimes a sense of humor sends the most serious statement.  

Leadership Principle Four: The best learning often happens outside the classroom.

     He single-handedly funded a library for Bible School students in India primarily by donating all of his lecturing honorariums and by routinely passing around a styrofoam cup with "India" scribbled on its sides to which we would gladly surrender our last dollar and forfeit our morning coffee in order to contribute. He could reduce a classroom full of college basketball players to tears by sitting on top of his desk, one leg folded underneath him, unwrapping the beauty and wisdom contained in a single scripture verse as he deftly wove his brilliance for Greek exegesis together with a gift for storytelling that kept his students enthralled.   We hung on his every word, not only because of his brilliant command of scripture, but also because we knew that this man had been wounded not only in war (he usually taught holding his elbow due to shrapnel wounds), but he had been deeply wounded in life.  ( He lost his only son to a tragic car accident when his son was just 16 years old).  His voice would still break and his eyes fill with tears on the few times he spoke of it and yet there was no bitterness, no raging at God, no "life isn't fair" refrain, only a melody of "it is well with my soul" which could not but break us in the listening of it.

Leadership Principle Five: When it comes to sacrificial giving, others will follow your example.

Leadership Principle Six:  The impact of your message will be determined by the authenticity of your life. 

   While, a deans list GPA was important to most of us, the highest honor we could receive was a nod from him and his iconoclastic compliment of "you're okay."  There was no  greater honor, unless of course, you were one of the "few" to have received one of the books from his prized personal library.  Books were the only treasure he allowed himself and he made it a self-imposed discipline to give them away to his students, always with a hand-scrawled note of encouragement inside their cover.

Leadership Principle Seven:  Give away what you most love to those you love most.

     While he could have been teaching at much larger universities making a significantly greater salary, he chose to spend the end of his career at a small, obscure Bible School in Pennsylvania pouring his love for learning, his passion for God and his commitment to truth into his students. His name was Hobart Grazier or "Brother Grazier" to his students.

     In a culture where evangelical popularity often comes wrapped in designer suits, announcing it's own importance with slick seeker-friendly marketing, on made for tv customized sets, wisdom can sometimes go unrecognized.   God wrapped His greatest gift of wisdom in swaddling cloth.  Sometimes wisdom comes in moth-eaten, mismatched suits with ridiculous bowties. I thank God for that wisdom.  I thank God for Brother Grazier and the lifelong lessons he not only taught, but lived.
    

    

How I Lost God In A Megachurch (and found Him in a cafeteria)

   

      As a staff member  at a growing megachurch, every week I sat in pastor’s meetings where we dissected the worship service bit by bit, like a frog in a high school biology class.  Every piece was systematically analyzed, discussed and reviewed to death.  Week after week, as if God’s presence could be categorically formulated with just the right selection of music, the exact style and selection of vocal pieces, the flawless presentation of multi-media.  As if God showing up was something any of us had any control over.  Perhaps, it was in hopes that if God didn’t show up, no one would notice as long as the musicians were talented, the vocalists were amazing and the lighting and media created the right ambiance.

            Somehow when the Holy of Holies is pinned down to the dissection table, the essence of what makes it holy disappears.  The goosebump, shivers down your spine, God-is-in-the-house thing somehow refuses to be captured and put in a jar like the pickled specimens in a science lab.  Even in a megachurch with a multi-million dollar budget, ivy-league educated executive pastors, half-a million dollars worth of theatrical lighting, state of the art sound equipment and recording quality worship bands, the presence of God remains sovereignly in His control and refuses to be manipulated or exploited, even by our best intentions.  Yet there we sat, week after week, every Tuesday morning, dissecting the worship service as if God showing up depended on our analysis.

            And somewhere in and amongst all the dissecting, analyzing, reviewing and debriefing, I had lost Him.  I had lost God.  I could market Him, I could make Him seeker-friendly, I could wrap Him in a creative, entertaining package that would draw crowds of thousands, but I couldn’t find Him; not for myself;  not for real.  Not in the way that I had found Him when I was 13 and I would cry as I felt His love wash over me like gentle ocean waves.  I had lost God in the middle of a megachurch.  I knew it, but I was too scared to admit it.  So I continued to sit around the dissection table every Tuesday morning, poking and prodding and…pretending.

            Maybe that’s why I was so surprised when God showed up…unannounced…in a cafeteria.  I didn’t even see it coming.  A hot Indian Summer night in a tiny little excuse for a cafeteria with a handful of moms and dads, toddlers and teens, watching three of my dance students dance to worship music from a $79 boombox under fluorescent lights in sweatpants and t-shirts.  God showed up, and as the music played, I watch those three young ladies dance as if they were on stage with the New York City Ballet.  I tried hard to swallow the lump in my throat and hoped that no one would notice me trying to hold back the tears.  Until I looked around and realized that tears were flowing all over that little cafeteria.  On the faces of moms grateful for young women who weren’t embarrassed to dance with abandon as an act of worship, on the awestruck faces of little girls who dreamed of one day doing the same thing, in the almost embarrassed admiration of Dads who recognized they were standing on holy ground…in the middle of a cafeteria.  God showed up.

            Isn’t that just like God though?  His presence, that sense of something so much bigger than anything our minds can fully comprehend, yet so personally intimate with the true essence of who we are, refuses to conform to the towers of Babel we try to build to reach him and instead shows up when we least expect it, a burning bush in the middle of our everyday to-do list.  May we never grow too busy or too calloused to recognize the Holy in the midst of the mundane.  May we have the wisdom to know that when this happens we need make the time to remove our shoes and acknowledge that we are in fact standing on holy ground.  May we always be watching with eager anticipation for those moments, when God shows up.

The Evangelical Identity Crisis - Part I

"If the divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God." CS Lewis

We are in the midst of an evangelical identity crisis which has the potential to reshape the face of "Christianity" to a degree that has not been seen since Luther nailed the 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. We are left to try and tread water in the wake of the 1980's formation of the Religious Right which ushered in the modern-day phenomenon of the mega-church, and framed political platforms as doctrinal truths upon which hung the eternal destinies of individuals and countries.

Evidence of this identity crisis is easy to find:

The children of the leaders of the 1980's evangelical movement are now middle-aged adults many of whom, rather than carrying on the message and legacy of their famous fathers, are speaking out against the hypocrisy they saw first-hand. Individuals like Frank Schaeffer, son of the late Francis and Edith Schaeffer, who has become a darling of the liberal left for his books denouncing not only the Religious Right but many of it's hallowed leaders. The adult son of Jimmy and Tammy Faye Baker, Jim Baker, who now holds "church" in a New York bar room, adorned in full sleeve tats, jeans and leather jacket.

The emergence of the "Emergent Church" with prolific leaders like Brian MacLaren challenging some of the very foundational tenets of fundamentalism and evangelicalism.

The public humiliation and fall from grace of leaders of many of the largest, mega-churches. While it's not necessary to name them; sadly it seems its only a matter of time before a new casualty appears in the headlines and on Good Morning America; yet another public trophy for the liberal left to hoist in the air, much as the heads of the French revolutionaries were mounted on stakes for public display.

The alarming statistics which show that the divorce rate inside the "born again" circle is the same as the divorce rate outside the shadow of the steeple. (In fact, when evangelicals and non-evangelical born again Christians are combined into an aggregate class of born again adults, their divorce figure is statistically identical to that of non-born again adults: 32% versus 33%, respectively.) Barna Research Group

The exodus of women from Evangelical churches (22% drop since 1991 according to the Barna Research Group)

The latest research from the Pew Forum confirms what the anecdotal evidence points to:

"The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, " (The Pew Forum: US Religious Landscape Survey, January 16, 2011)

Is it a coincidence that as the "aging Baby Boomers" hit mid-life and the inevitable "mid-life crisis" it may bring, that we are seeing a collective identity crisis in our spiritual practices?

Perhaps an identity crisis is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it is a sign of maturity, growth and wisdom to be asking questions, rather than assuming we have all the answers. Perhaps this uncomfortable, turbulent period when the tectonic plates we have always stood securely on seem to be shifting beneath us, will cause us to embark on our own search for truth rather than accept cleverly marketed cliches from the arbiters of mega-church culture.

Perhaps the evangelical identity crisis will force us to do what the Scriptures instructed over 2,000 years ago: "work out your own salvation in fear and trembling..." Philippians 2:12

Perhaps...

Question: What do you think regarding the "evangelical identity crisis?" Is it a positive or negative phenomenon?