The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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I Worship the Lord

October 6, 2014 / / 0 Comments

“I worship the Lord, the God of Heaven, who made the sea and the land.” ~Jonah 1:9

I imagine that when Jonah paid his fare and collected his ticket and boarded that ship to Tarshish, he never dreamed of talking to the boat’s crew about God. They would never listen. If he asked them to respond to his God, they would just say “no.” These kinds of people — these pagan sailors with their different gods and values, different cultures and beliefs and lifestyles — are not interested in the Lord.

But in the middle of that violent storm, as the wind and the waves grow increasingly stronger and the ship begins to break up, the sailors begin to fear for their lives. They’re drawing straws, casting lots, trying to figure out who or what is to blame for this great trouble. And Jonah, in the middle of the storm, in the middle of the turmoil and fear and noise and anxiety and panic — he answers their questions with a confession.

“I worship the Lord, the God of Heaven, who made the sea and the land.”

And that’s all it took.

Jonah confesses the Lord. The sailors reluctantly acted on Jonah’s instructions by throwing him overboard. And they begin calling on the name of the Lord. Praying to God. Begging God for forgiveness. And when the storm goes away and the seas grow calm, they greatly fear the Lord. They revere the Lord. They’re in awe. And they’re moved. They offer sacrifices to God and they make vows. They make commitments to him right there on the spot.

Jonah confessed the Lord to these pagan sailors. The sailors saw the great power of God. They experienced the merciful salvation of God. And their lives were changed.

This part of the story tells me that the world we live in is not closed to our faithful witness. Even if it’s a weak witness.

Hey, this world is in a crisis. This world is desperate. It’s hopeless. It’s grasping at straws, rolling the dice, shaking the magic 8-ball, grasping for truth, dying for something solid to believe in, anxious for something stable to hold on to. And so many people we run in to are wide open to the truth of our God. If we’ll just confess it in front of them.

The sailors were not looking for this witness. They weren’t looking for Jonah’s statement of faith. They weren’t looking for the Creator of Heaven and Earth. They didn’t know what they were looking for. But through Jonah’s witness — as weak as it was — they encountered our God and experienced his salvation. They acknowledged their helplessness in rowing against the storm on their own. They believed in God and his Word and they acted on it. And they worshiped him in reverence and in awe.

Your witness may be weak. But your God is strong. Your testimony may not be much more than “I worship the Lord.” But your God is ready to use that testimony to change the lives of the people around you.

Peace,

Allan

Central has 750 Ministers

September 29, 2014 / / 0 Comments

We swore in almost 750 men, women, and children yesterday as ministers at the Central Church of Christ. Borrowing from the Gospel accounts of the feeding of the multitudes in which the disciples asked Jesus for a way to solve the problem and Jesus responded by telling his followers, “You give them something to eat,” we declared that everybody in our Lord’s Kingdom is a Christian minister. We are all priests, saved and sanctified by God to serve as powerful mediators between him and humanity.

As priests, we reflect the holiness of God. We are holy because God is holy. And that holiness will not be compromised or conditioned. We are set apart. We are ordained by God for his purposes and to his eternal praise.

As priests, we offer spiritual sacrifices to God. We give our bodies to God. We give our money to God. We submit our very lives to God so that everything we do and say and think is offered to him.

We intercede like priests. We grab our brothers and sisters and we take them to God in prayer. We bring them into God’s presence and intercede for their healing and forgiveness and blessings and peace.

And, as priests, we represent God before others. We bless people. We take what God has given us and we, in turn, give it to others. We graciously share his love and mercy, his comfort and forgiveness, to everyone we meet with his power and authority as his holy priests.

A lot of us, though, are paralyzed. We’re stuck. We see things that need to be done, but we wait on somebody else to do them. We know something’s wrong, but we count on somebody else to fix it. We hear that somebody’s hurting, but we wonder if it’s any of our business. We’re especially susceptible to this in a big church. We recognize a hole that needs to be plugged or a problem that needs to be solved or a brother who needs a visit, and we don’t do anything. And then we wonder why it didn’t get done.

We are all powerful priests in God’s sight. Nobody in God’s Church has more power or authority or more permission than anyone else. We’re all the same. We have different gifts, certainly. But we’re all called to serve. Nobody’s exempt. We’re all authorized to pray and teach. We’re all authorized to comfort and minister, to encourage and bless. We all have the same permission.

To drive the point home, we passed out 750 little sheriff’s badge stickers at the conclusion of our lesson, pinned them on one another, and we swore everybody in as ministers in God’s Church. We all stood and raised our right hands and recited these vows together out loud:

“I do solemnly swear as a faithful member of God’s royal priesthood to act like a priest. I promise to henceforth and forever more regard myself as a minister in God’s Church. I promise to honor and respect and love and cherish my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. I promise to encourage and not tear down, to bless and not curse, to submit and to serve in compassion and kindness until Christ Jesus returns. As a minister and a priest in God’s Kingdom, this is my pledge as surely as the Lord shall live. Amen.”

With those gold stars pinned to our chests, we all looked like we belonged in a saloon scene in a corny old western movie. But when the words began coming out of our mouths, and the weight of our promises began to take hold, the worship center was transformed into a sacred place where we acknowledged the wisdom and power of our God who would dare to partner with us in his work of redeeming the world.

Peace,

Allan

 

Quick Hits on Friday

September 26, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m headed to Dallas today with our youngest daughter, Carley, for the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert at American Airlines Center. This is Carley’s birthday present — something she specifically asked for — and I’m all too happy to accommodate. I get to spend awesome alone time with her for the next 30+ hours, I get to share her first big arena concert experience with her, and I can use the opportunity to instill Rock and Roll deeper into her heart and soul. After seeing what has happened to Valerie, I’m concerned that, the longer we live in Amarillo, the chances of Carley eventually turning toward country music increase. I’ve got to do all I can. She’s my last hope.

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Adam Gray turned me on to a wonderful little reflection piece by Richard Beck, the head of the Psychology Department at Abilene Christian University, on how he makes theological sense of listening to Barbara Brown Taylor and Stanley Hauerwas on back-to-back days at Summit. As someone who has read and thoroughly enjoyed Barbara Brown Taylor’s books on preaching and is still reading and learning from Stanley Hauerwas’ books on theology and ethics, I have found Beck’s insights to be very, very helpful. You can read Beck’s analysis by clicking here.

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I will also recommend a wonderful essay in the current issue of Christianity Today by N. D. Wilson. “Called to Be Uncool” is a short piece and a serious call for Christians to stand against the prevailing culture, to resist conforming to the world’s culture, in order to effectively speak a word from the Lord and to live in the name and manner of Christ. The imagery is of cows that turn their backs to the wind so they’re continuously running parallel to the breeze. Wilson writes that we “must be fearless, immune to the pressures of kings and crowds, aligned only with the breath of God.” Whew! It’s good. You can read the entire essay by clicking here.

Have a great weekend.

Peace,

Allan

ACU Summit: Day Two

September 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I know what Summit Director Brady Brice means now when he says, “Wow… we’ve reached the peak. And the view from up here is spectacular.” It’s been a great past 24-hours. Kevin Schaffer and several members of our Central praise team led our time of worship last night in Moody Coliseum leading up to the evening’s keynote. What a great job they did. And I found myself increasing in gratitude to God that I am blessed by their gifts every week in our church assemblies. I spent a wonderful six or seven minutes today talking with one of my theological heroes, Stanley Hauerwas, about our common upbringing in the Grove. (When I introduced myself and told him I was a fellow Grove-Rat, he looked me over and said, “You’re kidding!”) We talked about Conner Drive and Wyatt’s Cafeteria and the old Pleasant Grove Shopping Center on Buckner Boulevard and Big Town Mall and Samuel High School and how all the houses in the Grove now have little rod iron fences around them. What a thrill!

But today’s panel discussion with the lead ministers from the 4 Amarillo churches in Hart Auditorium was by far the highlight of the week for me. It was so much fun. It was so encouraging. So well received by all in attendance. And so significant.

A jet-lagged Burt, who interprets “business casual” as a suit and tie, made it in to Abilene late last night to join Howie, who’s getting ready for First Baptist’s 125th anniversary this Sunday, Howard, and me for day two of the “That the World May Believe” classes I’m presenting on our 4 Amarillo project. We began by recounting how our partnership began with Howie taking Howard to lunch to welcome him to town as a new pastor back in the fall of 2010. Howard forwarded the favor to Burt and then to me when we arrived at our respective churches in Amarillo just a couple of months apart in the summer of 2011. And through those lunches, which quickly became a monthly ritual at the Burger Bar on Polk Street, grew a deep friendship and mutual respect for one another, supported by our common faith in Christ Jesus.

We talked today about the perfect storm of conditions and timing, dropped in our laps by our God, that made 4 Amarillo possible. We talked about our individual churches, about the response from the community, about the transformation occurring among our own members, and even gave a couple of suggestions for those who might consider some first baby-steps engagement with the church down the street from their own congregations. We poked fun at our own traditions and at each other. We laughed together and we challenged our audience; we acknowledged the hurdles and we pointed to our Lord. We spent the last 15-minutes fielding questions from the crowd and pausing several times for the enthusiastic clapping and “amens” to our responses.

It was received so well.

I believe there are many reasons our people are so receptive to this kind of thing. The spiritual maturity of our 220-year-old movement coupled with a better understanding of the grace of God in the middle of the prevailing post-denominational culture means we’re thinking more in Kingdom terms than “Church of Christ” terms. So many of our children and grandchildren have left the CofCs to join other denominations. We all have friends — godly friends, Christian people, sincere disciples of our Lord — in other denominations. And we’ve all needed some way to articulate with our words what we feel in our hearts about them. And about their own relationships with God. We’ve also needed some officially church-sanctioned way of expressing it; a practical, tangible method of experiencing what we read in the Scriptures but what runs counter to what most of us have been taught for most of our lives.

I believe 4 Amarillo does that. It provides the language, the logic, and the church-ordained ways of expressing the unity that all baptized disciples of Jesus have been given by the grace of God.

I’m forever indebted to my good friends who took a day-and-a-half out of their busy ministry weeks to drive five hours twice to talk to the people in our tribe about our partnership. They honored me today with their valuable time. They honored us CofCers with their grace. And they honored a true commitment to our great desires to serve the city of Amarillo together with the love, peace, and joy of Christ Jesus. I’m so glad we did this together today. I’m so grateful to God for the opportunity. And I’m so encouraged by the positive response that has followed me around campus all afternoon.

I finish the class tomorrow morning with a look at how this Kingdom way of looking at and behaving with one another in our different faith traditions shapes us more into the image of Christ, how it gives us a much better understanding of God’s grace, and how it probably fits with a whole lot of things our churches are already doing.

Father, may we be one. May we all — all of your Son’s followers, all the disciples in every Christian church all over the world — until that day when you send Jesus back to bring us home, be brought to complete unity so the world will sit up and take notice. So the world will say “Oh. My. Word. He really is the Holy Son of God! He really is the Prince of Peace! He really does transcend all of our differences!” And then the whole world will give you, Father, all the glory and all the praise for ever and ever. Amen.

Peace,

Allan

4 Amarillo at ACU Summit

September 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The early church astonished the world because of the way these dedicated disciples of Jesus refused to be identified by the social barriers of the day. The church astonished the world because it encouraged Jews and Gentiles to meet and eat together. It encouraged men and women to both worship and serve in the same houses. It gave slaves and masters, rich and poor, the well-connected and the barely-functioning the same seats at the same table, the same status in the same living Body of our Lord.

4 Amarillo, I suppose, is sort of doing the same thing. Presbyterians and Baptists worshiping and working together generates big news. The Church of Christ cooperating with anybody on anything seems to elicit surprised gasps of shock. So, I think, that’s how I wound up presenting three class sessions at this year’s ACU Summit. What we’re doing together in our little city is apparently fairly big news. And I’m so honored and blessed to be doing this.

This morning I laid out the theology for Christian unity among different denominations and traditions from our Lord’s beautiful — and loaded! — prayer in John 17, bolstered by Paul’s arguments in Romans 14-15 and Ephesians 4. Wednesday morning, I’ll wrap up the series by looking at how a commitment to this kind of unity is good for your church and the people in your church and how it probably would fit right in with most of the things your church is already doing anyway. But tomorrow, I’m especially looking forward to having all three of my co-downtown pastors join me here at ACU for a panel discussion regarding the origins of our 4 Amarillo partnership and the impact it’s having on our community for the sake of God’s Kingdom.

Howard, Burt, Howie, and I will discuss how this whole thing started long before any of us arrived on the scene, how God brought us four together to form an unshakable alliance of friends and partners in the Gospel, how we first presented the idea of 4 Amarillo to our four churches and church leadership groups, and the many ways God is using this cooperative effort to reach the downtown Amarillo area with his good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. The other three guys will spend a little time at the end telling all us CofCers everything we need to know about their churches and their people if we have any hopes of engaging them in any cooperative worship and/or ministry together. And then we’ll stay for audience participation and Q & A for as long as anybody wants to keep talking.

This morning’s session went well. The room was packed to the walls, a few people were forced to sit and listen from out in the hallway, everyone seemed to be tracking with the theology, the logic, and the heart of what we’re doing with 4 Amarillo, and the conversations afterward were rich with curiosity and grace. A lot of grace.

I’m very grateful that my friends in downtown Amarillo would agree to drive down to Abilene to do this with me. They don’t have a clue as to what we’re dealing with in the Churches of Christ as far as our rigid sectarian past and, sadly, still in a lot of cases, our present. Wait. Maybe Howie gets it. Every now and then when I’m making some apology about our CofC history, the long-time pastor of First Baptist Amarillo leans in to me and says, “Allan, you guys aren’t the only ones.”

Grace. See, grace is the only way you were accepted by God as his child. Grace is the only thing that makes your relationship with God possible. Grace. And it’s the very thing that’s demanded of us to extend to others. Grace.

May our God be glorified through these sessions this week at ACU Summit. May he be given all the glory and praise. And may our cooperative efforts, our Christian unity, be used by him as he works to redeem all of creation back to himself.

Peace,

Allan

 

Brought to Jesus

September 19, 2014 / / 0 Comments

You probably are aware that high school seniors today don’t just take the year book photo alone. Oh, no. That’s not nearly enough. They have to go out to exotic locations with their own commissioned photographer and half a dozen changes of clothes and take a hundred different portraits to capture the singular beauty and unique personality of each candidate for graduation.

Hannah McNeill is our family photographer. And she has done a remarkable job with our “Little Middle.” Of course, it would be tough to mess up pictures of Valerie. But Hannah is just the best at what she does with our kids. You can check out a bunch of Hannah’s work by clicking here. But her most important work lately can be seen in these thumbnails.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“People brought to him all who were ill with various diseases…” ~Matthew 4:24

“Some men brought to him a paralytic, lying on a mat.” ~Matthew 9:2

“A man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus.” ~Matthew 9:32

“They brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute.” ~Matthew 12:22

“Then little children were brought to Jesus…” ~Matthew 19:13

These people Jesus healed and saved, these people who felt the compassionate touch of the Father through the Holy Son were brought to Jesus. They were brought to him by somebody else.

It’s not “build it and they will come.” Praise the Lord, sometimes that actually works. But that’s not the deal. It’s really “if you bring them they will see.”

We go get them and bring them to Jesus. As his followers, as his loyal subjects, that’s our mission. It’s our charge as his disciples. We don’t sit around and wait for people to come to Jesus. We go out and get them and bring them into his presence.

You know, you can do that just by inviting people to church.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not talking about bringing people to church just so we can count them. Inviting people to church is not about filling up your worship center. It’s about inviting people to a place where they can encounter Jesus. Our Christian assemblies are still the widest on-ramp into your community of faith. A worship service is still the main entry point, the biggest front door, to someone encountering a group of people who represent and embody our Lord and Savior. What better place to see Jesus? What better venue for experiencing his love and acceptance, his mercy and grace, his peace and joy?

I’ve seen and heard in three different places this year that if you invite anywhere from five to seven people to your church, one of them will say “yes” and come. One out of every six (or so) people you invite to worship with your church on Sunday will say “yes” and do it. The question is: Is anybody inviting anybody?!?

There are so many people in our community — countless numbers; you’ll interact with several of them over the next 24 hours — who have never experienced anything like the merciful love and saving grace of Jesus. And it’s because nobody’s ever brought them into the presence of Jesus. You can do that, you know, just by inviting them to your worship assembly this Sunday.

Peace,

Allan

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