Lent 10

Saturday's lent reading gives this quote, the author's prayer during a crises in vocation, education and calling,

"I cannot believe that you intend the best years of my life as a disciple of jesus Christ to be experienced between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. I cannot accept that I have peaked in my experience of you and the church and that I am to spend the rest of my life going through the motions. I cannot accept this."

I really hate the way the worldly trait of youth worship has seeped into the church. High school is should only be the best years of your life if you are in high school. In the world, youth is worshipped as the thing we wish we all were. There are very few television shows with old heroes. I have heard people brag about high school sports endeavors ten years removed from high school - like they have been living memories for a decade. When does it stop?

In the church, we have also succumbed to this "memory living" as student ministries are living front edge of the gospel and many, many adults are content to ride their pew into eternity. As a leader, I really hope that we can figure out how to break through the numbness that so many churched adults live in and bring people back to that first love for Christ - that which they (at least 85% of them) first experienced as a teenager.

May we live more fully everyday.

Lent 9

Today Tim Keel talks about his expereinces in growing frustrated with being in youth ministry in a time when games where the most important part of the agenda and churched kids were entertained as much as possible in order to distract them from the evil (and fun) ways of the world.

Tim does what most young frustrated leaders do - seminary. Yet at seminary he experiences much of the same frustrations, as the institutions are forced to demand requirments that support the institution or else we'll dive into a version of Christianity that has deregulated leadership (and we all know what happens when we don't standardize...taking tongue out of check...).

Anyways - seminary is frustrating for most young leaders as their living in a holding pattern that seems to never end. I understand that and I think today's application would have to be to encourage some young leaders to act on their frustrations and put their energy to work in the kingdom of God - rather than just staying up late and complaining.

BE THE CHURCH!

Lent 8

Perhaps the hardest discipline in reading through Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel is not taking off with it and reading ahead. I have set small chunks for me to read each day. This is hard, because his dominant theme is to embrace narrative, metaphor and chaos. In this, he determines that the medium will be the message. His message is found in story form and he is just getting into the parts that are attractive. At the same time, Lent is a time of discipline, which is something I love to be able to have the Lord develop in me.

I am having conversations with high school students as they go through lent right now and it is so awesome to see them struggle through and be dedicated to letting God develop discipline in them. Just last night they even had a whole (loud) discussion on what fits the category of fast food. What they don't realize is that they are really trying to figure out how to deal with the temptaion of legalism that invades people who are seeking discipline.

Anyways...what I really want to remark from my lent reading today is that I love watching college students who are really living life for Jesus. Not in a cultish kind of way, but in a way that gives life and shows how desperate they are to follow Jesus and live the gospel all around them.

If I could only hang out with three kinds of people for the rest of my life it would be:
1. New converts who are amazed at the love of Jesus
2. College students who don't even realize what they are doing as they live out the gospel so fully.
3. People who sleep at my house. That means my family. They are easily awesome.

Lent 7

In today's section of Keel, he writes of the difficulties of growth. Specifically he talks about the difficulty of growing something else.

Not much said in these 5 pages. Maybe I should take bigger chunks each day.

Lent 6

On page 43 Keel writes, "We no longer live in the world of modernity...We are indebted to it and wary of it, and well we should be."

I love this quote because I find a lot of postmodern-loving people who are really just modernism haters. When, in reality, modernity haas given us so much. Through categorization we have been able to find and learn and discover all sorts of exciting things about ourselves and our world. The problem occurs when we substitute the worship of God with the worship of the modern understanding of God. Keel deals with this very well. It seems that, over time, modernity no longer worshipped God but worshippped their understanding of God.

It's a tricky little nuance, which makes it hard to detect. So you don't even know you've got a problem until its too late.

Lent 5

On page 36 Tim Keel writes about the ways that we try to hide our stories by aplogizing, domesticating and neutering them. By 'our stories' I mean the stories found in the Bible. This is something that frustrates me to no end. I wonder how we can do this better. The problem seems to be that we tell children the stories of the bible, but not adults (which Keel agrees with). When children are young, we cannot tell them about David's adultery, Noah's drunkenness or Judas' messy suicide without getting interesting questions (at best) or giving them scary dreams (at worst). For this reason, we must revisit stories when people are teens, young adults and fully into adulthood so that the stories can be better understood. Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac, specifically, when God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice Isaac. For a child, the story makes sense from Isaac's perspective. However, when a father hears this story, the empathy for Abraham's pain is clearly seen. I would even say that godly parenthood exposes God's love for us in the love found for one's children.

So here's a prayer for those who try to expose the truth of God at it's rawest and those who refuse to let God's story be apologized, domesticated and neutered.

Lent 4

When I was in high school my family was involved in starting a Saturday night service at our church. We were not following any models or had any idea what was going on other than we were full on Sunday mornings and Saturday night services were culturally acceptable because of the dominant Catholic influence in northern Ontario. My dad told stories. To the children officially, but anyone who has been in church with a decent story teller knows that the adults are all listening in, very interested.

Then our church spilt. It was so ugly it was funny. One of those 'God told us so you can't argue' deals.

In less than a year my dad went from storyteller to chair of the elder board. It was so beautiful it was funny. One of those 'what just happened?' deals.

After reading Intuitive Leadership tonight I thought of that history of mine and remarked to my invisible sidekick (a la Craig Ferguson) that, perhaps, it is genius to have great storytellers in leadership positions in a church. Mysteriously, storytellers have this quality of Jesus that many regular people do not have. The ability to transform communities through the telling of stories.

I wonder what would happen if, when considering people for leadership positions in the church, we considered their storytelling skills. What would happen if the key leaders were all storytellers?

To bring life with words.

Just like God.

Thank God for storytelling leaders.

Lent 3

Today I read the introduction of Tim Keel's Intuitive Leadership. I think one of the hardest part of this lent journal will be not reading ahead. It's a real discipline to refrain from reading books that I am interested in. Instead I need to spen my time reading my books for PESM, which I will be posting a bunch of my reading on here someday.

In teh introduction fo Keel's book he expressed the need in the postmodern world to go "beyond pragmatism." I think this is such a wonderful little package to express the massive shift happening in many churches. At Toccoa Falls, Doug White used to teach us that 'pragmatism is not the panacea.' This means that just becuase something works, does not mean it should be done. For a long time churches, especially evangelical churches have used pragmatism to justify practices that are harmful to the gospel. This is recognizable when people say, "Whatever it takes to get them in the door, right?" My answer is no. It's not alright to do whatever it takes to get them in the door. It's not.

That, I believe it one of the fundamental struggles for people engaging in ministry in a postmodern world. It's not about models and programs that work for me. Instead I would like to see what the real live gospel looks like lived in the context that I find myself in.

Lent 2

Today I will post on the acknowledgements. Like I said, these are small bites. The thing that I noticed right away in the introduction is that the leadership of the church is comprised of men and women, including husband and wife sets. There seems to be an influx of emerging church wives who possess the spiritual gift of leadership and want to exercise it. In the past it has been assumed, by and large, that the pastor's wife would take a supportive role, like playing in the band or leading the hcildren's ministry - and these have been productive models of church leadership. It is at least interesting to note that many young men who are becoming pastors are attracted to women who possess leadership gifts and want to partner with them in overall leadership of ministry.

I know that's true for me :)

Lent 1

Tim Keel's book, Intuitive Leaderhip is subtitled, Embracing a paradigm of narrative, metaphor and chaos. This subtitle is why I picked up the book. One of the things my Strentgh Finder test (which our staff did) talked about was my intuitive skill at knowing what the right things to do are. For some reason I am often able to discern what the right actions are, but I struggle at explaining my reasoning to others because it is almost an intuitive knowledge to me. It's like trying to explain to someone why they should jump when there is a loud noise. there's no reason, it's just the right thing to do!

To that end, today I will simply provide some quotes that resonate with the past journey I have been on. I figure I am a couple years into this thing and don't share some of the same frustrations as very young leaders, but I recognize it from my own journey. Also, Alan Roxburgh wrote the introduction, so it's quite inspirational for people who love Jesus' girlfriend the way I do (Jesus marries the church at the end of everything...that means we are his girlfriend right now...wrap your head around that...)

>p.10 "He has a strong sense of vocation...called into leadership...but feels stuck and frustrated. His sense is that something is not right...but he doesn't have the language to give words to his experience...He wants to discover friends and mentors with whom he can partner in this confusing time of transition."

>p.11 "There is little permission given to leaders to attend to the narratives going on inside themselves."

p.14 "Let's see how these narratives and metaphors shaping your life might provide all kinds of clues for the risky ways in which God is calling you to embrace the chaos of our time with hope and expectation."

Lent Blog

This year I am going to blog through my growth of lent. In our high school community called Driven (even though Marko says don't be Driven anymore...lol) we begin lent every year with an observation of Ash Wednesday. The students remark to me that they really like doing things that are tactile (not in those words) because it really helps them understand and experience truth, instead of just being taught about it. Each year on Ash Wednesday the seniors apply the ashes to all the other students and leaders while saying a blessing over them. It is such a powerful thing to see ninth grade students kneeling before a senior while they are receive the ashes. Perhaps even moreso when watching the adult leaders submit themselves to the seniors. For me, it's a beautiful picture of the kingdom of God, where no one is better than anyone else, we simply play the parts of God's story that he lets us.


So this year for lent I am going to be reading through a new book I bought with a Christmas gift card, Intuitive Leadership by Tim Keel. Tim is the founding pastor of Jacob's Well, an emerging church in Kansas City. Each day I am going to blog an interaction with what I read, or some other thoughts that are inspired by the little pieces (5-6) pages that I read.

Happy Lenting.