Lent starts next Wednesday! Starting in 2010 (when God interrupted my Lenten prayer),  I’ve enjoyed the Lent devotional provided by CRM:

• Church Resource Ministries is an organization I highly respect. They’re doing missional work around the world, including the United States.
• The thoughts and questions come from CRM’s missional focus. There’s no fluff. It’s real, personal and honest.
• The format is a daily devotional email during Lent. The daily reminder in my technological world helps keep me grounded.

With a smart phone, you can have the email devotional in your hand, wherever you are. I like to take a mid-morning break during my workdays and walk around outside with my iPhone. I walk slowly and meditatively, holding the thoughts, questions and prayers against the backdrop of both nature and workplace.

To sign up for this email devotional, go to www.crmleaders.org/subscribe. Click the “Lent and Week of Prayer mailings” checkbox.

It all started simply enough:
Andrew Jones wrote a Leadership Journal post, 9 Reasons NOT to Plant a Church in 2012.
Dave Jacobs replied with My Patellar Reflex to Andrew Jones’ “9 reasons NOT to plant churches.”
Their exchange about the value of starting new churches kicked my thoughts into motion.

I was going to post a comment on Dave’s blog, but it got too long. So I started to write a post here. But it got too long, as well! (I’m working on taming the length of my posts.) So I thought, “OK, I’ll make it a two-parter.” I wrote part two. But I still hadn’t finished what I want to say.

God is stirring, and I’m starting to bubble

Evidently, God is stirring me again. It’s not just coming from my blogging friends; they were just an important kick. I feel like I’m entering a new season:

• Kay experienced spiritual growth in a sudden, unexpected burst.
• I had my own encounter with God.
• I started blogging here again. There’s something about trying to put my thoughts into semi-coherent words that forces me to wrestle through those thoughts.
• Prayer is a lot easier now.
• I’ve started reading Sacrilege: Finding Life in the Unorthodox Ways of Jesus by Hugh Halter.

So I’ll share what’s starting to bubble through a short series:

1. New Churches, Global Movements and the U.S.A.
2. New Churches Stuck in a Box in Post-Christian America
3. New Churches & Evangelism: Do We Have It Backwards?

“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night.”

I leaned over to my daughter during the worship service and whispered, “So the announcement of God’s coming is made to a bunch of dirty scumbags. And to a group of foreigners.”

I love the upside-down nature of God’s kingdom! It confounds those with supposed wisdom, whether we’re talking religious wisdom or anti-religious wisdom. It reminds me that God’s ways are so unlike our own, and that to follow Jesus, I have to “free my mind.”

For all my friends — Christian, atheist, and otherwise — I give you a blessing:

May the coming year bring you freeing of your minds.
May you experience wholeness and purpose.
May your relationships be healed.
May you begin to know the depth of Papa’s love for you.

God has moved into the neighborhood! Merry Christmas!

Comic by David Hayward, a.k.a. nakedpastor

If Jesus communicated kingdom stories / parables in our context today, what stories would he tell?

If Jesus communicated kingdom stories/parables in our context today, what stories would he tell? #compellingquestionoftheday

January 26, 2011 7:03 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@jr_briggs

jr_briggs

This was the question J.R. Briggs posed on Twitter. I would have shared it right away, but this was 11 months ago, while this blog was in remission.

But I loved the question so much, I saved it for future posting, along with J.R.’s own 11 examples. And now, the time has come!

1. The kingdom of God is like a flash mob in the food court of a shopping mall…

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Advent has begun! For most people, however religious or irreligious you are, this just means it’s time to prepare for Christmas. …But there’s a whole side of Advent that we’re missing.

Advent 2: The second coming

“Advent” means “coming,” referring of course to the coming of Christ. But the Advent season calls us not only to look back to the First Advent, but also to look forward to the Second Advent: namely, the second coming of Christ.

Holy Rapture, Batman! Didn’t we just get past end-of-the-world silliness? Well, it was silly. And part of the silliness is treating the second coming of Christ as “the end of the world.” I blame fire-and-brimstone preachers, and bad movies. Why is it the end of the world? Why not the beginning of the world?

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If you ever love to sing, as I do, I think you’ll find this amazing. Composer and conductor Eric Whitacre had a crazy idea: He’d post a video of himself conducting one of his vocal pieces, but without a choir. The virtual choir would be provided by individuals replying with their own videos of themselves singing.

How had I not heard about this? I happened to stumble across a TED talk where Whitacre explains his first such project, uploaded to YouTube on in May 2010:

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What does it feel like to be saved?

Are you saved by what you believe?

I use the term “saved” cautiously, knowing that it won’t communicate what I mean to many, especially (but not limited to) my atheist friends. But I want to be clear: Living into the Way of Jesus is neither a set of beliefs you subscribe to, nor a set of actions you aspire to.

There’s a longstanding see-saw debate among Christians: Are you saved by what you believe? Or saved by what you do?

If I may I be so bold: No. And no.

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Like I said, I had a knockout encounter with God this past Sunday. It all started innocuously enough: I sat down in the morning to see what was new in my Google+ circles.

I’m gradually starting to use Google+ more, especially as a way to follow people who teach me. Jamie Arpin-Ricci is one of them, and he had just shared a new posting about The Four-Fold Pattern of Franciscan Prayer, which I’d never heard of.

I started to read… but was utterly captivated by the image he used of St. Clare and St. Francis. I read the post but kept coming back to the image:

Original image: http://www.poorclares-belleville.info/Fruits/Catechetrical/Francis_Clare.jpg

The heart-filling awe. The joy.

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