Church: Here's Why People Are Leaving You - John Pavlovitz

From what we know about Jesus, we think he looks like love. The unfortunate thing is, you don’t look much like him.

You think it’s because “the culture” is so lost, so perverse, so beyond help that they are all walking away.

You believe that they've turned a deaf ear to the voice of God; chasing money, and sex, and material things.

You think that the gays and the Muslims and the Atheists and the pop stars have so screwed-up the morality of the world, that everyone is abandoning faith in droves.

But those aren't the reasons people are leaving you.

They aren't the problem, Church.  You are the problem.

1) Your Sunday productions have worn thin. We can be entertained anywhere. Until you can give us something more than a Christian-themed performance piece; something that allows us space and breath and conversation and relationship, many of us are going to sleep-in and stay away.

2) You speak in a foreign tongue.  Church, you talk and talk and talk, but you do so using a dead language. You’re holding on to dusty words that have no resonance in people’s ears, not realizing that just saying those words louder isn’t the answer. All the religious buzzwords that used to work 20 years ago, no longer do.

This spiritualized insider-language may give you some comfort in an outside world that is changing, but that stuff’s just lazy religious shorthand, and it keeps regular people at a distance.

3) Your vision can’t see past your building. Most of your time, money, and energy seems to be about luring people to where you are, instead of reaching people where they already are.

Rather than simply stepping out into the neighborhoods around you and partnering with the amazing things already happening, and the beautiful stuff God is already doing, you seem content to franchise out your particular brand of Jesus-stuff, and wait for the sinful world to beat down your door.

4) You choose lousy battles. Every day we see a world suffocated by poverty, and racism, and violence, and bigotry, and hunger; and in the face of that stuff, you get awfully, frighteningly quiet. We wish you were as courageous in those fights, rather than the culture war, which is only a paper tiger to people out here with bloody boots on the ground.

5) Your love doesn't look like love. Love seems to be a pretty big deal to you, but we’re not getting that when the rubber meets the road. In fact, more and more, your brand of love seems incredibly selective and decidedly narrow; filtering out all the spiritual riff-raff, which sadly includes far too many of us. From what we know about Jesus, we think he looks like love. The unfortunate thing is, you don’t look much like him.

That’s part of the reason people are leaving you, Church.

The full article is available here

3 Ways for Churches to Stand In Solidarity With Ferguson - Rachel Held Evans in Sojourner's

Pastor Renita Lamkin who was shot at
and struck by a police rubber bullet while
praying and mediating in Ferguson, MO

When it comes to violence and oppression, we are rarely as helpless as we think, and this is especially true as the events unfolding in Ferguson force Americans to take a long, hard look at the ongoing, systemic racism that inspired so many citizens to protest in cities across the country.

I've heard from many of my white friends and readers who say they aren't sure how to respond to the anger and grief they are watching on TV or hearing from their black friends.

They want to be part of the solution but don’t know where start. They may even feel a little defensive when they hear people talking about white privilege or inaction on the part of white Christian leaders.

I’m in the process of learning too, but as I've listened to people of color whose opinions I trust, I've heard them issue several calls to action we can all heed:

1. Lament. In the wake of the events in Ferguson, those of us with racial privilege should avoid trying to regulate the emotional responses of our black brothers and sisters and instead listen and learn so that we better understand those responses, and ultimately, share in them. Anger can be startling, certainly, and it might even make us uncomfortable. But anger is not a sin. Anger is the right and just response to inequity and inaction.

When people of color express anger or frustration regarding the racism they have experienced, the worst thing white people can do in response is shrug off those stories as insignificant in an attempt to return to our emotional comfort zone.

The healing process cannot begin until the severity of these wrongs have been fully acknowledged, until the injustice of it makes us weep. Practical ways to express solidarity in this regard include joining a peaceful protest, introducing prayers of confession and lament regarding racism into your church worship service, and listening with empathy to the stories of black friends, artists, writers, and leaders without defensiveness or judgment.

2. Listen and learn. If you were bewildered by the response to Michael Brown’s death, it might be worth asking yourself why. How might your experiences as a white person limit your ability to put this shooting into context? And how might you expand your educational and relational horizons to better understand the struggles of your brothers and sisters of color?

[It’s important to note that when white people are reminded of their racial privilege, it is not a personal insult, nor does it deny the reality of other potential disadvantages white people may experience in their lives. It simply acknowledges that the broken, sin-riddled systems at work in our society tend to favor white people over people of other ethnicities, so even a white person who may be disadvantaged in other ways — socioeconomically, physically, etc. — will still know less about racially based oppression than a black person.]

3. Loose the chains of injustice. Finally, while prayer and fasting are fitting responses to what’s happening in Ferguson and around the country, we cannot forget the Word of God through Isaiah: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?”

No single person can “solve” racial inequity in this country, but we can each do our part to loose the chains of injustice in our own neighborhoods. Of course, the true test will be how faithfully we engage all these issues in the months and years to come, when Ferguson is no longer trending on Twitter.

Racial reconciliation can be a hard, discouraging road. But we are not helpless.

The full article is available here

When Christians Lack Imagination, They Lack Love - Stephen Mattson in Sojourner's

Imagination leads to empathy, empathy leads to understanding, understanding leads to action, action leads to experience, and experience leads to wisdom — which leads to even more imagination.  This is why keeping an open mind is so important — it helps expands people’s imagination.

Many Christians have an inability to use their imaginations.  Christian culture often seems to quell imagination, to turn our faith into a list of answers and clear-cut formulas. We leave no room for complexity, grey areas, or doubt. When this happens we prefer preaching over teaching, indoctrination over revelation, and propaganda over learning.

Christianity isn’t meant to be a form of passive escapism. Following Jesus means embracing others — everyone: family, friends, enemies, and strangers.  But many of those enmeshed in Christian culture have an inability to see themselves in someone else’s shoes. 

Why would we want to understand the harsh reality of others? Because Jesus commands us to. He humbly loved everyone and sacrificially devoted his life to serving those who were radically different from him.

Imagination leads to empathy, empathy leads to understanding, understanding leads to action, action leads to experience, and experience leads to wisdom — which leads to even more imagination.  This is why keeping an open mind is so important — it helps expands people’s imagination.

When imagination is missing, the void is filled with preconceptions, stereotypes, assumptions, biases, prejudices, and presuppositions. Imagination unlocks our potential to gain knowledge and understanding, to go beyond our comfort zones.

Choosing to utilize our imagination requires risk, vulnerability, and bravery, and it’s often easier to ignore — and avoid — the suffering of others instead of empathizing and communally adopting the sufferings of others as our own.

The full article is available here

The Gift of Disagreement - Kayla McClurg in Inward/Outward

Opposing opinions often feel threatening us. What are we afraid of—that we might learn something new, and have to change?

We can look almost anywhere in the world and see the consequences of one of our greatest failures as human beings—our inability to disagree.

Yes, that is what I meant to say. We are suffering today not so much from our inability to agree as our inability to, peacefully and respectfully, disagree. Opposing opinions often feel threatening us. What are we afraid of—that we might learn something new, and have to change?

A woman comes to Jesus seeking a crumb of mercy for her daughter. She is a nobody among nobodies. The disciples want to send her away, and Jesus himself compares her to a dog scrounging for scraps under the table. Yet she is remembered still today, not because she and Jesus hit it off so splendidly, but because she dares to disagree creatively.

She is put down and spoken to dismissively, but she does not let this deter her. She has a vision bigger than the evidence at hand. She has her own sense of God’s wide, wild mercy, and she recognizes this mercy within Jesus. If he is not yet ready to stand with her, so be it. She is ready to stand with him.

This is what it means to disagree with an open mind. We hold in our hearts our sense of what is right, and we also hold those who oppose us. We refuse to accept the same old worn out stories, and we also refuse to write people off. We know the old bigotries and hatreds have harmed us all, and that we of opposing opinions are not the real enemy. We also know that keeping quiet is no longer an option.

When she asks Jesus to heal her daughter, her beloved, her future, he says no. She finds a third way, allowing her expanded vision to stretch his.  From this woman we see what a living relationship with Jesus and each other can look like. We see the healing mercy that can come from disagreement.

The full article is available here

Reexamining Our Concept Of God's Mission - Brian Konkol in Sojourners

We should resist the temptation of indifference and isolation, but instead learn to care about opportunities to reconcile, transform, and empower. 

We should consider the purpose and intentions of a gracious God through faith, and as a result try to participate within this activity through faithful and fruitful words and deeds.

The mission of God crosses all boundaries, promotes inclusive hospitality and grace, expresses radical relevance, recognizes the need for humility and boldness, and has no ultimate outcome except that which brings life in its fullness for all people in all places.

1. God’s Mission is Reconciliation. As the world is more connected, we have more and more opportunities to see income disparity, unequal access to health care and suitable education, as well as dangerous and dehumanizing levels of racism, sexism, religious extremism, political polarization, xenophobia, and discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

While brokenness and exclusion threatens to tear apart local communities, churches, and international companionships, God’s mission is reconciliation, to the point that our common identity as children of God takes precedence over the color of our skin or passport, size of our bank account, gender of our life-partner, and affirmation of religious belief.

2. God’s Mission is Transformation. While some in our world strive for a larger flat-screen televisions with hundreds of channels, DVD screens in gas-guzzling SUVs, or the perfect massive diamonds for marriage proposals, there are others who would die for a clean cup of water or a simple bowl of rice. The world is messed up.

When people receive open acceptance and radical hospitality, they learn to look outward and strive for relief, development, and advocacy. The result is an interconnected world that intimately transforms for the better and embodies the life-giving love of God found in Jesus. When lives are changed, so are communities, nations, and the global village.

3. God’s Mission is Empowerment. One of the common metaphors of social transformation is “give someone fish and they eat for a day, but teach someone to fish and they eat for a lifetime.” In the 21stcentury this statement is not fully accurate, for in our interconnected multinational context of economics and ecology, one has to ask who has access “to the pond.” The long-term structures of poverty and injustice too often remain, to the point that “access to the pond” remains restricted, and the cycles and structures that keep some wealthy and others impoverished continue.

As reconciliation and transformation occur, authority and access is given to those who are too often marginalized and silenced, for people recognize that full independence is a myth, and interdependence is not only a factual local and global reality, but it is a Christian faith essential and a core component to God’s mission.

The full article is available here

Call to Worship: Hear God's Still, Small Voice (based on 1 Kings 19:11-13)

So often, we expect life to wow and dazzle us. But God, you often come in the still, the small, and the meek. So when we're overloaded by constant stimulus and marketing, settle us with the unforced rhythms of grace.

When our hearts are dried up by apathy and cynicism, open up the wellspring of your mercy.

God, we are seeking you in hopeful expectation. You are trustworthy and good. For this, we give you thanks.

Call To Worship: God Is With Us Always (based on Psalm 33:18-22)

We are never off of God’s radar, even when it feels like we are lost, adrift and overwhelmed. Whether through God’s Spirit inside of us - or through others who act as God’s skin to us - we are looked after and cared for. 

In a world where hard times and difficulty comes across all of our paths, we are not alone. This reassurance can be a great source of hope. When we begin to even faintly catch a glimpse of this all-encompassing, every day love, we can’t help but give thanks.

Post-Christianity Is Good for Church - Chris Piatt in Sojourner's

We have to re-imagine who we are without being propped up by the religious systems into which we've invested so much of ourselves, our resources, and therefore, much of our egos and identities.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Christianity is in decline in the western world by all accounts.  For many leaders within organized Christian circles, this is all a call to arms, a warning shot across the proverbial bow to wake us up from our slumber and engage the impinging culture war with renewed commitment.

It’s actually good news. Granted, it may not slow the decline and closure of churches anytime soon, and we Christians will likely continue to lose some degree of political clout, but I argue that this isn’t the point. It never was. And in fact, our numerical, political and even financial success in recent generations has taken us far off track.

There are several ways in which this current shake-up is the best thing for us, and actually promises to liberate the Gospel and its adherents from some of the false idols we've often come to worship, mistaking them for God. 

Humility is necessary.  We've become too comfortable with an imperialist attitude toward our faith. But Jesus consistently challenged such top-down power plays, and in as much as we’re to imitate the Christ-illuminated path to realizing God’s kingdom vision for the world, we’re well advised to do the same. 

Friction is good. We've come to lean on a ‘The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it’ way of approaching scripture, suggesting that there even is such a thing as literal interpretation of scripture. But such absolute approaches to the Bible and our daily living out of our faith actually stifles the spirit’s movement within and among us, rather than forcing all into some uniform mold dictated by God for us to fall into.

We’re worshiping religion, not God.  We've fallen victim to mistaken assumption that we have to resurrect dying religious infrastructures in order to reveal God to ourselves and others.

We need to know who we are independent of Church.  We have to re-imagine who we are without being propped up by the religious systems into which we've invested so much of ourselves, our resources, and therefore, much of our egos and identities.

The full article is available 

They Are Our Children - Rev. Carlos L. Malavé in Bread For The World

We are called to be Christ to all, but in a very intentional and biased way, we must be Christ to destitute, hungry, and oppressed people. Our actions, care, and concern for poor people reveal the presence or absence of the living Christ in us.

The most important responsibility of the Church is to promote, nurture, and protect human life and dignity. When the Church relinquishes this duty because of political expediency, or even in defense of its theological and ideological convictions, it loses its moral grounding and credibility.

The Church is called to be the most unequivocal expression of the heart and conscience of Christ. The way we respond to the cries of the children of God either affirms our legitimacy or exposes our failure.

Our allegiance is not to the political winds of the time. Our allegiance is to the one who will call us into account when the last act of the human drama wraps up.

Every follower of Christ, every minister, and every local congregation must offer refuge to those seeking freedom, healing, and salvation. 

Our ears cannot become deaf to the words of Jesus: “Because you did it unto one of these little ones, you have done it unto me.”

We must guard our souls from apathy and the callousness that pervade our political and economic systems.

There are children dying in the streets of Chicago and Philadelphia, and there are also children dying in the Sonoran Desert and the Rio Grande. They are our children. They are our children because we are one human family.

The children of Salvadorian, Honduran, and Guatemalan families are as human and as important as my own three children. How can anyone think that their own children have the right to live in peace and security while denying this same right to others?

The full article is available here

Child Refugee Crisis: 3 Responses Christians Don't Avoid But Should - Matthew Blanton in Christianity Today

When we spread half-truths or lies without checking their veracity, we are still bearing false witness through our own laziness. We must choose our news sources carefully. Even if children at the border were our enemies, we would still be commanded to love and care for them. Fear-mongering and hateful remarks are tired, overused tactics (that were employed against most of our own immigrant ancestors).

Easy prey for human traffickers. Thousands of traumatized children. Overcrowded government facilities. Social unrest. How are we to respond to the political, moral, and humanitarian crisis happening at the southern border of the United States?

As exhausted and war-torn children enter the U.S. looking for relief, our nation is overwhelmed by logistical, financial, and humanitarian challenges. To make matters worse, politicians and pundits are polarizing the issue, spreading misinformation and fear. In this intense climate, we are tempted to respond out of the values of our earthly nationalism, forgetting the radical values of God's kingdom.

1. Misinformed arrogance. In my years of ministering in immigrant churches, studying immigration, and working with churches on immigration reform, I am convinced that there is no other issue in American public discourse that couples arrogance and misinformation quite like immigration.

Regarding these children, I grimace as I hear members of Congress, talk radio hosts, and fellow Christians oversimplify the issue and recommend solutions like "just deport them all" or "build a fence." That such solutions actually would break aspects of U.S. law and potentially send people back into the hands of human traffickers doesn't seem to matter.

When we spread half-truths or lies without checking their veracity, we are still bearing false witness through our own laziness. We must choose our news sources carefully.

2. Fear and hatred.  "Don't feed stray animals." "Machine guns at the border would do the trick." "I have to worry about my kids, not these illegals." I know such statements do not represent the church as a whole, but I have been grieved and broken over statements that professing Christians have been making about the crisis.

The focus on "me and mine" and the attitude of "not my problem" are values of our earthly nationalism, not God's kingdom. We are instructed to welcome the stranger, care for widows and orphans (James 1:27), take responsibility for those who are hurt (Luke 10:25-37) and even to love our enemies (Matt. 5:53-54). 

That uncomfortable command means that even if children at the border were our enemies, we would still be commanded to love and care for them. Fear-mongering and hateful remarks are tired, overused tactics (that were employed against most of our own immigrant ancestors).

3. Being disengaged.  For some, the attitude might not be of hate or fear, but of ambivalence or willful ignorance. Although seemingly not a response, this is actually one of the most dangerous ways to respond. Christians not caring about crises in the world is a bit like firemen turning off their radios and settling in for a nice game of poker at the station.  

While the situation at the border is complex, this much is clear: We need to be informed, humble, and engaged in compassion for "the least of these." We have a responsibility to bear this burden. 

We can respond with political advocacy, insisting that children be given a fair hearing and the chance to apply for asylum before being deported and that Congress remove the ambiguities of our immigration system by finally passing broad immigration reforms. 

We can provide financial support to ministries meeting the physical, psychological, legal, and spiritual needs of these kids. Some of us may even open our own homes to an unaccompanied child.

The full article is available here

Reflection and Renewal: Wheat and Weeds (based on Matthew 3:12)

God, you plant each of us like seeds in the same field and together we are nourished and nurtured by the sun. We sway in the wind and are refreshed by the rain. We are blessed by the knowledge that you want us to grow towards what you call us to be.

When we deprive others of that same opportunity, forgive us. When we want to uproot those whom we believe do not belong in our part of the field, forgive us. When we prejudicially label others rather than seeing them through your eyes, forgive us.

When we are reluctant to acknowledge that we ourselves are a mixture of weeds and wheat, forgive us. When we are afraid to look into the fields of our own lives to see what is growing there, forgive us.

So we pray that you will help us to reach out to the uprooted and rejected, the lonely and the outcast, and to develop and grow the good in ourselves, in others and in the world.

Amen

Benediction: Peace, Hope and Light In The Darkness (based on Psalm 126:5)

Even in times when the shadows of doubt and fear threaten to overwhelm us; God, and those who act as God's hands and feet, can show us where - even in darkness - we can find light.

Even in times when the crashing waves of suffering and helplessness surround us; God, and those who act as God's hands and feet, can help us to find some solid rock of hope to stand on.

May the divine source of hope and life be with us today and every day. May the giver of mercy and peace lead our lives.

Responsive Call To Worship: God's Presence and Absence (based on Psalm 22)

Reader: God, there are times that we come to you
when we feel at peace and see your world in wonder.

ALL: But there also times that we
come to you in agony and despair.

Reader: There are times when we it seems
like all that we can see is all of the hurt and
pain in our own lives and in your world.
ALL: At these, the suffering seems
so endless and insurmountable.

Reader: In these moments, we ask, as even
Jesus did, “Where are you God?!?”
ALL:  And like Jesus, we believe that
you are there to be lamented to, even if we
don't understand why you sometimes feel so distant.

Reader: So before the mystery of both your presence and
your seeming absence, we wait for you.
ALL: Help us to seek you where you can be found.