ministry

let’s do it.

I’m in the middle of getting involved in youth ministry, media team, music team, and community group at my church.

I think it’s been almost a full year since I’ve been really involved in ministry.  Crizzap, I’m out of touch.

Greek

I’m reviewing my greek again.  Got a thousand or so cards.  Hello rote memorization.

Twenty-Four

Twenty-four oceans
Twenty-four skies
Twenty-four failures
And twenty-four tries
Twenty-four finds me
In twenty-fourth place
With twenty-four drop outs
At the end of the day .
Life is not what I thought it was
Twenty-four hours ago
Still I’m singing ‘Spirit,
take me up in arms with You’
And I’m not who I thought I was
Twenty-four hours ago
Still I’m singing ‘Spirit,
take me up in arms with You’ .
There’s twenty-four reasons
To admit that I’m wrong
With all my excuses
Still twenty-four strong .
See, I’m not copping out
Not copping out
Not copping out
When you’re raising the dead in me

Whenever it’s my birthday, I always get real depressed. Why? Because the man that I am, after 24 years of living, is still such a poor and broken wreck.

O God, I’d like to be the second man. now.

Sometimes,

I wonder about my life, and what I’ve amounted to.

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

- Albert Einstein

How you treat your wife.

A fantastic quote from a sermon from John Street.

“…The measure of  a good shepherd is how he treats his wife… how he shepherds his own…”

…and for the single, I suppose it’s how you treat your girlfriends.

new TMS website

If you haven’t seen this yet, check it out, it’s very well done:

http://www.tms.edu/

Church.

I’ve been attending this church in Redwood City called Redeeming Grace for the past few months.  It is pastored by ex-ex-crossroads shepherd Rick Carbannneau.  So far, I’m liking it.  Despite the fact that Rick is an ex-ex Crossroader, the church atmosphere is nothing like what I’m used to.  It is very community based, and the social dynamic is extremely broad.  For those who are looking for TMS in a box, you won’t find it here.  The doctrinally driven will unavoidably be a bit sub-impressed.  However, after a few months, you’ll begin to understand why.  RGC’s mission is not to equip and educate the layperson so much as push them forward into community-driven outreach.  Despite the fact that you may not feel challenged theologically, you will feel challenged socially.  There is no sitting in dark rooms pondering theological quandaries here.  Which I suppose is good for the cerebral type of person.  My only real hesitation is in full embracing their “Missional” label.  I think it could be better called “The Christian Responbility of Evangelism,” instead of mixing it up with the office of missionary, which involves crossing language/cultural barriers to plant the gospel seed in the midst of unreached ethno-lingustic people groups.  And also, I do still desire for there to be a clear teaching of the place of the Church in relation to Israel and the promises of the OT, rather than expositional shortcuts  to Church application.

Anyways.

I’ve recently begun to entertain the thought of serving in youth ministry at RGC.  I think, all the great experiences I had in college are finally itching to see the light of day again.  And I guess I’ve always wanted to help set kids straight too. those rascals.

Young and Crazy (The Passionate Youth of today’s Evangelical America.)

christian youngsters, raising hands during worship

When I was in junior high and high school, I subscribed to a brand of Christianity which I will here call Adolescent American Passion (AAP) Christianity.  It was a fitting brand of Christianity for me at the time, as it is for most teenagers simply because emotions are easy.  and teenagers have a lot of them.  If I take a survey of all the conferences, camps, movements and christian events I have ever attended, I can guarantee most of them were filled to the brim with AAP kids.

Defining  AAP Christianity

So first things first, what are the doctrinal convictions of AAP Christianity? Well, to be short, there aren’t any really, save one.  Be passionate! for passion will win the day.

As an AAP youngster, the Christian walk is characterized by emotional drive, and creative biblical discovery.  The devotional time or (Quiet Time / QT as it is also called)  is a time where the youngster reads a passage and looks for a deeper meaning, a meaning that sounds cool, that other people aren’t seeing, a creative biblical discovery as I am here calling it.  This special discovery of meaning becomes the so-called “scriptural” fuel which inspires emotional highs that then go on to motivate them towards missional activities.  (missional is the right word, because with the lack of sound missiological resources in AAP circles, settling for a general missionary feel as espoused by the majority of modern churches today is the best they can get).

A portrait of AAP faith and the problem with it

So what does this look like? And what is the problem with this form of Christianity? Take a moment to imagine a high school student, a self-proclaimed passionate “Jesus Freak”.   Well-meaning, and relatively serious about his faith.  Every morning he reads the Scripture and waits to be inspired by a sentence or a word, which he then later shares at his Christian club on campus, which in turn inspires his fellow Christian friends.  Later on in the day, he stumbles into some form of sin, and feels as though he has failed yet again to live up to the Christian calling.  Considering his failure, he then renews his vow to resist sin, and listens to cathartic Contemporary Christian Melodies to get him back on his feet.  In the months ahead, he participates in various Christian events, where the speakers call for “Revolution!” and/or “Rededication,” which he naturally responds to by feeling a wave of positive resolve.   The Christian camp he goes to that following summer results in the same sort of motivational push, and he relaunches into his everyday life with emotions soaring.  In his heart, the future is bright.   Christianity is indeed alive in him.  The night he comes home after camp, he falls asleep after reading a passage on a new heart, misconstruing the meaning of regeneration into one about spiritual renewal.  But that doesn’t cross his mind. He feels great, and that means, he’s doing great.

Pause there. That’s the problem.  There are thousands upon thousands of AAP Christians feeling great, and equating that feeling with their spiritual health and maturity. Never considering the fact their entire religion is based upon nothing more than that: a feeling.  But the problem with emotions, is that they are temporal, meaning that they inherently have a time limit.  We are happy, we are sad, we are nervous, we are confident, and those emotions ebb and flow like tides.  And just like tides, they rise and fall according to seasons, and according to circumstance.  Unfortunately, the reality of things is, a Christianity based on positive emotions is like a boat helplessly tossed about on a tempermental ocean.

The Solution to AAP

Which is where the Scriptures of God come in.  The Scriptures most directly affect the mind, which in it’s proccess of thought, gains the confidence of the heart.  The heart then produces the emotion to reward the soul and bolster the resolve of the person.  What that really means, is that the tempermental ocean is ultimately stilled by the voice of God.  And nobody should be surprised.

A Summary

The AAP Christian attempts to gain stability and growth via rootless emotion.  The biblical Christian, gains stability and growth via the careful study of the voice of God in the scriptures. In this case, the roots should be greater than the tree.  Which is how nature intended it.

AAP youngsters, go to all the events in the world, and they wonder why they feel like they are failing, why they are still burning out.  Here is the reason why. All those speakers, all those events, all of them. Use a sorry study of scripture to produce a large amount of emotion to motivate these AAP’s into feeling their way to progress.  Feeling their way to progress.  Good grief.  Theses self styled shepherds think that as long as they get the hearts of these kids pumping (which really isn’t hard since they are largely adolescents), the legitimacy and depth of the study is negligible.  But see how the carriage has preceded the horse.

The Study is not negligble.  The Maturity of a Christian, is directly based upon the intensity and accuracy of his interpretation of the Word.  He must be a man of the Scriptures, and in being a man of the Scriptures, he will necessarily be a man of stability.  At last we are talking about the psalm 1 man, “his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.”

What do we do with them

Considering all this,  it is not our job to lay waste to the AAP christian.  Despite the fact that AAP’s have shallow scriptural roots supplying their giant trees of emotional drive, destroying that tree, doesn’t help.  What will help is if the roots that do exist are slowly and carefully tended to, and watered so that one day that giant tree of emotion is being sufficiently supplied.  Because the problem with Conservative, reformed, evangelicals, is the exact opposite of AAP’s, their roots are massive, and their trees are small.  So why not leverage what we’ve got, play both strenghts to the center, and try producing a biblical Christian.

When life is gritty, forgiveness is hard to receive

A few hours ago, I finished watching Darren Aronofsky’s film,”The Wrestler”.  The script is about an old independent circuit wrestler dealing with the fallout of his career due to old age and a heart attack.  When facing the reality of a less than fulfilling retirement, living  alone in a broken down mobile home, miles away from an estranged daughter, Randy (the wrestler) finds himself searching for what it’s all added up to, and the depressing result is, not much.  The movie is full of dark and gritty scenes from stripper bars to up close shots of  masochistic wrestling matches.  And at the end of the film, Randy is once again in the ring.  Having been rejected by the world and feeling as though he has failed at his last chance to make things right with his daughter he declares that his only family are the people who scream his name in the stands and applaud him from outside the ring.

I left the movie an emotional wreck.  And my one thought was, it must be hard to feel like you can be forgiven when your life is all grit.

When we go to church, things are clean there, the pastor, his wife and kids, you see how they look like the model family, people dressed in suits and ties siting in their pews, these straight and orderly rows of padded benches, and everybody sing hymns in weird old English.  And there behind the pulpit the Pastor is saying that for all you sinners, you can be forgiven.  And I can just imagine this Randy the wrestler saying. “How could you possibly forgive me? How could I possibly FEEL forgiven after all this? And just thinking back, for all the weeks and months and years of having sex with girls in dirty club bathrooms and snorting blow at parties where I got drunk our of my mind until I puked, and missing all those appointments I made with my daughter to show her that I could change, and for all of it, all of those images that got burned into my mind because I just can’t forget what I’ve done, and how much of it stays with me…”

And all I can say is, Gosh, I take forgiveness so lightly.  I just pop it into my mouth like candy and smile real big and think it’s all okay.  But you know what? it’s not ok.  That’s not forgiveness, that’s …well, nothing.  It’s empty religious movement.

The reason why forgiveness is so hard for people like Randy, is because they feel the weight of their sin.  Because they feel like they are more horrible than anyone could possibly handle.  They feel like they can’t ever be clean again.

But you know what? That’s where I should be. That’s where Christians should all be.  Before we can ever reach out our hands for the forgiveness of the Cross, we need to know why we’re reaching for it.  And we ought to to FEEL why we’re reaching for it.  Because of all the grit and messed up living we’ve done, we are the one’s who should be abandoned, we are the one’s who should die alone, failures, we are the one’s who don’t deserve a second chance, and the last thing we should be expecting is forgiveness.

And that is when the message of the Gospel rises out of the little box we make for it, and becomes the power and the glory of God.  It happens the moment we understand Grace.

And Grace shines brightest, when we are the most helpless.

Yeah it’s got to be hard to receive forgiveness when your life is all grit.  But I bet, that if you end up taking it, that forgiveness is going to be real.

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So i’ve decided to start yet another blog for post-College life. This one therefore will now forever be categorized as my College Blog. And my xanga will forever be called my Pre-College blog. wawaweewa!