The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

This is the question Jim Martin hit us with yesterday during our afternoon session of the Waco Alliance. If Jesus were the preacher at Legacy, how would he go about his day? What would his week look like? What would he do that you do? What would he never do that you find yourself doing every day?

Weird question.

Weird, because I can’t imagine Jesus as a preacher at a church. Not a church in the way we do church today.

I look at Jesus in the Gospels and, yes, I definitely see a preacher. “Repent!” he preaches. “The Kingdom of God is near!” Oh, yeah, Jesus was certainly a preacher. And he ministered to people. All kinds of people. He taught Nicodemus. He consoled Mary and Martha. He healed the crippled and blind. He encouraged the outcast. He ate with the sinner. Jesus was a pastor/shepherd. On the road. In the desert. At the lake. In people’s homes. In the temple. At the market place. Jews and Gentiles. Sinners and saints. He preached and ministered. He did all the things I long to do. He is all the things I long to be.

But how would he be the preacher at Legacy?

The preacher at Legacy has an office. Four walls. Book shelves with lots of books. A desk. The preacher at Legacy is expected to be in this place, this preacher space, every day. An office. With a phone. And a computer. A lamp. Paper clips and staples and a printer. Emails and messages and blogs. Writing sermons. Practicing sermons. Re-writing sermons. Pens and paper. Budgets and meetings and meetings about budgets. Lunch at the drive-thru and then back in my space.

I imagine Jesus would not keep regular office hours. He might not have an office at all.

And I sometimes find myself living in this office. Living here.

How would Jesus do my job?

I wrote three more paragraphs here and then, after re-reading them a couple of times, deleted them. I’ve got some soul-searching to do. I’ve got some serious questions to answer. I have to be a disciple of Christ first and a church “preacher” second. The lines are blurred more often than not. I’ve got to figure out if that’s good or bad.

Peace,

 Allan

It was never really cool to be from P-Grove.

Until now.

As a kid growing up in Pleasant Grove, a once proud community in the southeast corner of Dallas — I’ve always assumed it was proud at one time, long before I was on the scene —I always knew we weren’t as well off as most everybody else in Dallas. I don’t think I ever lacked for a thing. But it was obvious, especially since my siblings and I went to private Dallas Christian about 15-minutes north, that the cool people lived somewhere else.

I distinctly remember a school-sponsored overnight trip to Camp Deer Run when we were kids. It was pouring down rain and blowing really hard and lightning and thundering and our teachers and counselors gathered us in the dining hall. They told us that a tornado had been reported in Dallas but “it’s OK, there’s no need to worry, the tornado was reported in Pleasant Grove.”

Pleasant Grove has been the butt of the Dallas jokes for at least 35-40 years now, maybe longer. People who live in P-Grove are called Grove Rats. It seems that 90-percent of the shootings reported on the evening news occur in Pleasant Grove. When I’ve driven my kids through the Grove to see my boyhood home, they’ve always reacted with horror. Carrie-Anne clicks the car doors locked as soon as we take the Scyene Road exit.

Can anything good come out of Pleasant Grove?

The Bruton IV theater just west of Bruton Road and Prarie Creek is where I experienced Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Pleasant Grove branch of the Dallas public library, on South Buckner Boulevard, is where I checked out all of Beverly Cleary’s books about Henry Huggins and Ralph, the motorcycle-riding mouse. The Pleasant Oaks recreation center, just about two miles down Jennie Lee Lane, is where we played ping-pong and basketball. That’s where dad pushed us so fast around the merry-go-round we thought we would either die laughing or choking on puke. It’s where I played three sets of tennis in that record 113-degree heat of a summer day in 1980. In my blue jeans. The 7-11 at the corner of Prarie Creek and Bruton is where I spent hours playing Asteroids and slurping Slurpees. The Pleasant Grove Church of Christ, on Conner Drive, is where I was baptized into Christ. Our three-bedroom house on Terra Alta Circle is where I learned how to be a family. The old Gibson’s store where I made my first major purchase: an $89 ten-speed bike, with lawnmowing money. Craving the ninety-nine cent hamburgers at Griff’s. Pulling the levers on the cigarette machines at Dairy Queen where my grandmother worked. The Circle Grill at Buckner and I-30. Doorknocking the apartments off Lake June Road. Learning to drive on Military Parkway. Twilight Time skating rink. (Oops. Sorry. I was only going to list positive memories in this paragraph.)

Jim Martin came out of P-Grove. That’s pretty cool. When he and I get together for our monthly meetings in Waco or run into one another in Austin or Abilene, our conversation inevitably turns to something only Rats like us could appreciate. And when Jim told me a couple of months ago that Stanley Hauerwas, the great American theologian and one of my favorite authors, was born and raised in the Grove, I was skeptical.

But here’s the proof. Today’s Dallas Morning News carries a front-page story (below the fold) about Hauerwas’ roots in Pleasant Grove. He’s just released a memoir, Hannah’s Child, that details a lot of his childhood experiences as the only son of a Pleasant Grove bricklayer, faithful members of the Pleasant Mound Methodist Church. From there, Hauerwas has gone on to lecture and write and teach and preach. Yale Divinity School. Notre Dame. Duke Divinity School. He’s one of the great theological thinkers of our time.

My favorite work of his is Resident Aliens. Living as Christians in a pagan land. The Church as a colony of outsiders in the middle of hostile territory. Read it. It’s challenging. Convicting. You won’t be the same after you’ve digested Resident Aliens. You won’t view God’s Church or God’s mission for his Church the same way. His writings have certainly had a profound impact on shaping my theology. Hauerwas is a genius.

And he’s from the Grove.

The Dallas Morning News article mentions that Hauerwas graduated from Samuell High School in 1958. My dad was a Samuell Spartan, class of 1960! Is there any chance? Could they have known each other? Is it even possible? I took my driver’s education at Samuell. But does my dad know Hauerwas?

He doesn’t. I just called. My dad doesn’t even have a 1958 Samuell year book, only a ‘59 and ‘60.

That’s allright. Today, it’s a little bit cooler to be from the Grove.

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The magic number is 26. Any combination of 26 wins by the Rangers and losses by the A’s gives our baseball team their first division title since 1999. Do you realize that there are only 32 games remaining? If the Rangers go 16-16 the rest of the way — no chance since Cruz comes back tonight and Kinsler’s scheduled to be in the lineup by this weekend — Oakland would have to go 25-8 to win the A.L.West.

I remember well those Red Octobers from the late ’90s. Whitney doesn’t. This is fun.

Peace,

Allan

“Lukewarm people say they love Jesus, and he is, indeed, a part of their lives. But only a part. They give him a section of their time, their money, their thoughts, but he isn’t allowed to control their lives.” ~Francis Chan, Crazy Love, p.72

As I consider my own discipleship to Christ, my own calling to deny myself and take up my cross and follow my Lord, I don’t want to be mediocre about any of it. I don’t want to hold anything back. I want to give him and “it” — my discipleship — my all.

And if I’m not careful, it’s easy for me to feel like I’m doing that simply because I’m a preacher.

Hey, look at everything I gave up. Look at all of my sacrifice. Look at the tremendous risks I took. I left my radio career. I sold the house and moved to Austin to get theological training, trusting God to provide. And now I’m preaching the Gospel. I’m teaching Bible classes. I’m ministering to people. I’m promoting church programs. I’ve given it all to God.

The honest truth is that I’m not sure I’ve really given up anything. It’s not really risky or hard, it’s not really a sacrifice to preach at Legacy. It’s a huge upper-middle class church in a suburb just minutes away from our families and stomping grounds in a wonderful part of Texas in the wealthiest country in world history. I get paid tons of money, I have a massive house with a pool, two nice cars, health insurance, a savings account, and an air-conditioned office with a big desk and a swivel chair.

I look at Manuel and Yvina Calderon and the work God is doing through them at Siempre Familia in the Rosemont area of Fort Worth and I see sacrifice. I see front-line Christian ministry. I see people being impacted, lives being eternally changed, by the Gospel. I look at David and Olivia Nelson in Kharkov, Ukraine and I see real risk and hard-core faith for Christ. I see them leaving everything behind to take Jesus to people who’ve never heard.

When I look at myself, I’m sometimes afraid that my discipleship doesn’t add up.

I’m not comparing myself to these missionaries. I don’t think that’s right. And I don’t feel guilty about the house and the cars. I use those to God’s glory and to bless other people in Christ’s name. I just don’t want to become complacent. I don’t want to settle. Yes, that’s what I’m trying to say: I don’t want to settle.

Because it’s easy to settle.

It’s easy for us preachers, I think, to slip into a very un-Christ-like mentality and pattern. Eugene Peterson describes it in Working the Angles (I think, I don’t have time to look it up) as church chaplains, holding the hands of the saved. Just kind of babysitting the faithful. Making life comfortable for the saints. Working to help the Christians feel better about themselves and their church. Religious shopkeeping.

That’s a pretty comfortable life for a preacher, too.

I don’t want that. I want all of my life — every moment, every action, every reaction, every interaction — to be lived not from a sense of self but from a sense of God. I want to hold myself to the high standard of my calling as a disciple of my risen Lord. I don’t want to compromise. When I’m writing a sermon, when people come to me for advice, when I’m teaching a class, when I’m counseling a friend, I want to give it my all from a deep sense of the God who lives in us and whose Spirit is working to transform us from the inside out. If my primary orientation is of my God, then I must be committed enough that when people ask me to do or say something that will not lead them into a more mature participation in Christ I refuse. I don’t compromise.

But it’s so easy to settle.

Not everybody I talk to wants to jump all the way in. Not everybody in our church is willing to go all the way. Chan says I have to “sprint up the down escalator, putting up with perturbed looks from everyone else who is gradually moving downward.” Peterson says it’s hard because the people who would rather we just settle into a nice, comfortable Christianity and Christian ministry are all “nice, intelligent, treat us with respect, and pay our salaries.”

I . Don’t . Want . To . Settle .

But it’s so easy to settle.

Allan

I’m in the middle of Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection. It’s the fifth and final book in his series of “conversations in spiritual theology.” It just came out. I’m devouring it. It centers on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, especially the line in Ephesians 4:13 about “attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” What does it mean to grow in Christ? What does spiritual maturity look like? How do we measure it? Why doesn’t spiritual growth, development of the mind of Christ, seem to be as high a priority in our churches as it does in our Scriptures?

See, it’s really easy to put down the Church. It’s easy to dismiss the Church as ineffective. Irrelevant. It’s easy to be condescending toward the Church because the Church appears to be in such a mess. It seems that the Church has had little impact, if any, in making any headway toward peace and good will on earth. Nobody’s clamoring to get inside. Nobody’s breaking down our doors to get closer to God. The world is coming out of the bloodiest and most violent century in history. And this current century appears to be determined to pass it. What good is the Church?

Well, Peterson’s point is that maybe we’ve got the purposes of the Church all wrong. Maybe the expectations we have of Church are wrong. At the very least, they’re not big enough.

Peterson points to a term coined by C. S. Lewis way back in 1952: deep church. It helps convey the ocean fathoms of all that God is doing in and with and through his Church. Things seen and unseen, things from eternity past to eternity future, things here and there, things God started long ago that are being finished today, things that are being started by God today that won’t be fulfilled in our lifetimes. Deep church.

“It takes both sustained effort and a determined imagination to understand and embrace church in its entirety. Casual and superficial experience with church often leaves us with an impression of bloody fights, acrimonious arguments, and warring factions. These are more than regrettable; they are scandalous. But they don’t define church. There are deep continuities that sustain church at all times and everywhere as primarily and fundamentally God’s work, however Christians and others may desecrate and abuse it.

Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, lethal injection, and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life. This practice is not a vague wish upwards but comprises a number of discrete but interlocking acts that maintain a credible and faithful way of life, Real Life, in a world preoccupied with death and the devil.

These practices include the worship of God in all the operations of the Trinity; the acceptance of a resurrection, born-from-above identity in baptism; the embrace of resurrection formation by eating and drinking Christ’s resurrection body and blood at the Lord’s Table; attentive reading of and obedience to the revelation of God in the Scriptures; prayer that cultivates an intimacy with realities that are inaccessible to our senses; confession and forgiveness of sins; welcoming the stranger and outcast; working and speaking for justice, healing, and truth, sanctity and beauty; care for all the stuff of creation. The practice of resurrection encourages improvisation on the basic resurrection story as given in our Scriptures and revealed in Jesus. Thousands of derivative unanticipated resurrection details proliferate across the landscape. The company of people who practice resurrection replicates the way of Jesus on the highways and byways named and numbered on all the maps of the world.

This is the Church.”

Massive. Eternal. Rich. Huge. Deep.

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I am honored to be invited by Rick Ross to speak tonight at the Decatur Church of Christ. Rick was our preaching minister at Mesquite when Carrie-Anne and I were there from 2000-2003. And I believe Rick is the first preacher I ever seriously listened to. Really. Of course, I’ve been listening to preaching since the day I was born. But Rick is the first preacher I ever really paid attention to. Not just his sermons, which were powerful and bold, but his life.

Rick carried himself in a godly way. Patient. Gentle. Encouraging. Cheerful. Determined. Strong. His preaching came out of that life. His sermons were born out of his own walk with our God. He was Thomas Long’s Witness of Preaching before I had ever heard of Thomas Long or read his book. It moved me, the way Rick lived and preached, preached and lived. Yes, there were other things going on in my life then. I was growing in Christ, I was maturing in my faith, I was thinking differently about eternal matters and God’s purposes for me. But Rick was all over that. God was working in him and through him to teach me.

Rick and Beverly treated me with great patience and understanding even as I acted selfishly and foolishly in church settings and congregational matters. They embraced my family. They showed me grace. They taught me grace.

Watching Rick and learning from him helped motivate me to answer God’s call to preach his Word. I’m so thankful for the ways God used Rick to shape me during those short years in Mesquite. I’m grateful for the rock solid example of faithfulness and trust in God that Rick has been to me and everyone who knows him since February. And I’m honored to speak to his church tonight in Decatur.

Peace,

Allan

Like many of you, I receive a two-page email from David and Olivia Nelson every Monday afternoon. The Nelsons are Legacy’s missionaries to Kharkov, Ukraine, the ones Carrie-Anne and I traveled to see a couple of weeks ago. The weekly email is a prayer request list. Two pages of names and circumstances that David and Olivia would like for us to lift up to our Father in intercessory prayer.

Confession: I have always just skimmed the email.

I’ve always just looked for the highlights. I look for two or three big things — by my definition of big, right? — and I pray about those. And then I print the email and stick it in the Legacy Morning Prayers folder for the other ministers and elders until the next list comes the following Monday.

The email came yesterday, right on schedule. And I must have spent 45-minutes on it.

After spending eleven days in Ukraine with these brothers and sisters in Christ, they’re real to me. After spending a week-and-a-half over there with these people David and Olivia know, these folks with whom they’re sharing the great news of salvation from God in Christ Jesus, they’re real to me. This weekly prayer request list from six-thousand miles away in Kharkov is no longer a black-and-white ledger of names. It’s a techni-color, HD, 3-D, surround-sound, IMAX presentation of the power of God in his people. These names have faces now. And families. And stories. And dreams. These people have history and heartache and hope. They laugh and they cry and they work and they worry. They have funny accents and peculiar habits and quirky customs.

And God is doing something with them. With all of them.

I look at this two-page list of emailed prayer requests and I see Andrei’s name. But it’s not Andrei’s name anymore, it’s Andrei. I see him. He’s the funny little guy who looks like Billy Crystal but thinks and speaks like he just stepped out of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was baptized in the McDougle’s bathtub on a Lord’s Day last fall. He took off work to personally walk me through Liberty Square. He showed me the 500-year-old cathedrals. He got me into the second-largest Jewish synagogue in Europe. He beat my back almost bloody with some kind of a ceremonial branch in a Ukrainian sauna. We talked together about leadership in the Church. He’s pushing their group to get involved with a local orphanage. Andrei. I love Andrei. Not a name. A great man whom God is saving.

There’s Victoria’s name again. But it’s not just a name anymore. I know Victoria. I’ve shared wonderful meals with Victoria. Of course, she just stared at the walls and didn’t say more than two words the times we were together. She asked me about Texas and then quickly looked away while I told her about 12-lane highways and 900-member churches and sprawling metropolitan cities and suburbs. Victoria. Shy. Bashful. An intelligent teacher of elementary school children. David and Olivia are studying the Old Testament with her. God is working on her.

Valerie. As Costanza would say, Valerie is a “well-proportioned young man.” He looks like he could walk on and play ball right now for your alma mater. Red hair. Big dreams. He says he wants to preach. I’ve seen that he already does. His English is as good as his Russian. He translates for preachers and teachers all over Ukraine. He works with disadvantaged children. He translated for me as I preached upstairs in the Hindman’s apartment last Sunday night. I waited while he figured how to communicate my American-isms like “wrapped around her finger” and “jump for joy.” He talked with me afterward about how he had no Russian word that spoke to Christ’s love that “compels” us. We also talked about his long-ago marital problems and separation from his wife Julia. And about how God brought them back together. Restoration. Reconciliation. Gospel. God’s preparing Valerie to do something huge for the Kingdom.

Kevin. I travel halfway around the world to Ukraine to meet a guy from Japan with an American name. Kevin’s in Kharkov getting his Master’s degree in sports management. I taught him how to throw an American football in an American spiral. He calls me coach. He leaves to go back to Japan in three months. I’ll probably never see him again. And I have no clue what God is going to do with him.

Alexander. He’s a dentist and an oral surgeon. He told me in front of everybody that drinking diet soda was bad for my teeth. He’s very deliberate in word and deed. He knows the Bible. He speaks pretty good English except when he uses the word “naked.” When we were reading Genesis 3, he kept saying “nak-d.” One syllable. He never made fun of me when I mispronounced “Ochin Priatna” (nice to meet you). So I never laughed when he said “nak-d.”

Yelena. David and Olivia’s Russian language teacher. Faked being impressed by the six words I knew. Taught me how to say “love” (lublu). Laughed with Carrie-Anne and me as we learned about “choot-choot.”

Vlad. Huge smile. Super quiet. Unless he’s singing. Very loud and wonderful when he’s singing.

Robert seemed to understand every single thing I was preaching that night. Gene knows all the differences between our English NIVs and his Russian text of the Scriptures. Katia is a tireless servant. Masha is an energetic fire-ball. Sasha looks Asian, talks like a California valley girl, volunteers with the Peace Corps, and can’t manage the Kharkov trains system. Valeria, Olivia’s doctor, is a generous and compassionate care-giver in any setting. Sergei, who once served hard time in a Ukrainian prison, is now preaching the Gospel in the northeast part of Kharkov with a ten-year-old congregation of about nine souls. He shook my hand and said, “Please tell the brothers and sisters at Legacy ‘hi’ for us and that we are praying for them.”

These are real brothers and sisters. These are real flesh and blood children of God. I have worshiped our Father with them. I went there to encourage them. But, instead, they encouraged me. They moved me by singing “Nearer My God to Thee” and “Lamb of God” in Russian. They honored me by sharing with me the bread and the wine. They thanked our Lord that we were there and prayed for our safe travels. They opened up their homes and their hearts to us.

That burden of the church I feel just got heavier. I care about these people. I worry about these people. I love this little growing group, this little community of faith, God is constructing six-thousand miles away. And now I need much, much more time with David and Olivia’s weekly prayer requests.

Peace,

Allan

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” ~Matthew 16:15

Peter answers his Lord by confessing Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In similar circumstances — we could argue we live 24 hours a day in that circumstance — we would all make that Christian confession.

And Jesus would respond, “Blessed are you, Allan. Blessed are you, Joe. Blessed are you, Jane. Blessed are you (insert your own name).

And we’d just sit there, together, basking in the quiet moment, reflecting on the eternal implications of that confession.

And then what if you broke that silence by turning the question back on Jesus? What if you asked Jesus, “Who do you say I am?” You ever thought about that? What would Jesus say if you asked him who he says you are? You know he has an opinion. He knows you. He knows everything about you. What you say. What you do. The ways you think. He knows. And you ask him…

“…Who do you say I am?”

Well, what does he say?

I think Jesus would say, “Allan, you are a faithful proclaimer of the Gospel. You are a compassionate minister in the Kingdom.”

See, Jesus would always go to the positives first. That’s the way he operates. Our tendencies are to see the negatives first. Even in our self-evaluations, we look at the negatives and blow them out of proportion. But Jesus would initially attend to the good things about us. It’s called grace.

And then, I’m afraid my Lord would say, “Allan, you have a real lack of trust in me. Your faith isn’t nearly as strong as it should be by now. And you have a real problem with looking at things from a worldly perspective. Even things in my Church. You make judgments and decisions based on worldly principles.”

He would say other things about areas in my life I’m needing to change. But he would probably keep coming back to my lack of faith.

If you were to ask Jesus, “Who do you say I am?” what would he say?

Seriously.

He has an opinion.

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The cops are coming to get me at noon today. No Thursday hoops. I’ll be in jail in Bedford trying to raise the rest of the $1,480 bail money needed for MDA. As of this writing, we’ve raised $950. Thank you, thank you, thank you! If you’d like to contribute to the cause, please click here. Again, thank you.

Peace,

Allan

God is not finished with me yet. Praise the Lord, he’s not done! He’s still working on me. And, by the power of his Holy Spirit, he uses people and circumstances and books and friends and strangers and situations to shape me more into the image of his great Son.

Right now our Father is using Kipi’s class on conflict resolution and a little book recommended by my great friend Jim Martin to show me how to better manage myself as a preacher. I especially want to share one wonderful insight and recent conclusion that has greatly reduced my burden and given me great comfort and peace. And freedom.

I’m afraid my private conversations with friends and church shepherds — those inside and outside our congregation at Legacy — involve some form of the question, “How can I get these people to….?” I’m afraid that’s my mindset. When seeking advice from others or when wrestling with our God in prayer, I often ask, “How can I get these people to listen? How can I get these elders to understand? How can I get these volunteers to act? How can I get these church members to think? How can I get these brothers and sisters to see?”

That kind of thinking and acting, that sort of mindset, would easily lead to frustration, don’t you suppose?

In her book Leaders Who Last, Margaret Marcuson says preachers should stop asking those kinds of questions and, instead, ask, “What am I called to say to them this week?”

I am responsible to do my best to preach God’s Word as I understand it to my congregation every week. I am responsible for challenging our church family and calling them to repent and live their lives worthy of our calling. I’m ordained to provoke them by God’s Word to do more and to be more. And that’s about it. These people are responsible before God for what they do with that Word each week. I can’t make anybody do anything.

It’s not, “How can I get them to…?” It’s, “What am I called to say?”

That takes the pressure off. That brings me great relief and peace of mind. It helps me trust more completely in God. Less of self and more of thee. Because if my faith really is in my Lord, if I really do believe he’s working through me in this church to transform all of us, I can relax. I don’t have to worry about taking care of everybody because I know the results of my preaching don’t depend on me. They depend wholly on God.

Marcuson says a church needs to be led, not driven.

“The concept is clear: people are not acquitted of the responsibility for their own souls. Personal decisions are still decisions, personal judgments are still judgments, free will is still free will. Being in a family does not relieve a child of the responsibility to grow up. The function of twenty-one-year-olds is not to do life’s tasks as their parents told them to when they were six-years-old. The function of twenty-one-year-olds is simply to do the same tasks well and to take accountability themselves for having done them… The role of leadership is not to make lackeys or foot soldiers or broken children out of adult Christians.”

Probably the best thing I can do as a preacher is to teach the Word of God, to communicate my understanding as clearly as I can, challenge my hearers, and then give them room — and time! — to respond.

Look at Jesus. He preaches and teaches out of this amazing position of relaxed trust. Trust in God and trust in people. He simply says, “Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.” If Jesus can give that kind of room and time to others, without chasing after them and hounding them for their own good, maybe I should give more effort to doing the same thing.

Peace,

Allan

“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” ~1 Corinthians 10:31

We’re studying conflict management and peace-making in a Wednesday night class here at Legacy. I’m not teaching it. Kipi is. And, man, I’m learning a lot.

I’m learning that the way we handle conflict is greatly influenced by all kinds of different factors such as personality, age, gender, upbringing, and even socio-economic status. I’m learning that until I understand my own conflict management style, I’ll never adequately understand yours enough to resolve our issues. I’m being reminded that I can only change myself, I’ll never change you. And it’s being reaffirmed in here that, yes, there is a big difference between peace-keeping and peace-making.

I’ve learned that my “conflict style” is to try to build relationship and consensus by getting everyone’s thoughts out on the table for open and honest discussion and evaluation. But it seems I’m just as likely to “give and take” as I am to “compete” in a conflict situation. Oops. That’s not good. I’ve also had it confirmed in interviews with co-workers here in the church offices that Carrie-Anne’s been absolutely right about me in a lot of ways for many years. That’s not all good either.

I’m learning. At least I’m more aware of my strengths and shortcomings now and am working to be a better communicator and conflict resolver. Mostly, though, I think we could all benefit from what Kipi shared with us this week:

Conflict is NEVER an opportunity to force my will on others.
Conflict is NEVER an inconvenience.
Conflict is ALWAYS an opportunity to demonstrate God’s love and power.

I believe our God uses our conflicts with each other to shape us more into the image of his Son. The ways we treat others, especially in times of stress or disagreement, reveal exactly what kind of a person we are. Our motivations in those conflicts say a lot about our continuing transformation by the Spirit. It’s not easy when you ask a hundred people — or a thousand — to get intimately involved in each other’s lives. It’s messy. We’re all different. We’re all fearfully and wonderfully made to be different. Our great diversity is intentional. It’s God-ordained. Getting along with each other is the goal. It’s what molds us into the image of our Creator.

Conflict is ALWAYS an opportunity.

Thanks, Kipi. I like that. And I’m trying to see it that way now.

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When the Soviet Union collapsed 20-years ago, we flooded Russia with Christian missionaries. In that time, several churches have been established and Christianity is flourishing there. Slowly but surely, I suppose. One of the great works and proof of our God’s activity in Russia is the Institute of Theology and Christian Ministry in St. Petersburg. Several of our Church of Christ University Bible professors, including my brother, Keith, at Harding, volunteer to teach there for a quick semester on their own dime. Igor Egirev, President of ITCM will be speaking at the Prestoncrest Church of Christ in Dallas Tuesday evening May 18th. The Psalom Quartet, also from St. Petersburg, will be singing at the event. They’ve edified us before at an Austin Grad Sermon Seminar. It’s beautiful. It should be a wonderful evening. I recommend it.

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I’m hearing today that Cowboys’ number-one pick Dez Bryant is going to wear #88 in Dallas. I’m wondering if it’s because of Jerry Wayne’s outrageous debt and that mortgage on the Dome. You know, he still had a bunch of Antonio Bryant’s old #88s in a closet downstairs and figured, yeah, let’s do it. You think there’s any six-or-seven-year-old Bryant souvenirs in a Cowboys warehouse somewhere that they’re digging out today? I’m concerned that this Bryant is going to remind us more of Michael Irvin than Drew Pearson. You know, there are reasons he slipped down to 24th overall. His best friend and unofficial agent, Deion Sanders, is probably somewhere on that list.

Go Mavs,

Allan

“God gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” ~Romans 4:17

Our Father doesn’t see Sarah’s barren womb; he sees the birth of a great nation. God doesn’t see a drowning prophet; he sees 120,000 Ninevites calling on his name. He doesn’t see a rejected Samaritan woman on her sixth husband; he see a powerful evangelist who converts an entire village. Our God doesn’t see a dark grave in a garden outside the streets of Jerusalem; he sees the light of eternal life walking out of that tomb to eternally defeat the powers of sin and death.

“God gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.”

I see our worship center at Legacy this Sunday with more than 1,600 people in it. Maybe 1,700. It depends. I see Doug Crowell and Steve Fleming scrambling to grab chairs and line the aisles as people just keep coming in. I see people who haven’t been to Legacy in months singing and worshiping God with tears in their eyes. I see visitors, our friends and neighbors, who don’t know our Risen Lord being confronted with the truth of the Gospel of salvation and being moved by our God to respond in faith. I see wet people climbing out of a baptistry, saved by the blood of the Lamb. I see the North Richland Hills fire marshal writing us warning citations for violating occupancy codes. I see our God exceeding our wildest expectations for Easter Sunday and our Resurrection Renewal.

Do you see it?

I know you’re praying about it. But, do you see it?

Invite those people you haven’t seen here in a while. Reach out to that man across the street. Hand a flyer to your dry cleaning guy or the lady who cuts your hair. And this weekend, let us call on our God who gives life to the dead to “call things that are not as though they were.”

I can’t wait to meet your friends!

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One of our teens at Legacy is doing some kind of a school project that involved me giving her my list of the top ten most important books of all time. It was fun. I thought I’d share. These are the books that have had a dramatic impact on my life and have served to shape my mindset and worldview. In no particular order:

The Bible (OK, the first one’s in a particular order…)
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
The Reason for God by Timothy Keller
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Tending the Heart of Virtue by Vigen Guroian
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Looking back at this list now, I wish I had put H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights in there. I guess I’d take out Grapes of Wrath or the Decline and Fall.

Peace,

Allan

As is often the case, my posts on this blog are things I’ve thought about and studied about and prayed about in relation to Legacy’s Sunday sermon but didn’t actually preach. Sometimes these posts are things I wanted to say on Sunday — intended to say — but, for a variety of reasons, didn’t.

This is one of those posts.

We’re immersing ourselves in the story of Jonah here at Legacy this month as we build towards our annual Missions Sunday on March 28. This past week we considered God’s call to take the good news of his salvation to all peoples, specifically our enemies.

God wants all the people of Nineveh saved. He wants them to repent and come into a relationship with him. And God intends to use Jonah to make it happen. But Jonah doesn’t want to participate in the redemption of this particular people. So the prophet runs to get lost in another culture. He heads west to Tarshish, the farthest point west known in Jonah’s day. Yhwh is not honored in Tarshish. He’s not even known there.

Jonah knows he can’t run away from God. But he can go to another place, another world, where maybe he can escape God’s call. Jonah maybe can immerse himself in worldly things. He can become overly occupied with possessions and status and busy-ness and career and sports and home ownership. Maybe a wife and kids. If he can just get away from the temple and from a lot of church people trying to tell him what to do, maybe Jonah can find some peace.

Of course, Jonah never got that chance.

God’s call on your life is unmistakable. It’s clear. You understand exactly what it is. But are you avoiding it?

I felt my God’s call to preach for years. And for years I said ‘no.’ I rationalized my rejection of the call. I was working at KRLD! I was the Sports Director at the Texas Rangers flagship station in a top-ten market! I was already doing enough. I was being a good influence there. I was shining like a light. Don’t talk to me about preaching the gospel, I’ve got work to do! God needs me here at the Ballpark!

Turns out I was just hiding at the Ballpark. Running away from the call. I’m sure God could have used me in radio. I’m sure he wanted to. But I wasn’t letting him. I was afraid. Or maybe I just wasn’t that interested. I was preoccupied with chasing my own dreams to insure my own comfort. Jonah tried to hide in the hull of a pagan ship. I was hiding in the tunnels at a stadium in Arlington.

In what ways are you avoiding God’s call on your life? What is God wanting to do with you and through you that you’re not letting him do? What are you running away from? Where are you hiding? In your job? In your recreation activities? In your family?

Why don’t you come on out? It’s beautiful up here. Getting involved in people. Getting into the middle of their broken lives. Talking to them about the miracle of salvation, the power of the empty tomb, the promise of the Resurrection, the glory we share in our risen Lord. Helping people. Encouraging people. Guiding people. Sharing their burdens. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. And, by far, the most rewarding. You might not be called to preach. But I’m certain our God is calling you to something big for the Kingdom. Something really big. Something he’s equipped you for and empowered you to do. And maybe you’re scared. Or uninterested.

Stop hiding. Commit right now, today, to doing exactly what our God is calling you to do. Act now and avoid the hungry fish!

Peace,

Allan