Misdiagnosis Of Church

"When any species undergoes a reproduction crisis, a name is giving it: "endangered." Arguably Christianity has entered such a crisis; our inability to reproduce the faith is the number one problem facing our families and churches today. Christianity in the West has become a sterile, exhausted religion. . . .

The dominant means of addressing the church's reproduction crisis has been to devise new methodologies and strategies for how we do church. This is a misdiagnosis of the problem, however, and without the right diagnosis of the disease, I cure is difficult."

-Leonard Sweet. From Tablet To Table.

Lies About Love

We talk like love comes naturally and we have nothing to learn. Same attitude about motherhood and fatherhood. Because we birthed a child we naturally could not have any level of incompetence, or lack of knowledge on the subject. We were born knowing how to raise chuldren.  

"Many of us believe loving well is learned automatically. 
We underestimate the depth of our bad habits and what is needed to sustain long-term... change in our relationships."
- Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy Spirituality -

Broken Church- 70-80% Of OUR Kids Never Return.

We are full of it.... we are full of hot air, bologna, theology, hyper-spirituality, and the fact is that we aren't doing anything other than congratulating ourselves on the profundity of our revelations.

Between 70 and 80 percent of evangelicals in America, by the time they are twenty-one, will leave the faith and never return. Did you hear that? We are not even reaching our own children.

It's like we have a broken down car and we're trying to sell it to the world, saying, buy our product.

Our product stinks. We have nothing to sell but our Bible opinions. And how is the world responding to our bible opinions?
But we're going to keep doing it because we've got the "Bible."
But we're not delivering on the life, the love, the power, the truth, the Incarnate....(sigh!) ..... we are not delivering on Jesus as a general rule."
Seventy to eighty percent of our own children should be a terrifying statistic. It should cause us to sit back and say,

"Dear God how many hours, how much money is being poured into this thing called Christianity, and my own children aren't even serving the lord?"
This is broken Saints. It's broken! It's broken, broken, broken! But we're going to have an evangelism outreach, we are going to pass out... [pamplets or flyers]
Oh my!
- Stephen Crosby!

Read this Book as it gets to the real issue below the surface that we never talk about in church.

This insight in how our history, our past, our emotions, and our emotional responses and mechanisms affects us today,  is simply extraordinary.

I found the book to be the typical  slick marketing and packaging  to make a "Program" to sell to churches. So the writing is the usual dumbed own style of language and writing of typical evangelical  programs,

but in no way is this books HELP and INSIGHT shallow.  

He hits  subjects not talked about. 

It is VERY well written.

Every leader should read this book. 

 

The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero 

It Is Ordaine That We Should Know One Another

"And I think that life itself, and the way we come into the world, is so ordained by the deity that we should know one another.

For everyone comes into this great universe obscure and unknown casually and by degrees, but when he mixes with his fellows and grows to maturity he shines forth, and becomes well-known instead of obscure, and conspicuous instead of unknown."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals.

1st Century Greek Philosopher

Let's Call Church what Church Is

“Let’s make a pact to use the term church only the way God uses it, not for humanity’s faltering institutions, but for the living, breathing family that thrives in the earth.”

- Kevin Smith

Are You One Of Us Or Not? Communion

In the little tin church in Page the desert sand serves as the floor. Bert Layman , the iron-worker cum preacher who built the church, prays over the rough hewn communion table he has crafted in his own rough hewn image. Grandma Yakashigi, Nakagawasan, Nishikawasan, from Japan are there. Cecil, who baptized me when I was 13, the most gentle of souls, is kneeling up front. Some way Pastor Sheets from the Baptist Church has strayed in – Bert will not be happy. The ordinary folk, the only kind I know, fill the little house of worship.  The journey from dust to dust does not seem so far in this dusty crowd melding into the sand floor. Roy, the local prison guard, comes bearing the emblems and as he bends down he brings me fully awake, I look at Roy who is silent but I hear the question from the emblems: “Paul, are you one of us or not?”[2

[2] The title and ending are from a Fred Chappell novel with a different meaning worked out here.

https://paulandfaithwalking.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/i-am-one-of-you-forever/

An Actor In Our Own Home

"I know someone who has twice cheated on his wife, whom I don’t know. He told me this over coffee because I was telling him how I thought, perhaps, man was broken; how for man, doing good and moral things was like swimming upstream. He wondered if God had mysteriously told me about his infidelity. He squirmed a bit and then spoke to me as if I were a priest. He confessed everything. I told him I was sorry, that it sounded terrible. And it did sound terrible. His body was convulsed in guilt and self-hatred. He said he would lie down next to his wife at night feeling walls of concrete between their hearts. He had secrets. She tries to love him, but he knows he doesn’t deserve it. He cannot accept her affection because she is loving a man who doesn’t exist. He plays a role. He says he is an actor in his own home."

- Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz 

Fathering As Revival

"I want the fast burn of revival but what will change history is the slow burn of fathering"

~ Lou Engle

A Church Without Control

"As we come to see his church as a reality outside of human control, then you can embrace her reality however she takes shape in the relationships and connections around you."

- Wayne Jacobsen. Beyond Sundays 

Children Have A Theology Too

"We need to remember that children have a theology too. It may be clumsy or rudimentary, but it is a theology. The difference between a child and an adult is not primarily the content of the theology. The biggest difference is the impact of that theology. Children are different...... They actually believed their beliefs and that those beliefs have present consequences."

- Tony Kriz. Aloof:

 Figuring Out Life With A God Who Hides.

Cockeyed Ambition To Conquer

"The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight."

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Mystical Faithfulness

"The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience."

- Edward Abbey, 

The Life I've Chosen

"I figured I'd put myself into an impregnable position and that no one would threaten to drive me from the life - and the death -  I had chosen. I stood up to the tearful, tragic letters from my mother and the free one one-way airplane tickets to Los Angeles or San Francisco sent to me by friends who couldn't believe that I lived as I did because I wanted to."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure 

My True Identity

"Personally, as my struggle reveals, I don’t often “feel” like a beloved child of God. But I know that that is my most primal identity and I know that I must choose it above and beyond my hesitations."
- Beloved. Henri Nouwen 

A Universal Church that Transcends Nations And Races

"....in Rome, in the Eternal City , the city of Peter and Paul, he saw a vivid illustration of the church’s transcendence of race and national identity....

To think of the church as something universal would change everything and would set in motion the entire course of Bonhoeffer’s remaining life, because if the church was something that actually existed, then it existed not just in Germany or Rome, but beyond both. This glimpse of the church as something beyond the Lutheran Protestant Church of Germany, as a universal Christian community, was a revelation and an invitation to further thinking:.... "

~ Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

The Alure Of Sensuality

"There’s something here, my dear boy, that you don’t understand yet. A man will fall in love with some beauty, with a woman’s body, or even with a part of a woman’s body (a sensualist can understand that), and he’ll abandon his own children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia, too. If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s humane, he’ll murder; if he’s faithful, he’ll deceive."
(Brothers Karamazov.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

Babe-In-Arms

"Is it so much that love asks -- that one day you be somebody's strength, the next day their babe-in-arms?"
(Robert Brault)

One More Chance To Love

"Another day, another chance to cherish those who have cast their lot with yours."
~Robert Brault

Harmony Among A The Brokenness

"When you became a part of her family, you stayed a part of the family. It didn’t matter. When her youngest daughter divorced, Grandma still kept contact with the ex-husband. He was one of the pall bearers at her funeral, right alongside the daughter’s current partner. When her grandson (my husbands cousin) divorced, his wife still came to help Grandma clean her house. The ex-wife’s daughter (cousin’s step-daughter) was still very much a part of the family, even though there were no blood ties.
She was feisty, a hard worker, fiercely loyal, and outspoken. Everything I aspire to be. Man, I miss her. I am so glad I knew her."
(Carrie Marshall- "Remembering" About her husbands grandmother)

http://awefilledwonder.blogspot.com/2014/11/remembering.html

Oh, Baby Baby!

My Fried George Smith died in his mid 40's, in the fall of 2008. I want to share a few stories about him.

While we were attending College, “Oh, Baby Baby!” was the phrase George would say to a passing flock of good looking young ladies in the mall. I use to die of embarrassment every time.

You have to understand George. George could not whisper. He was a jolly short big man, with a deep voice. When he said something, everyone heard. However George was convinced that the flocks of young ladies NEVER heard him say; “Oh baby baby!” Let me tell you they almost ALWAYS heard. George was always a free spirit, and not very self conscious about much. I liked that about him.

The College we attended was in my young brides home town. My greatest fear became this; Being introduced to some 21 year old friend of Lynn’s from earlier days, and having this young lady remember or recognize me as the guy who “Oh Baby Babied” them in the mall. Guilt by association – know what I mean?

How many times had I made George promise he would not do this? Before I would agree to go to the mall with him I would threaten him about it every time. However, “Oh, Baby Baby!” would slip out of this training preachers mouth at the most embarrassing times. I realize he meant nothing insulting by it. He was just saying to himself, so he thought, they were pretty and God creates some very nice things in this world. But they always heard him say it to "himself", and it was wearing thin with me.

One day George “Oh Baby Babied” a group of 4-5 young ladies passing by. Immediately after the young ladies passed by I elbowed George, HARD, and said; “George, will you please lay off? They hear you saying it every time.”

Right out loud George bellows; “What? They did not hear me say Oh, Baby Baby! What are you elbowing me for?”

I said; “Yes they did hear George, they are looking at us right now”

The 4-5 young women had already stopped 10 feet away, turned around, and were laughing as I chewed out my friend for “Oh, Baby Babying” them, and giggling as George insisted at full volume that they did not hear him “Oh Baby Baby” them, and that I had no right to elbow him.

I have often found myself using this phrase very endearingly for my wife over the years. She knows the story behind it, and she likes the sentiment I give with it as well. When I know she needs a compliment, when I just "notice" her, or maybe she asks me how a new outfit looks; at times there is only one phrase that really says how I feel. I say to her; "Oh Baby, Baby!" and she smiles a big grin back. When I haul that phrase out, she knows full well that I really really mean it.