That Darned Piggy

26 May 2013

Last Sunday was our joint Pentecost service here in Englewood.  Seven or eight sponsoring churches cancelled their Sunday morning service and met together on a baseball field to share in a joint service of prayer and worship followed by a meal.  As Billy Waters pointed out in his brief sermon, Paul’s letters to the churches are addressed to the “church of God which is at Corinth” or “to the saints who are in Philippi,” not to First Baptist or Third Anglican or even to the church that meets at so-and-so’s house as over against the others.  We believe in One Church in Englewood, and it was as the One Church of Englewood that we gathered.  Of course, there are other churches that weren’t involved in sponsoring the event, and they went on with their regularly scheduled services, which is fine.  All were invited, and all are welcome — they are part of the One Church in Englewood whether they jump in on this particular event or not.  Because I come from a much more sectarian tradition, this kind of occurrence always prompts me to meditate on why I do this, and why I no longer believe that I’m transgressing some boundary of doctrinal faithfulness when I do it.

Biblical truth and Christian love are two virtues which we must cultivate; two doctrines to which we must be faithful, and they cannot be separated such that it’s possible to prioritize one over the other.  The two are not in competition; “I am the…Truth” and “God is love” show us that truth and love are a perfect unity within the Triune Godhead, and they ought to be in God’s creaturely images too.  It is neither wise nor virtuous to set our virtues at one another’s throats.  When we have “love” lacking truth, the prime critique is not the lack of truth.  Love without truth isn’t true, fair enough — but more importantly it’s not really loving.  Likewise, “truth” lacking love is a sounding brass and a clanging cymbal, and of course unloving by definition, but more importantly, it fails on its own criterion — it falls short of genuine truth.  The One who is the Truth is loving, and real love rejoices in the truth.

It is precisely because I care that truth be lived as well as honored on paper that my fellowship and working relationships are as wide as they are.  Once upon a time, Paul came to Antioch and discovered Peter, his breath still reeking of pulled pork, suddenly refusing to sit and eat with the Gentile believers.  Paul could have upbraided him for being unloving.  Paul could have simply criticized his legalism.  But what Paul did, in fact, was rebuke him for not being straightforward about the gospel — and Paul’s subsequent tirade is one of the clearest expositions of justification by faith in all of Scripture.  Christ had spoken; the Gentile brothers were as clean as it gets.  By breaking table fellowship with them, Peter was implicitly succumbing to a “Christ-plus” gospel — of course the Gentile brothers belonged to Christ, but something was still missing because they ate that darned piggy.

Except for the occasional sectarian Messianic Jewish group, we seem to do okay these days on the piggy question, as long as we’re talking about literal piggy.  But we seem to have more than our fair share of metaphorical piggies coming out of the woodwork.  Whether it’s pre-, mid- or post-somethingism, hand-wringing over whether those guys are “radical” enough in the pursuit of Jesus, or whatever — anything that makes you look at someone Jesus called clean and think, “But is he really clean enough?” — lay down your idols and repent.

Christ is among us.  We are His people.  That is enough.

2 Comments | Ecclesiology, Kingdom of God, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

What He Told the Hometown Crowd

14 May 2013

This post is a part of the May Synchroblog.

A lot of folks have opinions about what Jesus was about. You’ve heard them all before — good moral teacher, revealing the Christ consciousness in all of us, whatever. In the ecclesiastical tribe I grew up in, we thought Jesus was all about dying for sinners so we could go to heaven when we die.

But what did Jesus Himself say?

Well, Jesus said quite a lot, and I’m not going to try to give it an exhaustive treatment. But there’s one particular venue that I think sheds a special light on who Jesus is and what He came to do. Jesus grew up in Nazareth — lived there until He was 30 or so. Then He began His ministry, but He didn’t begin by ministering just down the block from His childhood home. His first miracle was in Cana, and He was already traveling and teaching with a few disciples at that point. He continued His life as an itinerant teacher, but eventually, His circuit of the Galillean cities did bring him back to His hometown.

Luke 4 tells us the story. Jesus is in town for the Sabbath, so of course he goes to the synagogue like any visiting rabbi would do. Asked to read and comment on the Scriptures, he steps up and reads this from the scroll of Isaiah:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

And then He goes and sits down, and everybody stares at him. Any good commentator can help you fill in the cultural gaps here: the rabbis would stand to read the Scriptures, and then sit down to teach, so Jesus was following the accepted pattern in that regard, but He stopped reading in the middle of a sentence. The sentence finishes “…and the day of the vengeance of our God,” and of course everybody present knew it, having heard this passage read countless times throughout their lives. The omission is significant, but we’ll save that conversation for another day.

Right now I want to focus on what happens next. Remember, Jesus had grown up in this town, and lived there as a single man until He was 30. He played there as a child, worked there as a builder, worshipped in this very synagogue for most of his life. The people sitting around Him at this moment are his aunts and uncles, childhood friends, teachers, suppliers, subcontractors, bosses, clients. They know him. They know that he left town to do heaven-knows-what, and that he has been wandering about the countryside as an itinerant teacher, preaching and gathering disciples. They have heard stories of how he’s healed the sick and cast out demons. And they know, better than anybody, that he’s not a rabbi’s son, not some up-and-coming revivalist. He’s a construction worker, for crying out loud, not an exorcist.

And now here he is in the synagogue for the first time since all this weirdness started, and the first thing he does is screw up the Bible reading. What is going on? What is he all about?

Jesus tells them: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Wow. So he means it like this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted….” “Me,” he says. “I’m the one.”

He continues to speak, and they are amazed at His message, but they can’t reconcile what they are now hearing with the Jesus that they know — Joseph’s boy, the construction worker. It’s hard to take. Jesus sees the problem and calls it out, and all hell — literally — breaks loose as Nazareth becomes the first Jewish city to try to murder her Messiah. But again, that’s a discussion for another time.

For now, let’s focus on what Jesus said. When He was in front of the hometown crowd that wanted to know what He was about, He summed up His calling in a few bullet points from Isaiah, and one of them was this: He came to heal the brokenhearted.

***

This is significant to me because I didn’t believe it for most of my life. I literally do not remember a time when I was not a Christian, but receiving comfort from God was simply not part of my experience. I didn’t believe that He cared. God had a plan, sure, and it would all be gloriously worth it on the other side, I had no doubt. But “you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs,” as the man said, and God was making the biggest omelette of them all.

I didn’t just harbor these thoughts in those angst-filled teenaged moments when I was writing bad poetry, either. This was my day-to-day experience. The God I knew called for sacrifice and obedience, for pulling yourself together and getting the job done, for a stiff upper lip. God was M, as played by Dame Judi Dench. For those of you who saw Skyfall, “Take the bloody shot!” about sums it up. I knew He would burn me out, use me up in a heartbeat if it would help Him further the Grand Plan, whatever it was, and leave me a scarred husk of a human being. I knew it.

What made me so sure? That’s what was actually happening to me. Outwardly my life was proceeding well, but my inner life was withering away. The breastplate of righteousness (as I understood it) had become a straitjacket. My heart had been broken since I was a kid. I literally couldn’t remember a time when I felt whole, when I felt like being me was okay. I spent a big chunk of my formative years surrounded by people who hated me, and that didn’t help me any, either.

In my teenage years, I had learned to forgive — and that was huge for me — but I had been raised to believe that if I forgave people, that was it. Actual healing wasn’t even a category we talked about. To the extent that it was even considered, healing was assumed to happen automatically over time. It just wasn’t true, and I was unable to really love other people well as I labored under the weight of my own accrued injuries. I had been hurt and hollow for so long I didn’t know it was possible to feel any different. I didn’t even have the vocabulary for what was wrong with me.

Other people could see it — or some of it, anyway — and would say things like “God won’t ever give us something we can’t handle.” Of course it wasn’t true.

***

There’s no checklist for helping someone in that situation, but I can tell you what helped me. The first thing was that God did give me things I couldn’t handle. A lot of them, until the accumulated weight of them was crushing me. Until I finally admitted I couldn’t carry the load without Him.

By God’s providence, I found myself in a community of people who were open to supernatural ministry. Beyond their relational wisdom, grasp of Scripture, and (in some cases) clinical skills, they were willing to have God show up and do…whatever. Whatever needed to be done. I found that when we gathered, the Spirit was active. The lies I had believed about God began to surface — some of them shown to me directly by the Spirit during our times of worship, others spotted by a wise friend, and some called out prophetically by gifted brothers and sisters.

Two particular incidents stand out in my mind. In one of them, God showed me in the middle of a worship service that I did not really believe He had my good in mind. As I struggled with that — because I really didn’t believe it, and admitting it out loud didn’t change that — two prophets sat with me and began to speak — how God saw me, what He envisioned for me. It was one of the first times I experienced being comforted by God.

The other incident that springs to mind was an occasion when we were dividing up responsibilities for a service we were planning. Now, I’ve been a pastor for some years, a solo church planter, and a lot of other things, and there really wasn’t anything on the list that I couldn’t do. So when they asked me what I wanted to do, I said “Just tell me what you need me to do, and I’ll do it.” The whole room went quiet. Into the awkward silence, the pastor gently said, “I know that. But what do you want to do?” I knew what I wanted to do. I had known as soon as we laid out what needed to be done. But even among people who loved me well, people I trusted, it didn’t occur to me to say it out loud, until someone specifically asked for it. Among these dear brothers and sisters, I began to learn that God had made me to be something in particular, and leaning into the desires He gave me was the path to growth.

A little later, I met a group of people who practice and teach healing prayer, and through their ministry to me and beside me, I came to know Jesus as the Great Physician of my soul. The experiences I had there are a little too close for me to write about yet, and would take too long to explain for this post anyway. Suffice it to say, it was not a matter of doctrine or of guided imagery or any other such human manipulation. These dear brothers and sisters simply trusted Christ to be present to heal even when I did not believe that He wanted to, and asked Him to reveal Himself to me.

He did, and I love Him because He first loved me. Tangibly.

***

Paul said to “comfort one another with the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted,” and I finally know what that means. It’s not actually that complicated — “Freely you have received,” Jesus said. “Freely give.”

I can only give what I have been given. The comfort Jesus gave me was not doctrine, although it can be described doctrinally. It was Himself. That’s all I really have to offer. When I sit with someone in pain, Jesus is there, sitting next to us. He has something to contribute. Mostly, all I do is ask what it is.

***

This post is a part of the May 2013 Synchroblog. Other posts on the same topic are below:

5 Comments | Meditations, synchroblog | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Another Book Salad

12 May 2013

I just finished Leading Kingdom Movements by Mike Breen. It’s worth reviewing for sure, but this is also a good occasion to look back over Breen’s output in the last few years. The man has written four books since 2009, which is an accomplishment all on its own, and the four taken together are his team’s distilled experience in a ministry self-consciously modeled on Jesus and Paul to a degree that’s unusual in the modern Christian world. I started reading these books in 2011, and read all four in order, so this will also be autobiographical to some extent.

I want to commend all four of these books to your attention, even if you aren’t even remotely interested in taking the sort of approach to ministry that Breen and company advocate. It’s working really well in some settings. Doesn’t mean God’s calling you to try to replicate it in yours. However, in my experience, there is great value in studying the work of the Holy Spirit in Christ’s Church — learning how God is pleased to work, what He is presently doing, and so on. Great value. These four books taken together will give you a good look at a fascinating slice of the Spirit’s work in the contemporary church.

***

For me, the journey began with Building a Discipling Culture. This is an outstanding book. Organized around a series of shapes, it seems at first kind of hokey and overproduced. In a way, it is exactly that. Breen’s target market for this resource is American megachurches who have lost their way when it comes to really making disciples, so the hokey slickness is contextualization. This is a resource on disciple-making that you might get a purpose-driven church to buy and implement. It’s slick, it teaches easily, and it’s memorable, easy to keep track of all the material. Mentally walk through the shapes — circle, semicircle, triangle, square, and so on up to octagon — and you’ve got it all. Most importantly, once you get past the packaging, the content is deeply biblical.

But that is most definitely not all. Accompanying the book is the social model, called a huddle, that helps to inculcate real discipleship. See, if you come from a teaching-heavy tradition, it’s easy to degenerate into teaching yet another “discipleship” curriculum, from which your congregants depart with full notebooks and empty lives. Huddle is not another “discipleship group,” exactly. It is a group of 3-8 people who are presently in leadership somewhere (at least in a family leadership role), and it provides the opportunity for some formal teaching and debrief time. Huddle is not discipleship by itself. It is one component; the other key component is access to the leader’s life. participants will be invited to join the leader doing this or that — and not just ministry stuff. You are as likely to be invited out for a beer as you are to be invited to help clean up after the youth group’s annual movie-and-silly-string night. When Jesus went to a party, after all, He took His disciples. Why shouldn’t we?

I’m here to tell you, being huddled and working my way through the material in Building a Discipling Culture in that context was life-altering. I’m a teacher by gifting and calling, and I’ll never see teaching the same way again. I recommend it highly — but in a proper context. Don’t just rush out and buy the book. Even if you have to do it by distance (which is how the guy who huddled me had to do it) find your way into a huddle and go through it that way.

***

Breen’s second book in the series is Launching Missional Communities: A Field Guide. I’m just going to admit at the outset that of the four books, I’ve found this one to be the least helpful. Full to the brim with practical nuts-and-bolts advice, warnings, and how-tos, the book is designed to be very helpful, but in a particular context. The target audience is a large church seeking to “go missional.” Now, the way that Breen and company mean it, I’m a fan of missional, so that’s not my problem. My problem is that I’m not at the helm of a large church. Or a medium-sized church. Or even a small church, really. I’m a shepherd-at-large in the One Church in Englewood, doing a variety of things that may ultimately result in a church plant, but haven’t so far, may never, and if they don’t, that’s okay. So as advice, the book is pretty useless to me, and it’s too thin to be a good doorstop.

I don’t say this just out of a general sense that I haven’t got the resources to pursue the plan Launching Missional Communities recommends. I say that because we did actually try to follow the model laid out in the book as closely as we could, and in our context it failed spectacularly. I hasten to add that I know of other people right here in Denver who are applying the same model with roaring success. I’m not at all blaming Breen and company for our failure. Different contexts call for different approaches.

However, I commend the book to you whether you’re in a context that’s amenable to its approach or not. It provides critical nuts-and-bolts insight into the advice that Breen and his crew are giving, and you may find, as I have, that while you can’t follow the track laid out in the book, you might be able to reverse-engineer some pieces — same truths, different approach — to your great benefit.

Autobiographically, I want to add that as I was grappling with all this, and griping to my mentor that “the 3DM model” doesn’t work all that well in our situation, he crisply informed me that there is no such thing as “the 3DM model.” 3DM’s staff of mentors and disciplers, right up to Mike Breen himself, was unanimous on the point. I pushed back pretty hard on the grounds that what they were selling in the field guide and the seminars certainly was a model. I was right — it was. We were disassembling that model and making use of the spare parts anywhere we could, in the context of entirely different social vehicles and a different model of ministry. But my mentor was right as well, as we shall see.

***

Multiplying Missional Leasers is the third book in the series, and focuses on recognizing, training and launching out leaders who will go and make more leaders — from “little” leaders who will never lead more than three or four people at a time to “big” leaders who will lead thousands. Breen shows a rare grasp of the nuance involved in the task. Most leadership development material focuses on the “big” leaders, and tries to teach prospective leaders how to develop (or mimic) the charisma and organizational talent that characterizes high-capacity leaders.
Breen doesn’t go that route. Leaders can have any sort of gifting, Breen says. He proceeds to devote a considerable portion of the book to unpacking what leadership looks like in people with different kinds of gifts. It proved a valuable addition to my own understanding of how to be a leader within the bounds of the gifts God gave me.

***

Leading Kingdom Movements is the latest in the series, and conceptually the most important of the lot. In this book, Breen finally gives away the core truths we had been forced to discover somewhat earlier: it was never really about missional communities, or huddles, or any of the social vehicles. The model of moving a large church into a culture of disciple-making where people were empowered to launch and maintain missional communities — that model was just a means to an end. In many contexts, it’s a useful means, but still just a means.

The end, the telos of it all, is the big-C Church taking on the character of an extended family on mission. The rhythms and relationships that characterize an extended family with a mission beyond itself create an extraordinarily effective culture for gospel witness and disciple-making. Getting there has always been the real point. The social models of huddle and missional community were really about bringing people into familial relationships with one another, and immersing them in rhythms of life that follow the examples set for us by Jesus and the apostles.

Explaining those rhythms and relationships through an extended treatment of the life of Paul takes up the latter half of the book, and it’s excellent reading. There is some necessary conjecture along the way — filling in the gaps with what we know from the history and culture of the time — but nothing extravagant. Breen’s treatment is sound on the essential points, and well worth your time.

***

I have said throughout this review that there are four key books, and as far as the how-to part of Breen’s oeuvre is concerned, that is true. There is, however, a fifth book. Written very early on, Covenant and Kingdom is a brief treatment of the story of the whole Bible, told around the two key themes in the title. Covenant and kingdom, relationship and responsibility, family and mission, being and doing. If you break out in hives at the very mention of the word “missional,” if you are a traditional-church person to the very core and intend to have no truck with anything like what Breen and 3DM are up to, if you are not going to invest in any of the four books I mentioned above — this book is still for you.

There are other themes worth expounding through the Story, other strands that you can trace through the Bible from end to end. This is not the only way to tell the tale. But it is a way to tell the tale, and a very good one, too. For many of you reading this review, I guarantee that as you read Covenant and Kingdom, the Bible will ‘click’ together as a whole story in ways that it never has before. The way it will click together, you won’t just see the Story in the Bible — you’ll see the Story going on in your own life, too, and in ways you never noticed before.

If you get nothing else by Breen, get this one.

***

I will close this review with one final note. Print editions of the 3DM books run on the slightly expensive side. This is partly because the physical books are designed to take a pretty good beating, so they’re a bit higher quality than your average mass paperback. It’s probably also partly because the 3DM team is supporting themselves, in part, by selling books. However, all the above books are also available as e-books for much less than you’d pay for paper, so if money is an issue, you might look into that option.

Illustrations do play an important part in these books, so effective reading sometimes calls for monkeying with the enlargement settings on the smaller e-readers (like the Nook Simple Touch, for example), but it can be done. I myself read two of the above books on my Simple Touch.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Review: Healing Prayer Training

28 April 2013

A while back God began leading me to lean more heavily into the supernatural. As Christians, of course we believe in the supernatural in the sense that it’s in our doctrinal statements, but from day to day we often expect nothing supernatural to actually happen.

God was gentle with me and brought me along a little at a time. There was a whole journey preceding this that developed my prayer life from my biggest spiritual weakness into an area of strength (about which more at another time). Then God began to show me that when I come into His presence in prayer, I don’t do all the talking — He speaks to me, too, if only I’m willing to listen. (And to others. I’ve had the pleasure of introducing a number of people to hearing God — about which more later.)

About the same time, I was re-examining the Scriptures on prayer and found that God was directing me to pray for miraculous intervention in other ways that went well beyond simply hearing God (about which, once again, more later). Last spring, I took time off work to go to a conference that was addressing some of these issues, and then ended up not having the money to afford the actual conference. Talk about frustrating.

Then, this fall, I came across a flyer. The Anglican Healing Mission was holding a series of classes on healing prayer. I’d never heard of the Anglican Healing Mission, but it was $40 for four Saturdays worth of training, and the course came highly recommended. So I scraped together $40 and went.

That, Gentle Reader, was a life-altering decision.

The material was from Francis and Judith MacNutt of Christian Healing Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida, and over the course of the last several months I have taken their Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 classes. Each level involves about 13 hours of instruction, and the way the Anglican Healing Mission does it, each level is spread over two months (we met the second and third Saturday of the month from 10 to 3). Have a look at their website to see all the topics covered.

In exchange for enough money to cover materials and a few Saturdays a month, I got to hang with people who have a great deal of experience in healing ministry, and let me tell you, it was absolutely worth it. The MacNutts bring decades of experience in healing ministry, and their teaching involves a great deal of wisdom and common sense. I can’t tell you how many times I heard them say that there’s no formula, that it’s not magic, that this ministry is about what God wants to do, and nothing more or less than that.

On any given Saturday, we would gather, hear three or four lectures from the MacNutts, supplemented by our facilitators from the Anglican Healing Mission, and then the real work would begin. After the lectures came the practicum, in which we would apply what we were learning — right there, right then.

Now, I can just hear the growling from my former tribe members. The way it usually goes is something like this: “Well of course I believe that God still heals miraculously today — He’s God, He can do anything He wants. But I don’t believe He does it on demand.”

Me neither, guys, and you know what? In twelve full Saturdays of classes and practicums, I never heard anybody demand a healing, nor did I hear anybody advocate demanding a healing. I saw lots of prayer for healing, though, and I did see some people healed. The most visible thing I saw was a guy who came into the building with a bad limp walk back out with his knee injury completely gone. That was pretty cool — and the guy with the limp was as surprised as anybody — but that was far from the most spectacular healing I saw.

The most spectacular healing I saw was within me. Time would fail to tell you all that happened, and some of it is too personal to share anyhow, but let me put it this way: Jesus said He came to heal the brokenhearted, and He said that He is with us always. I knew these two facts long before I began training in healing prayer, but I had very little experience of them in my life. In the last nine months, I have repeatedly experienced Jesus’ presence and closeness with me in a way that is unprecedented in my life. He has, in encounter after encounter, been present for healing of many hurts that I thought would never really be healed. I have seen curses broken, my own idolatrous vows renounced, besetting sins driven away miraculously, and much more. I knew God would do anything to get us into heaven, but I never really believed that He’d do whatever it took to make me whole here and now. The God I grew up with would use me up without a second thought, and make good on it somehow by showing me the grand plan in eternity. There’s an element of truth in that. There is. But there’s a lot more to God than that, and eternal life begins here and now. In the past nine months I have experienced that as never before, largely through the ministry of the Anglican Healing Mission.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Bonsai in the Tabernacle

21 April 2013

“Martial arts as a living tradition is like any craft tradition in that skills must be taught, learned, and performed by individuals who innovate even while reproducing the tradition.”
-Peter Lorge

Worship is a similar tradition, and it is the tradition that orders our world. This makes alterations in worship a big deal-whether we recognize it or not.

In this culture, we suffer from an overwhelming temptation to change it up constantly lest our worship get ‘stale.’ Now, this can actually happen, but far more commonly, staleness is not the problem. When the worship begins to feel a little dead, most of the time that’s not staleness, it’s winter.

As a culture, we’re nothing if not mobile. It’s always spring somewhere, and you can just keep moving with the weather. But you’ll never grow roots that way. You can stay alive in a bonsai pot — beautiful maybe, but stunted, bearing very little fruit, dependent on constant care from others. You were made for better than this.

Settle in. Endure. Pass through the winter of your discontent. Spring is coming, and growth. Keep at it, and your roots will sink deep into the aquifer. Bonsai don’t fare well in droughts.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Neighborhood Sacramentology: Imaging the Reality of the Table

7 April 2013

We are considering the Lord’s Table in the context of neighborhood church and ministry. In the preceding post, we looked at the reality of what is happening at the Table. In this one, we want to consider how to incarnate that reality in a way that is fitting, both to the reality that is occurring and to the context into which we are bringing it. Along the way, we’ll hit the question of appropriate contexts as well.

In a wedding ceremony, as long as certain essentials are covered, the bride and the groom will be married at the end of the day, no matter what else goes wrong. This leaves a lot of room for things to go wrong without having to call a do-over, an emergency “get it right this time” wedding ceremony — for which all thanksgiving. But it also means that there is a lot of room for honoring or dishonoring the occasion. The groom can answer the request for an “I do” with “Why not?” The bride’s dress can be immodest to the point of whorish. The best man can make a pass at the groom. The maid of honor can get drunk and fall into the cake. A wedding ceremony is meant to both accomplish and signify the beginning of a marriage. These things signify something else, something antithetical to what the ceremony is accomplishing. None of them make the wedding invalid, but that doesn’t make them okay. That said, one of the sage pieces of wedding advice is that something will indeed go wrong, and you had best make up your mind ahead of time to laugh about it and roll with the punches.

In these occasions, the attitude we seek is attention to detail and appropriateness tempered by a sense of proportion. If somebody falls into the cake, the happy couple is still married, and it’s a day for celebration. Scrape the icing off the dance floor and carry on.

We want this same attitude in our Lord’s Table celebration.

This has been a challenge for me because I come from an ecclesiastical tradition that rarely even asked the question of how to best represent what was really happening. How to think about it correctly, sure. How to teach it well, of course. How to represent it? Not so much. We figured if we were talking about it right, the job was done.

So how do we? Well, we could do worse than do what Jesus did, I suppose. He passed one loaf and one cup from hand to hand around the table. We are one Body, partaking of one Lord — so one loaf, one cup. We are eating a meal with Jesus, so we pass the elements around the table. Makes sense.

That’s great, if you happen to be observing the Passover feast in an upper room already. But suppose you’re with 150 people in an auditorium? Do you have one loaf and one cup, and invite everybody forward to tear off a piece of bread and sip from the cup? Do you pass around one of those big offering-plate-looking things with a bunch of plastic cups, each containing a thimbleful of juice, and a tray of tasteless little wafers? Do you give everybody one of these?

I have celebrated communion in all these ways. As horrifying as I find that last option, in the service where I encountered it, it was by far the most reasonable choice. It was that or no Lord’s Table at all. The pastors who organized the service made the right call, and may God bless them for it.

When we begin to talk about how to do this in a typical “traditional” church service like this, we enter into a discussion that’s been going for a while. There are some good things to talk about there, but I’d like to talk about something else. Our subject, remember, is neighborhood sacramentology. The first question we encounter is one of simple appropriateness: may we take the Lord’s Table out of the church building and into, say, someone’s dining room on a Thursday night?

I know a good many people who would say no, or at least feel uneasy about it. I used to be among them. But then I noticed something. The original Lord’s Table was in someone’s dining room on a Thursday night! How could it not be permissible? The question is not whether it’s okay to take take communion out of the church building and into the home, but whether it’s okay to take communion out of the home and into the church building. For the first 300 years of the church’s history, we met in nothing but homes…when we were particularly blessed. Too often, we only had forests and prisons, catacombs and caves and dens in the earth for meeting places.

Though there be only two of three of us huddled together in a hole in the side of a hill, Christ is there in our midst. Wherever and whenever we gather, we are the church. And where the church is gathered, what could be more natural than to eat at Christ’s Table?

The objection that always stopped me was 1 Corinthians 11. By observing the Table in an exclusive manner that reinforced division rather than honoring the unity Christ created in His Body, the Corinthian believers heaped up judgment for themselves. For some reason, it seemed to me that the best way to avoid all this would be to reserve the Lord’s Table for an official, called meeting of the church on the Lord’s Day. In that way, there could be no exclusivity — everyone would be welcome, and everyone would know when and where to show up if they wanted to come.

I have come to understand that while that certainly is a way to obey, it is not the way to obey…and it is not, in fact, the way that Paul instructed the Corinthians to proceed. The thing that changed my mind was this: I was talking with a pastor who had originally held my position: save Communion for the church service on Sunday morning only. He spent several years working with an aging congregation, and the experience changed his mind forever. As an increasing number of his congregants were unable to make it to church regularly because of health concerns, inability to drive, or for other age-related reasons, he realized that limiting Communion to the church service did not ensure that everyone could be included — far from it! In fact, his policy effectively excluded the weakest and most helpless members of his congregation from the Table. Convicted, he began to serve the Table in houses, nursing homes, wherever he had to in order to take the Table to everyone in his congregation.

Now, the understanding this man arrived at is actually fairly common in Christendom, which is why you can find a couple of portable communion sets in the back of just about any decent-sized Christian bookstore. But that started me thinking — what better way to avoid reinforcing exclusivity and division within the Body than to observe the Table everywhere, with everyone in the Body? Nothing wrong with doing it in the Sunday service, too — we certainly should — but why only there?

Perhaps there’s a simple set of qualifying questions we could ask. Is the Father with us? He is. Is Christ among us? He is. Is the Spirit here? He is. Well then, if this is our God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — and we are His people, the redeemed, then what could be more appropriate than to lift up our hearts to Him, and to partake of His gifts for His people?

I can hear my high-church friends growling — but what for? When God’s people ascend in worship before Him, we ascend to the Holy of Holies in the heavenly tabernacle, the very throne room of Yahweh — it doesn’t get any higher than that, now does it? And that glorious fact is not in any way dependent on where or when we meet. Heaven is as near to the dankest catacomb as it is to the stateliest cathedral, and glory to God for that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Neighborhood Sacramentology: What the Table Does

31 March 2013

The first Neighborhood Sacramentology post on the Table considered the priesthood and the validity of the Eucharist, which raised the question of when we ought to observe the Table. The second post enriched the question by recasting it in liturgical terms, and that left us with three questions.
1. What are we doing/representing at the Lord’s Table?
2. How can we do that effectively in a given context?
3. Are there contexts where the Table should or should not be observed?
This post will tackle that first question.

Whether in a high-church Anglican service in Canterbury Cathedral or a secret meeting of a Chinese house church in a nondescript apartment in Beijing, the Lord’s Table will be the highlight of Christian worship around the world today, and rightly so.

On this day, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

A human being died, was buried, and on the third day, and was raised to new and incorruptible life.

But so what? It was 2000 years ago, in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, and nobody’s successfully done it since. Other than being a candidate for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, what does it have to do with me?

Nothing at all…unless somehow, I could participate in it. If the same thing could happen to me, then the resurrection of Christ is not just a historical oddity. It’s proof that new life and immortality await whoever follows in His footsteps, whoever partakes of Christ.

This is Paul’s point in Romans 6. We who believe in Christ participate with Him in His death and resurrection, and because He is raised, we also are raised to new life. Hebrews shows us Christ as our forerunner, the High Priest who leads us into the Presence behind the veil of the heavenly Tabernacle, going before us, whose ministry never fades because He always lives to intercede for us.

When we come into the Presence in worship, we find Him there ahead of us, blessing and breaking the bread and pouring the wine. “This is My body,” He says, and “This is My blood.” There in the throne room of His Father, He invites us to His victory feast: “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has everlasting life, and I will raise him up on the last day, for My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in Him.”

You are what you eat. We who eat and drink Christ are Christ’s Body, His hands and feet released into the world to do the works that He did, and greater works still. As the bread and wine are broken down and incorporated into our bodies, so He is incorporated into our hearts, as the Eucharistic exhortation also says: “Feed on Him in your hearts by faith, and with thanksgiving.”

This is what the Table does, and what the Table represents.

Christ is risen! Alleluia!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Neighborhood Sacramentology: Liturgy and the Table

27 March 2013

In the previous ‘Neighborhood Sacramentology’ post, we looked at the question of who may administer the Eucharist, and we addressed the question in terms of validity, and in terms of priesthood. Working with only those two criteria, I concluded that any baptized believer is a priest, and a priest may validly administer the Eucharist.

Those are not, however, the only criteria. When we gather together for worship, we always have convictions about what our worship is, what it means. We embody those convictions in a set of expectations about what we will actually do, an order of service — or to use the historical term, a liturgy. The liturgy and the beliefs about worship reflect one another. (I am speaking ideally here. In reality, our liturgies often embody beliefs and expectations we do not hold, either because we were taught the liturgy but not the underlying foundation of beliefs, or because we simply weren’t reflective about the liturgy.)

By being a reflection of our beliefs and inner life, liturgy is drama, an acting-out of our understanding of worship. Only it is performative drama, like a wedding ceremony. The smallest details of the wedding ceremony may be carefully planned to adequately represent what is happening on the wedding day, but on the wedding day, the ceremony does not just represent the beginning of a marriage. It also accomplishes what it represents.

Likewise, our liturgy does not simply represent worship; it is worship. As custodians of the liturgy, we have a duty to attend to the details so that the real worship of the church is adequately represented in the liturgy.

This means that when we turn to the question of who blesses and distributes the bread and wine, we are not simply dealing with matters of priesthood and validity. We are also casting for a role in a drama, and the role for which we are casting is Jesus Himself.

We need to recognize at this point that we have departed from “right and wrong” territory and embarked into “wisdom” territory. We already understand that any baptized believer can validly step up and represent Christ; in fact, that is exactly what we are all called to do in daily life. The question now is, “Given that anyone could, who is the best choice for the role in the liturgical drama we are carrying out?”

The answer, of course, is Jim Caviezel.

I kid, but to make a point: obviously, you have to choose from the talent you have available. You may feel strongly that it should be an ordained priest, but if you haven’t got one about, what will you do? You may personally feel it should be a man, but if you’re at a women’s retreat with five other churches and they plan to observe communion, you will be offered the elements by a woman. At that moment, the relevant question is not “Shouldn’t this be a man?” but “Shall I break table fellowship with five churches’ worth of my sisters in Christ over it?” No, you shouldn’t.

Now, for what my $0.02 is worth, I do think that a man should represent Christ in the liturgical drama, just as I believe the Prayers of the People should be led by a woman, representing the Bride. I also don’t really want to see a production of Romeo and Juliet where Romeo is played by a woman, or Juliet by a man (even if that’s how they really did it in Shakespeare’s day). Gender matters, and God was pleased to present Christ His Son not just as a man, but as the man, the new Adam, and to cast His Church as the Bride of Christ, the new Eve, the mother of all living on the New Earth. I believe this imagery ought to be honored and reinforced, especially in our worship.

That said, there remains the Jim Caviezel problem. This post is called Neighborhood Sacramentology for a reason, and we have to work with what we have. I once heard a story of a group of Russian Orthodox clerics who wanted to observe the Eucharist in the gulag. In their tradition, the Eucharist is served from an altar that contains the relics of the martyrs, and of course, they had neither altar nor relics in the gulag. These men, each one imprisoned for his faith, looked at one another and thought, “We’re all martyrs here!” So they laid one of their number on a bench and served the Eucharist off his chest.

While I don’t feel a need for the relics of the martyrs, that’s the spirit. Given that we’re doing our liturgical casting from the people we have handy, let’s be as clear as possible about what we’re seeking to represent, and then make the wisest decision we can with the resources at hand.

I ended the last Neighborhood Sacramentology post with a question: When should we observe the Eucharist? The observations above don’t answer that question, but they give us some better questions.

1. What are we doing (and representing) at the Lord’s Table?
2. How do we embody that in a given context?
3. In what contexts is the Table appropriate? Are there some contexts where it is required or prohibited? If so, what are they?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Being Bi…

24 March 2013

Hi. For a number of years now, I have been living an alternative lifestyle, and it’s time to get it out in the open. My name is Tim, and I’m bi…

…vocational.

If that seems an unnecessarily provocative way to start out a post, I don’t think it is. I’ve been in American church culture all my life, and this lifestyle choice is poorly understood. The church exhibits a staggering ignorance of what it is to be bivocational, and there’s a real stigma attached to it. I never really noticed the extent of it until I came to terms with my own bivocationality. And before you ask, yes, I’ve tried “not being bivocational.” I have. I tried really hard, but in the end…nothing else worked. I don’t know what the future holds, and hey, God can do anything. Maybe one day, I won’t be bivocational. But right now, this is what I am. I don’t want to be cranky about it, but I’m not in love with the way the church tends to view me.

Mike Breen gives the best description I’ve seen so far of the bivocational stigma in his latest book, Leading Kingdom Movements:

..I think there is a pretty unhealthy stigma that attaches itself to being bi-vocational, strangely enough, even for church planters. This seems to be the train of thought:

A ‘real’ pastor does ministry full time for full-time pay
If you’re good enough to pastor, you’ll be paid full-time.
If a pastor isn’t paid full-time, it’s because he or she isn’t good at his or her job.
Most people find their identity in their job (an unfortunate reality).
If I’m not paid full-time, it means I’m not a good pastor.
Therefore, the core of my identity is shaken because I’m bi-vocational.

That’s the stigma.

I want to add a little to that.

In almost any professional field in our society, the aspiring professional goes to school. Depending on the field, he will seek an associate’s degree, at the very least, usually a bachelor’s and often a master’s. Sometimes he will need a doctorate. During the schooling, the student is not yet qualified to work in his chosen field, so unless he’s lucky enough to be born with a trust fund, he works at whatever comes his way — waiting tables, tending bar, landscaping, temping, moving, retail, limo driving, the usual assortment of common student jobs.

Nearly every student is ‘bivocational’ in this sense of straddling the line between preparation for his chosen field and some form of totally unrelated employment that he’s doing purely to pay the bills. But it is universally understood that this is temporary, and the signal that all the menial labor and the grinding poverty of the student lifestyle has finally paid off is…what?

He finally gets his first “real job,” which is to say, a full-time job in his chosen field.

What if it doesn’t work? He keeps pushing, keeps applying different places, but after a few years, his resume makes it obvious to prospective employers that he just didn’t make the cut. Then what?

He does something else, something unrelated to his education, just to pay the bills. At some point, if he doesn’t just take the hit and move on, it starts to look a bit sad. A guy getting his master’s in marine biology and then ending up working for Nationwide Insurance is a failure of sorts, but hey, he’s feeding his family and not everybody can swim with the dolphins, can they? But there’s something pathetic about that guy taking a job as a security guard at Sea World just to be near the orcas.

That is what bivocational ministry looks like.

Failing, followed by failing to move on.

It’s actually a little worse than that. If the guy always wanted to be a cop, got his degree in criminal justice, became a cop, and has a ministry with homeless kids on the side, he’s a hero, a saint. Everybody admires him.

If the guy always wanted to be in full-time ministry, went to Bible college, couldn’t make it pay and ended up a cop to pay the bills, but has a ministry with homeless kids on the side — he failed, and he’s making the best of it. We pity him at best, and sometimes we make him a cautionary tale. “You know, lots of these guys graduate and go into full-time ministry to start with, but it gets hard and they bail out for secular employment,” we tell our aspiring ministers. “Stand strong. God will provide.” And they nod their heads as if that’s wisdom.

These two guys could be partners in the same ministry together, doing the exact same work shoulder to shoulder, advancing God’s Kingdom among homeless children. Yet in the eyes of the church, one of them is going above and beyond the call of duty, while the other one is a failure, a wash-out.

What is this?

It is a culture of professionalism. We have been indulging in a centuries-long experiment in professionalizing the clergy, and this is one of the things we get out of it.

On one hand, a well-paid, well-educated, slick and presentable corps of motivated, upwardly-mobile professionals, and on the other, a bunch of God’s people who are being implicitly discouraged from continuing to pursue their calling.

Being one of the latter is a lot of what 2012 was about for me. For those of you who don’t know, my other vocation is school bus driver, which is just about perfect for mortifying my ambitions. Unless I deliberately make a discipline of humanizing myself to the children I drive, they don’t even see me as a person. To them, I am just a part of the bus, attached to the seat at the factory. My peers in society understand correctly that nobody wants to be a bus driver when they grow up, and infer on that basis that I couldn’t cut it at much else. Otherwise, why would I be a bus driver? In terms of social status, it’s barely a cut above being a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Once upon a time, I did do other things successfully. For nine years I taught and designed curriculum for two different seminaries. I was an assistant pastor for a year, then a pastor for 6 years. I’m pretty smart, well-read, I’ve travelled and taught on 4 continents, spoken at numerous conferences, published articles, and so on — I was an up-and-coming young professional theologian.

And I really, really wanted people to know it. That was part of the problem. Even when I first started driving a bus, I thought it was only a temporary setback. I was really only doing it because I needed the money, and the nature of the work and the timing of it allow me to continue pursuing my calling — so I told myself. I’d drum up some more classes to teach, raise a little support, and get right back in the saddle…

But no. God was steering me, and early in 2012, God made it clear that He wanted me to let go of the professional theologian schtick and fully embrace my other vocation. Buy the hat with a school bus on it, wear the school district Transportation Department jacket, the whole deal. I’m lucky He didn’t ask me to buy a bumper sticker that said “My other car is a school bus.”

Why? I don’t really know. I’m still not sure what all God is up to, but I can tell you some of the things that have come out of it.

1. It forced me to get more conscious and skilled at the disciplines of building a relationship. On the bus, I see the same kids every day, but most of the time, I interact with them for only seconds at a time. Building relationships under those circumstances means not wasting opportunities, and I’ve gotten much better at capitalizing on the chances God gives me to build relationships through a series of tiny interactions. The same skills apply off the bus, and make my life much richer.

2. Until I was well out of the ‘professional ministry’ culture, I had no idea how much its expectations controlled my thinking about what ministry was. Fully embracing the bus driver vocation let me ‘cleanse my palate’ enough to contemplate a much wider field of ministry than I had in the past. I could not possibly have contemplated the sort of ministry I have now while immersed in the culture of professional ministry.

3. I keenly appreciate the control of my schedule that came with being in full-time ministry. There’s so much I want to do that I can’t now, because I simply am not free at, say, 7:00 on Wednesday morning. In the event I ever have that freedom again, believe me, I’ll make the most of it.

4. As I mentioned above, driving a school bus has been a beautiful tool for mortifying my ambitions. I was building a career, a little Kingdom of Tim, and that’s just not what life is about. Seeing my little sandcastle carried out with the tide was destructive in the best possible way, and cleared the way for beginning to lean into building God’s Kingdom instead of mine.

There’s probably more, but those are the ones that leap to mind right at the moment.

Oh yeah, and I’m pretty sure the breaking isn’t done yet. I don’t know what the next stage looks like, but in a weird way I’m looking forward to it. “Go to a land I will show you” leads to really good stuff, but only when you get out of Haran.

2 Comments | Kingdom of God, Livin' the Bivocational Dream | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Social Justice?

17 March 2013

Last week we looked at how Jesus interacted with the woman taken in adultery in John 8. Jesus defended her from people who wanted to kill her — and she was guilty of a capital crime.

If we’re going to be like Jesus, we have to be ready to do the same.

This means that sometimes, we will protect people from the rightful consequences of their sinful actions.

Is that right?

No. No, it isn’t.

But there was nothing right about Jesus bearing our sins on the cross either, was there?

***

Earlier this week, I was reading the discussion between Doug Wilson and Thabiti Anyabwile on southern slavery and Wilson’s highly controversial writings on same. (That discussion, by the way, is how adults ought to interact, and I commend it to your attention.) In the course of the discussion, Anyabwile said something that caught my attention:

Notice how Paul keeps rattling his own chains of imprisonment in Philemon’s ears. Paul identifies himself repeatedly as the prisoner, the bound man, the one without freedom. He could have identified himself as the man of authority, the apostle, the one with right to exert himself over others. He nowhere does. That, I think, is instructive for how Christians should engage discussions involving oppressors and the oppressed. We should normally be on the side of the oppressed in the fight for justice. [Emphasis added]

While I am not sure that I agree with every nuance of Anyabwile’s meaning in the context of that particular discussion, consider the statement as a broad generalization for a moment. We should normally be on the side of the oppressed in the fight for justice.
Sure.

We have framed these discussions in terms of “social justice,” and tactically, that was a good move. Who could be against justice?

Jesus could, and that ought to give us pause.

***
The debtor cries out under the weight of a crushing, debilitating debt. If only he could get some relief, he might be able to make a life for himself. A Christian takes up his cause, and cries out against the creditors, demanding social justice.
The creditors, in response, demand the justice of the debtor paying the debts he freely agreed to undertake. “Let your yes be yes,” they say. “Honor your word,” they say. Isn’t that just too?

“This woman was caught in adultery, in the very act! Moses taught us that such a person should be stoned to death. What do you say?”
Note that by “Moses” they mean “Yahweh, speaking from the glory cloud on Mount Sinai to Moses, who passed it on to us.” And don’t forget that they are right. Isn’t that just?

Of course it is.

But what does Jesus do?

He stands between her and her accusers, backs them down, and sets her free. Then He goes to the cross and dies for her sin. Justice is served, but mercy reigns.

We ought to spend less time talking about social justice, and more time investing our own resources in social mercy. May a creditor insist that the debt due him be paid, and be a good Christian? Sure. What would Jesus do? He would step in between the debtor and the creditor, and pay the debt Himself, thereby doing justly and loving mercy at the same time.

***
If you’re reading the Anyabwile/Wilson discussion, you’ll have noticed that Philemon figures heavily in it. Both parties agree that Paul effectively manumits Onesimus, and does so without coercing Philemon, but so far I don’t think anybody has paid much attention to the mechanism that allows Paul to achieve that end. “But if he has wronged you, or owes you anything, put that on my account.”

Whether Philemon ever insisted on Paul settling up is, of course, another question. As Paul notes, Philemon did owe Paul his very life. However, Paul puts himself on the hook for it, writing with his own hand, “I will repay.”

Paul learned from Jesus, and it shows. We ought to do the same.

4 Comments | Kingdom of God, Meditations | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

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