This week at Ikon we began a series on Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians. We kicked it off last night with a gathering centered around one of the major themes of the letter, and today I started the daily reading with an introduction of why I think this should be an important series for our little group.
As usual, any of you are welcome to join us!
Today is our final reading before Easter, and much like yesterday’s chapter, today’s is packed with action as Jesus approaches the climactic moment of his earthly ministry. Take time to read through Matthew 27 today and reflect on the questions below:
Questions for Reflection:
Today read Matthew Chapter 22 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
At Ikon we’re trying to learn how to pray. My mother – who is part of our community of faith – wrote this in the comments of a recent exercise on “daily bread”:
So I did this exercise the other day and thought to myself, OK, that was nice but do I really trust God to provide my needs? No not really.
Then today as I am coming back from picking up my husband and son from the airport and complaining how I need a vacation, we stopped at a light and I notice an old man on the side of the road with a card board sign that said, “Please, I’m Hungry”
I’m looking around for my purse and I’m really agitated because I can’t find it, finally I say out loud, doesn’t somebody have some money on them?! My husband pulls out the cash in his pocket and I command him to give the guy the 5$ I see lying in his palm. Dave rolls down the window and the old man hobbles over to the car, not only is he old but he is also crippled. Dave hands the man the money and the guy not only profusely thanks us but He also says God Bless You. Now I am so pissed off I almost cry. I rail loudly to my poor family in the car against a society who doesn’t take care of it’s poor, it’s old, it’s crippled. But is that who I am really mad at? Could I be mad at a God who allows this old, crippled man to have to beg on the street? Or am I mad at myself because I allow it? Give us this day our daily bread…….
I love this tension. You know you’re reading the Bible wrong if all it ever provides you is comforting thoughts to reinforce a comfortable life.
There was a time when the Bible fed me nothing but comfort and I was a glutton. Then came a time when it fed me nothing but sorrow and I became an anorexic. Lord help me feast in temperance, finding joy and nourishment in both the sweet and the bitter.
We started a new series on Prayer at Ikon Community tonight. We’ll spend the next several weeks exploring what prayer is and how we can become people who resemble Christ’s high value for prayer.
Also, I’m excited to announce that Christ Church, a new missional church community in Fort Wayne, Indiana will be joining us for this journey (or, maybe we’re joining them!). Their Pastor, Ben Sternke, will be sharing blog posting duties with me during this time.
Wherever you are – and whatever community of faith you call home – you are welcome to join us for our daily readings and exercises in prayer. If you do, we’d love to hear from you in the comments every day at the Ikon website. Continue reading…
I mentioned recently that we’re celebrating a Progressive Advent over at Ikon Community – which just means we’re moving our four Advent gatherings to different homes each week. We had a great gathering last Sunday night for our first Candle lighting service and I personally enjoyed that we pulled both kids and adults into the liturgy (although it was a bit odd switching gears and being so formal!).
We’re also practicing daily Advent Readings together to enter into a rhythm of worship and formation during this season as we seek to prepare ourselves for the celebration of Christmas. From December 1 through December 24th we’ll follow three major scriptural themes concerning Christ: Continue reading…
Today the Ikon folks met at Grape Day Park in Escondido to have a Thanksgiving meal with our friends who live in the Park. For the past six months Cory and Crissy Verner have spent every Saturday having coffee and donuts with these folks, making friendships and immersing themselves in the lives of people who are typically overlooked. Once a month a few of us join them, bring real food, get to know people, offer haircuts, etc. Today they wanted to share the holiday with their new friends in a meaningful way.
Several things surprised me about the gathering, but one thing didn’t.
I was surprised how many people turned out. There were probably over 100 folks there today, and at least 30 of them came to bring food for our friends in the park. Wow.
I was surprised at how peacefully the event unfolded. I’ve done a ton of feeding programs at churches and non-profit centers as a pastor, and it’s not uncommon for a large gathering like this to grow tense (or worse) with people cutting in line, jockeying for position and taking more than their share. There was none of that today. I think this is because our approach all along has been that we’re not feeding the homeless, we’re eating with our friends. Cory and Crissy embody this approach perfectly and did a great job of setting it up like a large family picnic. People chatted in line, piled their plates, and plopped onto blankets in small groups scattered around the area. Kids played football and stormed the playground. It was genuinely fun and restful.
I was surprised we didn’t get a ticket. The Verners have been progressively harassed by the Park Police over the past few months because it’s illegal to feed the homeless there. We do it anyway because we think that’s stupid, immoral, and discriminatory – but we’ve always been discreet about it and it’s always been much smaller than this. Today a Park cop showed up, saw all the people sitting on blankets laughing and eating together and said, “This is a good thing. I’m not going to call it in.” Then he stayed and chatted for awhile. Wow again.
I was surprised how many different churches were involved. As I walked around meeting people I counted 6 different churches from a variety of traditions represented. This wasn’t intentional. As word organically spread over the past few weeks other churches jumped on board, officially and unofficially. It was inspiring and humbling to see.
I wasn’t surprised when someone expressed disappointment that we weren’t sharing the gospel. I’ve come to expect this from Christians. We’ve been telling ourselves for a couple hundred years now that the gospel is an intellectual formula about Jesus and heaven, so it comes as no surprise to me when people expect a speech about that formula.
I was proud of my wife Jenell who replied, “These people already know about that, they don’t need to hear it again from us. Actually, I think most of them have more faith than we do. What they need now is relationships.”
Exactly.
Every Saturday around the time Cory and Crissy go to the park another man shows up with his bible and preaches a message. Every week he says the same thing: “You’re sinners; you’re filthy and depraved; your addictions are keeping you from God and you’re going to Hell; turn to God and be saved.” This means saying the sinners prayer so they’ll go to heaven when they die – because that’s what’s really important. Additionally, the natural, yet deeply superstitious implication is that if they do so, some of their immediate problems might start going away too.
Now – never mind for the moment that I don’t think this is the gospel – Jenell and I have taken an informal poll, and as near as we can tell they’ve all been there and done that already…multiple times in most cases. In fact, in 15 years of ministry in 3 different States we’ve never met a homeless person that didn’t profess Christ. They’re so desperate they’ll pray anything if it means getting some relief for their hunger, their illness, their woundedness, and their hopelessness. You would too.
But it doesn’t help.
Praying a sinner’s prayer won’t fill your belly. It doesn’t fix mental illness, it won’t get you a job and it won’t dry your addictions. I don’t even think it will get you into heaven when you die (but that’s another blog post).
Here’s what does help: people. God, yes…but God through people. What helps us is deeply committed, compassionate people who are willing to get to know us, suffer with our dysfunctions, love us in spite of our shit, help us re-build our lives, and include us in the little things. As John says,
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:7-12)
That’s where God resides. That’s where we “see” him – in the vacuum of human need, which then fills to overflowing with life as the abundance of God flows from person to another. This is a significant implication of the incarnation of Christ, and every time we do it we’re literally “sharing” the gospel.
Sadly, not may Christians I’ve met have been there and done that. It’s way too hard, too messy, and too frightening. But that is where salvation lies, for both the giver and the receiver. In my recent series on the Kingdom and Economy I quoted Bryant Myers, and he’s worth quoting here again:
“Poverty is a result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable.”
There’s an indispensable place for proclaiming the audaciously disruptive news of Christ’s Kingship, but for those who’ve already heard, our urgent task is to demonstrate the gospel as a life of deeply just and harmonious relationships that manifest redeeming love between people.
Our family is excited to be celebrating the Advent season this year with our newly initiated church family, Ikon Community. In addition to daily Advent readings and exercises from December 1 through the 24th, we’ll also be gathering in the homes of different Ikon families for each of the 4 Advent Sundays leading up to Christmas.
Jenell and I have worked every year to develop practices that help us re-appropriate Christmas as a truly Christ-centered holiday, and we’re excited to take this next step with a new group of friends. What do you and your family or church do during this season to refocus on the parousia of Christ? Continue reading…
I recently spoke on “Economy and Mission” at Verge L.A. 2009. Since starting Twoshirts.org almost two years ago, this has been a significant subject of study for me and it has direct bearing on how we shape community – something we’re currently neck deep in defining over at Ikon Community. So, over the next few days I’ll share my Verge presentation here in the hopes of stimulating some thoughtfulness about how missional churches might follow the Holy Spirit in cultivating subversive, grassroots economic communities in a desert of greed and inequality.
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I am an economist. Not by education or by training. The truth is I don’t know much about “macroeconomic rigidities” or “consensus forecasts,” but what I do know, perhaps naively, is that the heart of economics is merely the stewardship of resources, or, quite literally the “rules of the household” (Greek: oikos & nomos). Therefore, I am economist simply by living.
This means you are an economist too. It doesn’t matter if you’re poorly educated or hopelessly impoverished. Economics isn’t about what you know, or how much you have; it’s about how you handle what you have. Everyone has stuff, and everyone has a way of figuring out what to hold on to and what to let go of.
Obviously, then, God is also an economist because God has stuff – lots of stuff! So if, as I take it, “mission” means going where God goes and doing what God does (John 5:19) then a critical question for us is, “What is God the economist doing?” Or, perhaps a more helpful question for shedding our cultural prejudices would be, “What are the rules of his household?” Continue reading…
I’m processing some of this publicly in the interests of transparency, and in the hope that some of you out there will have something to share that might help.
For about 3 weeks now at Ikon Community we’ve been engaged in an intentional conversation about what it might mean to be a “missional church.” The first week I talked about the basic paradigm shift from attractional (Christendom) church to missional church and proposed a “Discipleship > Community > Mission” rhythm of life. Then the second week I unpacked the subject of discipleship, or spiritual formation. So, at last night’s gathering we talked about community (I’ll bet you can see where this is going, eh?).
I’m sure many would disagree with me, but in my mind this is the critical topic in the formation of a post-Christendom church. Why? Continue reading…
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