Midwest Emergent Gathering

I returned yesterday from Chicago after attending the Midwest Emergent Gathering. What a great time my wife and I had as we heard from and shared with so many people who are exploring what it genuinely means to follow in the path of Jesus. Kudos goes to Mike Clawson and his wife Julie of up/rooted (Chicago Cohort) and their team, which included the Indianapolis Emergent Cohort led by Ryan and Sarah Notton, for putting this event together.

I enjoyed meeting and hearing directly from several people whose books I've been reading lately, like Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, and Spencer Burke. I especially enjoyed hearing about The Emmaus Community in Chicago from Pastors James King and Alise Barrymore and I learned so much from Denise VanEck, a founding partner in ILS Coaching and Consulting and currently serving as Mars Hill Bible Church's Community Life Pastor,during her keynote sharing and follow-up dialogue. I also appreciated the dialogue with Hemant Mehta who is known as the Ebay Atheist. What a valid challenge he presents to us Christians as we seek to be more engaged in the world outside of our little created boxes. It is inspirational to hear from these folks who are not only dialoguing about issues related to the emerging and missional church, but who are also taking the risk of being practitioners. I thank all who led and participated in this event for welcoming me and my small beginnings into these conversations. It is truly exciting to feel the momentum of this conversation and the change that it can encourage and produce along the way. I look forward to sharing with my friends, colleagues, and current congregation much of what I'm learning so that we can also be an incarnational presence in the Muncie community.

I want to encourage others who might visit my blog to connect with the above links to get an even deeper understanding of the emerging and missional conversations going on all around the Christian community. It is an exciting time and the more I learn and share in this conversation, the more humble I become - recognizing my own limited knowledge and ability to genuinely live in the way of Jesus in my own family, community, and congregation.

Room for Expression

A few weeks ago I went on a mission experience at Camp Barnabas in Purdy, MO with some young people who went there to serve. Camp Barnabas is a camp for kids with disabilities ranging from Autism and Downs Syndrome to physical disabilities or even Cancer and HIV. It is a wonderful place with staff and managers generously giving a tremendous amount of compassion, love and freedom for these kids who come there every summer to experience camp. Although the staff and the C.I.A.'s (Christians in Action) are there to serve the needs of these kids 24/7, it is quite clear that the kids and even some adults with disabilities, teach the staff and C.I.A.'s so much more. At Camp Barnabas, their a-bilities shine through.

Around the camp there are signs. One says, "Dance like nobody's watching." Another one says, Love like you've never been hurt." Another says, "Laugh as if no one hears you," and finally, one that says, "Sing like nobody's listening." I'm not sure where these sayings come from. When I googled it, it came up as a quote from Mark Twain, with an additional piece that said, "live like it's heaven on earth." However, there were others who have added variations to this quote over the years, but I think originally it may very well have come from Mark Twain.

These sayings around Camp Barnabas speak to the beauty about the openness to one another expected there in terms of allowing people to feel unembarrassed and at ease for the things they might do in celebration, worship, play, or just in conversation and relationship. The kids who come to Camp Barnabas are truly beautiful inside and out. Many of them just burst out with joy, they will sing, dance, and laugh, all without worrying about how other people perceive or judge them. Much of the staff at Camp Barnabas are this way too, as are some of the C.I.A.'s who come. However, I am not one of those people who does this very well. I think that in many ways I am trapped in self-consciousness which inhibits my ability to truly open up without fear of what others might think about what I say or do. But I applaud those who do not feel trapped in such a way and I am working this out in myself. I believe I have been taught to be this way through my own church experience.

In terms of my faith and the church and how we worship or even in just how we relate to one another, we often only make room for the most talented singers, most gifted musicians, strongest speakers, and most elaborate pray-ers (I know that's not a word, but you get it). We make little, if any, room for those who might pause too long in prayer, who might sing off key, or raise their hands or cry, or pray with passion and emotion. For some reason, at least typically in my own church tradition and experience, we feel uncomfortable with those we consider less than "perfect" or even less than "exceptional." I think the modern contemporary church has turned worship into a place for professionals. At Camp Barnabas, watching the kids stomp their feet, shake their arms, or sway back and forth - out of rhythm no less - seems like more genuine worship before the Lord than much of our highly structured and ordered way of doing things sometimes. We try to address this in the modern, contemporary church by trying to manipulate people into getting up out of their seats to "do" something in worship as opposed to being spectators of a "celebrity hour." You know, like American Idol comes to church. But, we set ourselves up for this.

I appreciate Dan Kimball's (author of The Emerging Church and Emerging Worship) idea of the band being at the back or on the side in the worship setting. This at least helps a little to get away from the "performance" aspect of worship. I guess what is really important is that in worship, in the church, and in our groups, we would all be better off if we work together to create an environment where people feel free to worship and relate to one another in a variety of ways. This does not mean we no longer have focus or themes, or even structure. However, it does mean we would create opportunities where a variety of senses and experiences are engaged and multiple intelligences are considered in creating such an environment. It's interesting that we celebrated this past week the freedom we gained from England. We talk a lot about freedom in the United States - especially in our churches. But, my experience with the church is often the opposite of freedom. We tend to judge those not like us, who don't believe like us, who don't act like us, who don't worship like us, or look like us. We often think if people aren't in with us, they aren't in with God. How arrogant is that? We like to curtail people's ability to just express their joy or pain or thoughts and feelings when they don't line up with ours.

How refreshing though it would be to just be able to "Dance like nobody's watching, love like you've never been hurt, laugh as if no one hears you, and sing like nobody's listening." Of all places we should be able to do these things, should it not be the church? May we freely give one another room for expression and living as we journey along the path of Jesus.

Embracing God's Grace for All

I once heard Mike Yaconelli, co-founder of Youth Specialties, say, "Never compare yourself with what you don't know about other people." He may have been quoting someone else when he said this, but I wouldn't know who that might be. I remember that it stuck in my mind. It has certainly come to mind recently as I have heard people talk about Biblical characters like Moses, David, Solomon, Paul, even Jesus. I have often wondered why we make assumptions about Biblical characters' lives and decisions as if their whole life was determined by one or a few good choices we read about them making.

In Solomon's case, it is like we trap him into that one thing he did in asking God for wisdom when he could have asked for anything else. Then, immediately following the granting of this wisdom, he comes face to face with a decision regarding two prostitutes fighting over a baby. In the story, found in I Kings 3: 5-28, two prostitutes each have their own baby very close to the same time. One rolls over onto her baby and kills the child, then steals the other woman's baby for herself and putting her dead baby by the other woman. The other mother recognizes that the baby she finds in her bed is dead but also realizes that the dead baby is not hers. They go before Solomon to decide which one is the real mother. Solomon decides to split the baby in half so each could have half, but the real mother protested and told Solomon to let the other woman keep the child. Solomon decided that the real mother, the one who saved the child's life, was the biological mother and she should, after all, have the child back. This is a wonderful story, but Solomon was fortunate too in that he assumed the real mother would speak up to save the child's life as opposed to the selfish notions the other prostitute displayed (which was that if she could not have the live baby, no one would).


I've thought about what we don't really know about Bible characters or people we might look up to or even pass judgement on today. There's just so much we don't know about Jesus' childhood. And there's so much we don't know about his adulthood and ministry and teaching. The Gospel writers wrote what they felt needed to be said in order for others to understand who Jesus was, his purpose in being here, and his relationships with people and with God. But, in terms of a lifetime of decisions and actions, what's printed is pretty minimal. In many ways, reading the Gospels is like watching a sports highlight film. The story of their efforts are told in brief moments in time that really do not speak about the whole.


Often we recognize highlight films for what they are. However, many times, when it comes to people of the Bible we have a very strong tendency to trap those people in the moments of either their courageous and faithful decisions or in their tragic or unfortunate lives. I believe much of this is because, like I said, in many cases, we do not see the entirety of these people's lives before us on the page. We hold many biblical characters as heroes of the faith, and I believe they were, but we often overlook the realities of their lives. The moments of questioning, the moments of doubt, the moments of uncertainty and failure that make these people just ordinary humans struggling to live in relationship to their God. When we do recognize their humanity, we seem to give these characters portrayed in the Biblical text a lot of room to be human, to fail and be redeemed, to fall and be forgiven. However, it saddens me that so often in the church, we do not presently give one another that kind of room to be human. It's as though after the New Testament canon was voted upon and established, there was no more room for God's grace toward us anymore unless we believed certain beliefs, lived a certain life, said a certain kind of prayer, or joined a particular kind of church.

I long for the church to embrace God's grace for all people in all circumstances. I'm not qualified to mete out God's grace only to those I deem worthy because I'm no more worthy than anyone else to receive God's grace. May we in the church spend more time loving and serving people rather than judging and dividing people. I always find it troublesome when ministers, evangelists, politicians, celebrities, authors, activists and others are held up as "perfect" role models because of what we see presented to us through the television media or their written works. So many people compare their lives to those folks and often find their lives lacking for what they are being told they have to live up to. But the reality is, we must be careful as Mike Yaconelli said, in "comparing ourselves to what we don't know about other people." We all need God's grace and we all need to show God's grace to all people. Let's give room to one another on the journey so we can grow, learn, fail, be reconciled, be forgiven, love, and show God's grace without conditions.