• Archive of "prayer" Category

    Cape Town Bound

    October 13, 2010 // No Comments »

    Today is the day.  Amy and I have been busy all morning with last minute details as we get set to take off for Cape Town, South Africa for the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evanglization.

    We are only able to go thanks to the generosity of a plethora of family and friends who financially supported us and we are grateful beyond words.

    If you have some measure of interest in this gathering, I highly recommend you check out the advance papers, participate online, or maybe even attend one of the Globalink Events.

    Between the place we are staying and the conference center, we should have some access to Internet and I plan to do my best to offer brief reflections and pictures throughout our time there.

    Thanks for your prayers for us and the rest of the leaders that will be gathered in Cape Town for the next week or so.  May God use this event for the sake of His Kingdom breaking forth in new ways all around the world!

    Posted in church, conference, evangelism, kingdom, leadership, prayer

    JR’s Career Path

    August 2, 2010 // 7 Comments »

    **I owe everyone an update on our support raising effort for the Lausanne Congress in South Africa that’s coming up in October and I promise to do that soon, but I wanted to throw out some exciting news regarding my career path first.

    Tomorrow, I will begin in a new role as Associate Director of Advancement for Northern Seminary.  In this PT position, I will be cultivating relationships with alumni and other supporters of the school and its mission.  On top of this, I have been hired as a communications consultant to do Internet Presence Management for the school and its programs.  Among other things, I’ll be creating and maintaining social networks for the school and its programs.

    For those of you who have been tracking with us personally, I want to try and articulate how Amy and I see this evolution of things.

    When Amy and I got engaged (Feb. ’09), we knew that it was going to mean one of us leaving a job that we loved.  I was a pastor to young adults in Memphis and she was a mobilizer for International Teams here in Elgin.  Through much prayer and support, I resigned my position and moved up here to Chicago (May. ’09).

    Though I’ve applied to no less than 36 jobs in the last year (3/month!), the bulk of my time has been given to largely unsolicited opportunities that have come my way and, I believe, have paved the way to this new position and consulting work.

    Over the last year I was asked to teach a class for Fuller Theological Seminary, TA a class for Talbot School of Theology, build web sites and create communication pieces for International Teams, do quality control work for christianaudio.com, lead an alumni project for Northern Seminary, write articles for Jovia Web Studio, and assist on Information Architecture projects with Uzify.

    The structure of our first year of marriage has been non-traditional I suppose.  Amy has worked full-time while I looked for work and gave my time and attention to these contractual jobs that just kept coming my way.  It’s very true that she’s been incredibly supportive and my biggest cheerleader.  She was often upset on my behalf when I was passed over for a position.  But I don’t want to paint a picture that the last year has been a struggle.  Quite the contrary, we’ve quite enjoyed the structure of our life for the last year and the flexibility it’s brought.

    For us, my saying yes to these new opportunities isn’t so much the end of a year long search for a job as much as it is another step in our ongoing attempt to be open and faithful to God’s work in our lives.  I am receiving these job opportunities not as relief after a year of drought, but as a new kind of gift in an ongoing succession of the same.

    Having this sort of posture toward God and God’s work has been incredibly formative for us and it instills in us an even greater sense of excitement and anticipation for the future.  To all those who have been praying for us, your labors have brought us not to a finish line, but simply to yet another stage in a life-long race of openness, faithfulness, and discernment.  We thank you for that.

    Posted in Amy, chicago, decisions, marriage, Northern Seminary, prayer

    Transitioning Traditional Churches into Missional Ones

    January 29, 2010 // 24 Comments »

    A little over a week ago, my cousin-in-law Josh, asked how one might go about transitioning traditional churches into “something more missional at its core.”  Since I have banged my head against this wall for years in several different churches, my response will be a mixture of, “here’s where I failed,” and “here’s what I think is most helpful.”  For anyone who might have missed them, my posts on, “The Move: The Journey from Attractional to Missional,” and “What is Missional?” would be really helpful in understanding where I am coming from.

    I should say a few things at the beginning to help frame my thoughts.

    1) This is a wine skins issue (Mt. 9:17).  Anyone considering this topic who thinks (whether they realize it or not) that this is basically about getting new wine into old wine skins is destined for frustration and failure – I speak from experience!  Missional churches represent brand new wine skins, not just new wine.

    2) This takes a long time.  The most experienced people will tell you 8-10 years minimum.  When we are talking about changing the core identity of, not just a person, but a community, we have to expect a long hard road.  An apt analogy – God got Israel out of Egypt in pretty short order, but it took another 40 years to get Egypt out of Israel.

    3) No one person is capable of maneuvering this transition.  Solo pastors are dead in the water in this regard.  And this isn’t to say that the better way is having a team of top-down leaders – this will end up being damaging as well.  One of the keys to instilling missional DNA in a church community is inspiring and encouraging new imagination from the bottom.

    Those things being said, what does it take?  What might the process look like?

    My short answer is,

    A Spirit-guided intermingling of communal practices, teaching, and prayerful reflection.

    Here’s my slightly-longer expansion on those three things.

    I take for granted that fundamental to the distinctions of “traditional” and “missional” is a vision of what it means to be the church in Post-Christendom vs. Christendom.  My personal opinion (others may disagree) is that there is no point in talking about what it means to be a missional church until Christendom has been rejected as a cultural value. Thus, transitioning traditional churches to missional ones is a non-linear process of deconstruction and reconstruction.  Communal practices, teaching, and reflection are the tools which assist in this ongoing task.  It would be a (classically modern) mistake to think of this as a mainly intellectual enterprise.  Instead, in the integration of these things, deconstruction and reconstruction happen alongside one another.

    Since there is no universal model to apply to this topic, we are better served by asking general questions that need to be answered in specific contexts.  Here are some questions which I think would serve us well in maneuvering this sort of transition.

    – In both small numbers as well as large, what are the practices we can engage in as a community that will shape us into people and “a people” who think and act like Jesus?

    – As we try to be honest with ourselves, what things are we doing as a community that don’t seem to be contributing to our spiritual formation?

    – How do we incorporate space in our times together (in homes, in meetings, in gatherings) to intentionally reflect on and respond to what we sense God is speaking and doing in our community?

    – Who are those in our community who seem most gifted to teach (identified by the fruit of their teaching helping people become more like Jesus)? How can we encourage these people to engage with authors and speakers who are dealing with the subject of missional ecclesiology on our behalf?

    – How do we make incremental yet strategic changes in the percentage of money that goes to those things which ensure our security as opposed to those things which necessitate faith in the midst of great risk?

    Over and above questions like these, I would also suggest these sort of biblical principles for those who shoulder the responsibility for a transition like this:

    – Find people of peace who can be trusted and are willing to commit to the journey. Ask for their help.

    – Demonstrate servant leadership by being open, transparent, and broken.

    – Commit to structures of biblical conflict resolution.  Entrust to God’s care those who choose to leave (there will be many and this is not necessarily a sign of poor leadership).

    OK, there’s some initial thoughts.  I’m sure I’ll have more so I hope to continue the discussion by way of comments.

    Posted in christendom, church, community, leadership, missional, modernity, post-christendom, prayer, preaching/teaching, questions, spiritual formation, theology

    Kenya

    December 25, 2008 // 4 Comments »

    UPDATE: Flight was delayed in Memphis so missed the connection in Atlanta. We are enjoying the local Ramada and we’ll take the same flight tomorrow that we missed today at 3PM.

    I am heading to Kenya in the morning with 5 friends.  We are going to be helping to put on a camp for a orphanage in Eldoret.  For those of you who pray, any that you would offer on our behalf would be most appreciated.  Please excuse the blogging hiatus.  We’ll see you in 2009!

     

    Posted in africa, blogging, prayer

    Prophetic Speaking — Prophetic Action

    January 22, 2008 // 6 Comments »

    A friend posted this quote this morning and it got me thinking…

    Prophets yell because their hearts are on fire.  They scream at the world trying to wake us up.  They can’t help it  After all, God is in their throats.

    Steven James

    Having felt something of a prophetic bent in the way God has wired/gifted me, I was struck by the way, at times, I have decided to squelch this fire in my throat for the sake of sustaining relationships and trying to “be more loving” (as if not boldly proclaiming the message God has implanted in you could ever be loving??).

    But as God has used prophets, God has never just given they fiery words to say, God has given them graphic symbols to display – walking around naked to display the shamefulness of God’s people, wearing an ox yoke to symbolize the burden God’s people were placing on others, marrying a prostitute as a way to convey God’s love of Israel the whore, and so on.

    Jesus was a prophet too.  He came with a fiery (anti-empire) message in his throat and it got him killed.  He embodied a message as well, but not primarily one of judgment.  Rather, he embodied the message of the Kingdom of God come to earth.  He healed the sick, cast out demons, restored people to community and fellowship, sought to free people from the burden of wealth, and practiced radical inclusion and forgiveness.  These are not nice or quaint ideals or ways to exist, they are God’s salvation embodied.

    Here’s what I know.  God uses prophetic voices as a means to correct and edify the body of Christ.  I also know that it’s that very church which is most resistant to their message, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how long I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.” (Jesus – MT. 23:37).

    Talk about your all time Catch-22′s.  So, this is my prayer for myself and those like me – looking to Jesus as our example, may God give us the grace to live out our calling with no regard for our own security and safety.  And for the people of God: Father, may you cause us to be open and attentive to your correction and calling.  May we, with Jesus, be willing to lay aside our rights and find our life in dying to ourselves.

    Posted in blogging, church, community, decisions, friends, God, Jesus, kingdom, prayer, prophets

    Jay McKinley is My Hero

    April 20, 2007 // No Comments »

    Because in a way I have never experienced, his love for those he has never met and his commitment to following Jesus brings me to my knees.

    I found this story through my friend Jason, but he got it from the blog of Ben Witherington.

    You really need to read ben’s full post, but the long and short of it is that Jay has been positively destroyed by the mass genocide in the Dafur region of the Sudan (almost half a million innocent peple have been slaughtered). In non-violent protest Jay moved from his home in PA to live on the street outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington DC. He has also been fasting for longer than Jesus did. He is in poor health and stands alone outside the embassy praying that others will take notice and be moved to action.

    I am hoping to contribute in some small measure to Jay and his cause. This truly is a matter for all Christians everywhere over which to weep and, more importantly act.

    PLEASE READ JAY’S STORY, TELL OTHERS, PRAY WITH OTHERS, AND ASK GOD HOW YOU MIGHT JOIN JAY IN BRINGING RELIEF TO A PEOPLE BEING EXTERMINATED.

    Posted in Jesus, justice, prayer

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