Page 462 of 497

Mutual Ministry

April 8, 2008 / Allan / 7 Comments

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.” ~John 10:14-15

Ministry is a communal experience. And it’s a mutual experience. And this becomes much more clear to me the more I try to model what I do after what Jesus did/does. As a preachers and ministers or elders and shepherds, we are not spiritual professionals who know the problems of our clients or constituents and take care of them with great efficiency. We are vulnerable brothers and sisters who know and are known, who care and are cared for, who forgive and are being forgiven, who love and are being loved. It’s mutual. It works both ways. It has to.

Some have told me that I’m going to get burned. Some have said I can’t let people get too close. I can’t let people in. I can’t share my inner thoughts and feelings—the things of which I’m proud or the things of which I’m ashamed—because it’ll come back to bite me. I’ve been told that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we’re called to lead. Just look at doctors and psychiatry and social work.

Bunk!

We’re not doctors or psychiatrists or social workers. We’re ministers and shepherds, called by our Father to share his love with the world. Doctors and psychiatrists and social workers provide one-way services. Someone serves, someone else is being served, and the roles are never mixed up or reversed. But if I’m ministering like Jesus…

How do I lay my life down for people I won’t get close to?

There’s something powerful, I think, about being open and honest, hiding nothing, totally trusting God and his people.

Henri Nouwen addresses this in his In the Name of Jesus.

“Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life. We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for. The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God.

Therefore, true ministry must be mutual. When the members of a community of faith cannot truly know and love their shepherd, shepherding quickly becomes a subtle way of exercising power over others and begins to show authoritarian and dictatorial traits. The world in which we live—a world of efficiency and control—has no models to offer to those who want to be shepherds in the way Jesus was a shepherd.”

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It was pointed out to me by a friend about two hours before tip-off last night that the Bible actually had something to say about the national championship game. Hosea 9:6 clearly states, “Memphis will bury them.” I told this friend (her initials are Paula Byrnes) that that prophesy had already been fulfilled.

I didn’t realize until last night that of the 341 Division I college basketball teams in the country, Memphis ranked 339th in free throw percentage. 59%. And Memphis was up by nine last night with two minutes to play. But they missed four of their last five free throws down the stretch, allowing Mario Chalmers to sink the buzzer-beating off-balance three that tied it up and sent it to overtime. Kansas won it going away in the extra period. Great game. Back and forth. Frantic at times. Lot of fun.

The Tigers’ choke job kept Whitney and me in a tie in our family basketball pool. And since the final score added up to 143 points, she takes the contest by virtue of the 130 she had in the tiebreaker to my 125. If Kansas had won in regulation, I would still be in possession of my basketball bracket crown at Stanglin Manor. But today the king is dead. Whitney holds the crown. The extra points in the overtime did me in.

It was a bitter-sweet victory for Whit. She was glad for the overall win in the bracket. But it was weird in that the team she’s been cheering for the past month lost. Congratulations, Whitney. And congrats to Geoff. Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk. Whatever that means.

Peace,

Allan

'Tis What It's All About

April 7, 2008 / Allan / 1 Comment

“How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?” ~Habakkuk 1:3

Asking God questions. Wrestling with God. Struggling with God. Complaining to God. Although one-third of the Psalms are lament psalms that speak openly and honestly about those times when God seems absent and some of the greatest heroes of Scripture spent a lot of their time lamenting to God, we don’t pray like this very often. We certainly don’t do it in our public assemblies.

One of the reasons is that we don’t schedule it. We believe our corporate time together on Sunday mornings must be filled from start to finish with the Joy of the Lord, happiness, smiles, upbeat, uptempo, energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. I don’t know if that line of thinking stems from wanting to attract and sign up visitors or keep our members from leaving. Culture probably has a lot to do with it.

Another one of the reasons is that we think this kind of language—questioning God—is a sign of weakness or unbelief. And I’m not sure where that comes from. Where did that start, that we can’t question God? Definitely not from anything rooted in the sacred writings of Scripture.

The truth is that our God views open and honest wrestling and questioning of him as a sign of great faith. Our God is not displeased with these kinds of prayers. He honors them. Open struggling with God reveals our faith.

Think about it. To demand that God ought to act justly is solely based on the conviction that God is just. If we don’t believe God is just, we won’t go to him when we see injustice. We’ll go somewhere else. What we believe about God, if we really believe it, is exactly what leads to these kinds of prayers of lamentation.

We believe in God’s omnipotence. There is only one God. He does not share his power with any other God. He made the whole world and everything in it. He is the sovereign ruler over all creation. So, every single thing that happens—good and bad, fair and unfair—happens because God allows it. And that leads directly to the prayer: Why? Why, God, do you allow these horrible things to happen? Why, God, don’t you intervene?

We believe in God’s righteousness. God loves the world he created. He is concerned with what happens to his creatures in the world. He’s certainly not wicked in the ways he deals with the world. But there is the reality of terrible suffering and even cruelty all around us. And if God really is omnipotent and righteous, that leads directly to the prayer: How long is this going to last? God, where are you? Why aren’t you doing anything?

Here’s what I like about these kinds of prayers to God and what, I believe, God likes about them, too. When God’s people in Scripture complain about their troubles, when they lament the injustices of life, when they seek answers to their questions about the evil all around them, they don’t write letters to the editor, they don’t hold court in the coffee shop, they don’t call the talk shows, and they don’t join a campaign. God’s people bring their doubt and their fears and their uncertainties and their questions and their complaints straight to God.

And in the case of the Psalms and Habakkuk, they do so as a part of their worship, in the presence of God, in the middle of the congregation.

When Habakkuk answers God in 1:12 he makes it clear that, even though he doesn’t like what God is saying, he doesn’t agree with what God is doing, and none of it makes sense, he will go nowhere else for his answers. He will seek no one else to protect him or save him. He’ll look nowhere else for refuge. Habakkuk declares his total and complete dependence on God. Total faith. A faith that goes beyond any evidence or any proof for even having it.

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Go Kansas. With Memphis State’s win Saturday night, Whitney moved into a tie with me for first place in our family basketball pool. If the Tigers take the title tonight, she’s on top as the undisputed winner. If KU can pull it off, Whit and I will finish in the tie. The tie-breaker we established three weeks ago was total points scored in the championship game. Whitney has 130. I have 125. I need Kansas to win a low scoring game. And, either way, I need to limit Whitney’s college basketball watching between January and March next year.

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I explained at the beginning of yesterday’s sermon how certain settings demand a certain type of language and how certain types of language anticipate or point to certain settings. I was showing how Scripture’s use of lament psalms and lament language in some of the prophets was given to us to be used in the public assembly of God’s people. To set it up, I read the winning entry in the Washington Post Style Invitational Contest from a few years ago. Jeff Brechlin submitted “The Hokey Pokey” as if it had been written by William Shakespeare. As soon as we were finished, almost a dozen people asked me for copies of the work. A couple of more have emailed me today seeking copies. Here it is:

The Hokey Pokey, by William Shakespeare

O proud left foot that ventures quick within,
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe;
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin,
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! Yea, to spin! A wilde release from heaven’s yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go.
The Hoke, the Poke – banish now thy doubt;
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.

Peace,

Allan

$209K and Counting…

March 31, 2008 / Allan / 4 Comments

“God calls things that are not as though they were.” ~Romans 4:17

A red-letter day yesterday for the family of believers here at Legacy and in our history as a congregation of God’s people. The goal for Missions Sunday was to collect $150,000 to fund our local and foreign missions budget for 2008. And our Lord blessed us with over $209,000 in cash and pledges. And the number is still going up.

What a thrill it was to watch our little children parade with their Bible classes down to the front to announce and then to dump the money they’ve collected over the month of March for our missionaries. How amazing it was to be joined by our brothers and sisters at the Centerpoint church in Bagiuo City, Philippines via video and audio hookup and to see them and talk to them and wave to them and sing “We Love You With the Love of the Lord” to them, half a world away. And then to experience our Father opening our hearts and our spirits to sacrificially give like we never have before was beyond description.

Our God always out-imagines us. He always out-dreams us. We can’t think too big or plan too big for him. He always gives us much more than we can ever ask or imagine. How wonderful to consider the lives that will be saved, the souls that will be won, the people who will be reconciled to our God as a result of yesterday’s blessings.

And our Lord continued to pour out his blessings on us as he held back the rain and kept us high and dry at last night’s fellowship / assembly in our new, not-quite-finished-yet worship center. Nearly 700 of us ate dinner together in the new building and then worshiped our God in song and prayer. We read Scripture together. We confessed Jesus as the Christ and as Lord together. We imagined together all the baptisms that are going to take place in this building, all the weddings, all the singings, all the sermons, all the laughing, all the crying, all the seminars, all the love that’s going to be shared in this building. And then we asked our God to, again, blow us away.

I saw the Legacy church transformed yesterday. I saw all our same people, all our same brothers and sisters. But I saw us differently. There was a different spirit about us yesterday. The Lord was in our midst yesterday and he was working and blessing and inspiring and planning for things I can’t even begin to see yet. But he sees them. They already exist in his sight. Our God calls things that are not as though they were. And we’re beginning to see and to think like him more and more. And it’s exciting.

After we prayed together for all of the future things that would be happening for our Lord and for the Kingdom in this new place of worship, we wrote on the foundation. We wrote our favorites passages of Scripture. We wrote our prayers. We wrote our dreams for our church family. And we wrote the names of our children.

What an incredible day. What an incredible God!

It’s 10:30 pm Monday, my computer’s been down most of the day, and I’m still riding yesterday’s high. I just got out of a Small Groups Church Co-Leader training session with a bunch of couples who are leading new groups beginning this Sunday—new groups that are all multiplications of original groups who’ve grown beyond their capacities. And they’ve all experienced the love and the ministry and the sharing and the fellowship and the connection and the evangelism that takes place in a small group. And they’re all inspired to take what they have and spread it out into our congregation and into our communities.

And we give God the glory. He alone is worthy of praise for all the wonderful things that are happening here. He alone. In Romans 4, when Paul writes about our God who “gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were,” he says Abraham’s faith was strengthened and he “gave glory to God” because he was seeing the impossible-to-deny truth that our God has “power to do what he had promised.” Amen.

May our Father use us in his Kingdom. And may we submit our lives and our church family and our wills to him. May we be blessed with his Spirit and his vision. And may his will be done in the Legacy church as it is in heaven.

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And may UCLA beat Memphis Saturday night.

The only way I beat Whitney outright in my NCAA tournament bracket is if the Bruins beat those impossibly-loaded Tigers from Memphis State AND Kansas beats Carolina. I can salvage a tie if the Tarheels win and Tiger High loses. I can salvage a tie if Kansas and Memphis win and Kansas then takes the title. But if Memphis wins the championship or if Memphis and UNC both win their semi-final games, I’m toast. And then, I’m probably done. You can’t lose to your daughter in a college basketball tournament pool. I need Kevin Love to score about 40.

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Michael Young drove one deep to put Texas up 1-0 in the Rangers half of the first inning in Seattle. And Millwood looked good into the 6th. But the Rangers lose their opener (SHOCKING!!) 5-2 to the M’s. Now, Kipi, they’re tied for last place in the American League.

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Tomorrow (Tuesday) is my day in Waco with Jim Martin and some of the other central Texas preachers down there. So I probably won’t write again until Wednesday morning. I’ll reflect a little bit on this year’s Tulsa Workshop then.

Peace,

Allan

Thinking Theologically

March 25, 2008 / Allan / 0 Comments

Last night I read Henri Nouwen’s In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership. It’s required reading for our little group of preachers that meets in Waco once a month. We’ve all read it this month and we’re going to break it down one week from today. It’s short—I read it in about 45 minutes—but it packs a powerful punch.

Nouwen uses two stories from the gospels, Jesus’ temptation in the desert and his commissioning of Peter to feed the sheep in John 21, to lead the reader in a discourse on Christian leadership. Most of the book centers around the idea of Christian leaders being servant leaders, seeking to be led by Christ’s Spirit into areas of service and sacrifice and submission instead of seeking power and popularity and relevance. He paints a Christ-centered life of “downward mobility ending on the cross.” And it’s all very good. But I was especially touched by the author’s angle on theological reflection as a spiritual discipline.

Thinking theologically, the way I understand it, is to recognize the salvation work our God has been doing in his world since the beginning of time and will continue to do until time ends and then using that as the guiding force behind everything we do and say. It’s realizing that every single thing relates to and goes back to God’s eternal plan for the reconciliation of the world and then jumping all the way into that plan and work with everything we have. It’s seeing how it all connects to redemption and salvation and deliverance and making sure the things we do connect to those things as well.

Even though we speak and teach in Scriptural terms, most ministers and preachers today are raising psychological and sociological questions. Thinking with the mind of Christ is more difficult. Nouwen writes,

“Without solid theological reflection, Christian leaders are little more than pseudo-psychologists, pseudo-sociologists, pseudo-social workers. They think of themselves as enablers, facilitators, role models, father or mother figures, big brothers or big sisters, and so on, and thus join the countless men and women who make a living by trying to help their fellow human beings cope with the stresses and strains of everyday living.

The task of Christian leaders is not to make a little contribution to the solution of the pains and tribulations of their time, but to identify and announce the ways in which Jesus is leading God’s people out of slavery, through the desert to a new land of freedom.”

Thinking theologically, which I was first introduced to at Austin Grad and which still does not come easily to me, is seeing God’s saving work in everything around us and seeing our efforts as nothing more and nothing less than joining that divine work. Thinking that way and being guided by that careful reflection serves us well as leaders; it keeps us focused on the things that truly matter and diverts our attention away from the peripheral things that take up way too much of our time and energy.

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Carrie-Anne and I are leaving in the morning for the annual Soul Winning Workshop in Tulsa. And I can’t wait. I love Tulsa. I love the four days of get-away-time with my wonderful wife. I love getting re-acquainted with old friends from Mesquite, Arlington, and Oklahoma and making new friends from all over the country. I love worshiping in song with hundreds and hundreds of other saints. I love the great collection of powerful speakers and the opportunity to sit at their feet from morning to night. It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating.

We always come back from Tulsa wishing there were a way to bring back to our home congregation that same spirit and fire we see and feel and experience up there. What are the differences? Why is being in Tulsa so radically different from being in our home churches? Is it because Jeff Walling and Terry Rush and Rubel Shelly and Randy Harris are preaching? Is it because Keith Lancaster is leading singing? Is it because there are so many people there? Is it because 99-percent of the people there are all going there for pretty much the same reasons? Is it just because we’re in a different location? There is an unmistakable fire and energy there that feeds me. And I can’t wait.

Tomorrow is also our Day of Prayer and Fasting at Legacy in preparation for Missions Sunday. And, be assured, I’m holding off on the jalapeno potato chips, the Whoppers, and the Little Debbies until Thursday morning. Those are my traveling foods. But I’m fasting with the rest of our church body during this day of prayer and preparation.

Please remember to encourage each other tomorrow. Call or email your friends. Keep in touch. Get together sometime during the day for an hour of prayer. Use the building here for those times. Or just kneel with a buddy in your living room or kitchen. The prayer meeting here at Legacy Wednesday night at 6:00 will also be a wonderful time for mutual encouragement. And while you’re breaking your fast with a bagel and coffee here at the building Thursday morning, I’ll be doing the same with a continental breakfast at the Hampton Inn.

The blogging will be short and sporadic for the next few days. May our God bless us all with his vision and his passion for lost souls as we pray and prepare for Missions Sunday.

Peace,

Allan

March Sadness

March 24, 2008 / Allan / 0 Comments

Thank you, Georgetown.

My champion didn’t even make it through the first weekend. I still have three of my Final Four alive. But the second-seeded Hoyas choking against Davidson cost me 20 points in the Stanglin family pool. Peeps and malted chocolate Whopper eggs are soothing me somewhat. Heading in to the Sweet 16, Carrie-Anne’s actually leading the house with 45 points. My reign as Bracket Champ continues. But the throne is teetering.

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What if Mark Cuban trades his entire kingdom for Jason Kidd and the Mavericks don’t even make the playoffs? The Mavs are 9-8 since trading for the troubled point guard. And they’re 0-8 against teams with a winning record. Since trading for Kidd, Dallas has slipped from 5th place in the Western Conference standings to 7th, just a half-game out of 8th and only two games out of 9th. That means they’re just two games away from missing the postseason.

And Dirk’s injury yesterday during their third consecutive loss doesn’t help. He’s gone for at least two to three weeks. And they have a couple of games against Golden State and Denver during that stretch. Wow.

I’m not celebrating the fact that Cuban’s Mavs have fallen apart since they acquired Kidd. OK, maybe I am just a little…

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Easter photos from Sunday afternoon at Vic and Kathryn Akers’. As always, click on the pic for the full size.

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And the stone is up around the stumple on the new worship center! We really don’t know what to call that short, stocky, outcropping on top of the new building. It’s certainly not a steeple. It’s too wide and stumpy. One of our elders suggested “stumple” a few weeks back. And it’s stuck. Here are pictures of our newly stoned stumple.

Peace,

Allan

The Net

March 21, 2008 / Allan / 0 Comments

One more week here at Legacy to pray and plan and prepare for Missions Sunday, March 30. Wednesday is our Day of Prayer and Fasting. Our prayer service begins at 6:00 Wednesday evening. And then our adult classes are meeting in the auditorium at 7:00 for a missions-themed time of worship. Thursday morning we’ll break the fast together with a come and go break-fast here at the building from 6:00 to 8:00. And then Sunday is Missions Sunday.

John Wesley once said, “The Church has nothing to do but to save souls. Therefore, spend and be spent in this work.”

And I’ve been trying for the past six weeks to preach that message to our family at Legacy. I want us to see ourselves—each of us—as Christian missionaries. Ambassadors for Christ. Ministers of reconciliation. God’s fellow workers. We’re not all preachers or teachers or Bible study leaders. But we’re all co-workers with God.

Yesterday Terry Rush, in his blog Morning Rush, nailed the idea. He paints a beautiful picture of our involvement with God in his saving work that began before time and continues through eternity. Everything we do and say today connects with all the things that have been done and said before us and connects, too, with all the things that will be done and said after us to win souls to heaven. I urge you to read his article here.

Hope the Easter Bunny’s good to you.

Peace,

Allan

The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

Page 462 of 497

Mutual Ministry

'Tis What It's All About

$209K and Counting…

Thinking Theologically

March Sadness

The Net

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