Category Archives: Body Design

Body Design

Counter Assumption

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In his article, The Cult of Mac: Neuroscience shows Apple’s impact on the brain is the same as religion, the author Skye Jethani cites research and opinion based on that research toward addressing what he sees as consumerism affecting the church.

“Apple is (as we’ve proven using neuroscience)…a religion. Not only that–it is a religion based on its communities. Without its core communities, Apple would die–it is already facing strong pressure as the brand simply is becoming too broad (losing) its magic. What’s holding it all together is the hundreds if not thousands of communities across the world spreading the passion and creating the myths.”

I was glad to see he came back and explored the opposite side of things… as he puts it “If brands have become religions, is the opposite also true? Have religions been reduced to brands?” Skye affirms that he does believe this to be true. I have to admit I was already thinking in this direction as I began his article (but then, that doesn’t surprise those of you who know me, right?).

Could it be the same thing that makes humans in general vulnerable to consumerism in the first place is the same thing that contributed to the rise of a religion out of the relationship focus Jesus lived and taught while He walked the earth?

What’s really intriguing about this study, and about Apple being dubbed “a religion”, is more what it says about religion than it is an indictment on Apple or any other strong brand, right? Does the study show that people are generally pre-disposed to a system of belief about something? And, if so, could it suggest that when Jesus left the disciples without a religion per se, that in the absence of one, the people who by nature are predisposed to systemization rather than relationship, unknowingly began to layer the system, or religion, back onto that which Jesus spent three years striping away?

Projecting the familiar on to that we’ve not experienced

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So as I cruise the Internet reading various blogs I continue to astounded and marvel at the pervasive habit of projecting the tenants of something with which we are familiar on to something we’ve never experienced.

Okay, guilty as charged. I too did this for a couple of decades. From the time I began to make my way into “full time ministry” I interpreted everything I read in the Bible through the filters of stuff I saw and understood around me. In other words, when I read “church” in the New Testament I projected what I saw a church to be in my culture and time onto what I read. Almost as if the Ephesian “church” looked and functioned just like First Church Anytown I was familiar with. They had Sunday School in the morning on Sundays right? Well, that’s a little too simplistic but you get the idea. When I read “pastor” I projected what I had always known as a “pastor” back on to what I was reading. When I read Paul’s letter to the church at Galatia I read it envisioning a group of people gathered on a certain day seated in orderly fashion where a designated person read the letter as part of the “service” being conducted. I envisioned a “pastor” speaking

That’s a dangerous flaw in the way we read and study. I know, I know, that’s why we do all that deep Bible study and ferret out the meanings and culture and history. But the fact remains, my impression of what the New Testament Christ Followers were like was tainted by my own experience. I knew nothing else.

Last year I began to escape the decades of filters that had for so long kept me from understanding the life and ministry of Jesus and what He left to his disciples. The mission He left them. Not the mission I was taught being projected back on to what He said at the end of Matthew, but more of what He was truly saying to them. Since then, my eyes have been opened to understand things from my reading that had before never quite connected. Now, the rationalizations I had made as to why something I read in the Bible didn’t seem to fit with other stuff I read in the Bible began to no longer be necessary.

I’m anxious at some point to try once again to learn to read Greek and may attempt (yeah right) Hebrew. I’m wondering how much of what we read in a translation could be skewed by that which the translator is familiar with and takes on today’s meaning rather than the meaning for which it was written. I know. I know. This is a Pandora’s box. But nonetheless, one worth considering.

Attending Meetings Does Not Equal Church

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So today I came across several interesting blogs. One of which led me to lifestream.org – I continue to be amazed how prevalent this movement of God is. In fact, I remember around Feb or Mar of 2007 thinking I was the only one out here struggling with whether what I had come to know as “church” was really what Jesus meant for His followers to be doing. One of the watershed moments in the journey was looking around the room at a group of folks whom I had led in Bible study for several years after making the comment “You have to take personal responsibility for your own spiritual growth. Not your spouse, not me, not the pastor, or the church. But you reaching out to walk with Jesus day by day, moment by moment.” What I noticed would best be described as the deer in headlights look from all but three faces. It was then I realized God was calling me to invest deeply in the three who understood. So, reading the lifestream.org blog/site today I found this comment:

Don’t be tricked into thinking that just because you attend its meetings you are experiencing real body life. That only comes as God connects you with a handful of brothers and sisters with whom you can build close friendships and share the real ups and downs of this journey.

From Why I Don’t Go to Church Anymore! by Wayne Jacobsen

There you go! Reflecting back after my own watershed moment, I remember the numerous times I or someone else would speak of walking in the Spirit and sensing the leadership of the Spirit to do, say, or whatever, and seeing those same looks. The funny thing was the family-ship that the group had. Probably the most unified group I’ve ever been a part of. Yet, the experience of being in touch with God through the Spirit mostly absent. I believe a vast majority of those “attending church” today, even those who experience a great “fellowship” of friends and having incredibly moving spiritual moments, are not experiencing a genuine, Spirit-led walk. In fact, the pastor of the church (deemed a highly successful and exploding church by all standards of ministry in today’s mainstream understanding) we were attending at that point even said in the same message which prompted my comment about personal responsibility for one’s own spiritual walk that he stayed awake at nights lamenting that over 90% of the folks who sat listening to him each week would spend eternity in hell.

Love God? Love the Church!… but which Church?!

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Recently a Facebook friend posted an article on his blog and I posted the following comment. Before approving it, he kindly suggested it might make a great post on my own blog (and I think he preferred I moderate the backlash on my own space than him having to do it on his) so here it is…

Wrong targetBeing on my own journey of rediscovery into what Jesus truly intended for the life of a Christ Follower to be like has resulted in some pretty definitive ideas in this area. One patriarch in a church where we were on staff used to always say “Nothing succeeds like success.” He was right. But the question has become “what if you are successful at the wrong thing?” I found a photo last year of a target with two arrows on the outer edge one splitting the middle of the other. It illustrated what was occurring in my journey. What if all those years we’d been aiming at and hitting the wrong thing? What if, like the 2004 Olympic shooting saga of Matt Emmons, we knew we had hit the bullseye of the target but discover we lost the race because we hit the bullseye of the wrong target?

Out of my college and seminary days, and 30 years of church staff and denominational work I would have answered these folks very similar to how you outline above. However, what if the “church” as we know it has drifted decades and degrees from the course Jesus put the early Christ followers upon?

What if all the stuff we hold so near and dear is truly not that important to God and Christ? What if, once again and so often in the cyclic life of the human race, God showed us the path and we set off on part of it yet adding and adjusting along the way until the destination 2000 years later is far from what Jesus intended? Then, what if like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day, we fight to protect a religious way of life which was never intended.

Many of my wonderings drove me to a trip through the New Testament attempting to discover exactly and only exactly what Jesus said (and noticing what he did not say) about “church”. I was shocked by many things with this “no filters” approach. One of the amazing things was the fact that just about everyone except the religious leaders thought very highly of Jesus and what he was teaching. People genuinely liked Jesus. But, just like some of the comments we are seeing today, these same lovers of Jesus loathed the religious system which was being promoted by the religious leaders.

What if we were dinging the bullseye every day but the bullseye we were aiming at was totally the wrong target. What if, instead of the sinners being so messed up and unable to recognize the value of the organization we have created (uh oh, those will be fighting words I bet), they actually see the organization without all the religious bindings and have no interest in something so much like the world they already live in and thus want no part of that? What if they see Jesus more clearly than those who are bound by today’s religious teachings and are only in need of someone to guide them into The Way of the Kingdom which Jesus taught about? What if we are adhering to generations of religious stuff heaped back upon the simple and straightforward message of the Kingdom Jesus taught? Spend some time evaluating how much of what you do every week in the name of religion you can actually find record of Jesus teaching about or him physically taking part in while he was walking among us. If what you do is as important to the Kingdom as we tend to make it, would not Jesus have spent his three years walking among us hammering it home to his closest followers? Yet we have no record of him teaching or participating directly in much of what we hold so near and dear. What if God has chosen to raise up a new generation of those who follow The Way of His Kingdom and what if they must live so outside the walls of what we have always known as “church” because they cannot live the Kingdom life taught by Jesus inside the walls that exist today?

Now that you are likely fuming… go back and re-read his whole article page from top to bottom and see how many times “church” is mentioned verses how many times “Jesus” is mentioned. I love the “church” more than ever before, just not the one we created.

Bursting the Christian Bubble — The Cart Running Over the Horse

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It appears that Dan Kimball, author of They Like Jesus But Not the Church, speaking live at the Shift conference shared some thoughts on “Bursting the Christian Bubble”.

In an increasingly post-Christian culture fewer people have contact with real Christians. We’ve hidden ourselves in a Christian sub-culture bubble.

I would totally agree with the sub-culture bubble concept. We emerged from that bubble last February and ever since folks think we have backslidden (one of those sub-culture terms used to help protect the organization and keep people inside) and “lost our faith”. In fact, just the opposite has happened since we purposefully stepped away from that social bubble which demanded way too much time for us to be out impacting the lives of those outside the bubble. In fact, a friend with whom we’ve become reacquainted with since returning to the Denver area, tells us about the stealth inquisitions she often undergoes from those in the church we formerly served on staff at while here. Yet not one of them has picked up the phone and called us to ask what’s going on. Wonder if that means life outside the bubble is way weird to those inside.

In one of my first mywalkblog posts was The New 80/20, I reflected that “my time was so tied up in good things at church and in ministry [that] I spent little time engaging with people outside my church in the community or my even my own neighborhood.”

Inevitably the cart gets before the horse and before too long the cart actually begins running the horse over and killing it. Of all the things I reflect back on of value during my years serving the organization it’s the relationships with precious people that I am most fond of today. Those don’t require the institution itself to exist. In fact, those relationship often thrived and were most founded from any time we spent apart from the bubble.

Now almost two years later I’m going to propose something that will be very unpopular to those inside their bubbles… I don’t believe it’s possible to have the organized institution which is called church without that bubble inevitably becoming a dominating reality. I’ll concede that in some smaller communities in secluded areas where the “churches” themselves are small, I believe the bubble-syndrome is less likely to be as crippling to true Christ Followers. But that’s where it stops. Even as those institutions increase in size it will require more resources to keep them going and ultimately there won’t be enough time to serve Christ and their church any longer. (ouch… I can’t believe I just said that) The very nature of the organizations we’ve created and called “church” (given, Christ established His Church as the global body of all who profess a faith in Him but I’m less inclined to say the establishments find ourselves slaves to today and call church are what He had in mind at all) will inevitably turn inward in focus and create a sub-culture of isolationism because of what they strive to be. Maybe that’s why the disciples were scolded when they asked Jesus about having a position in His future organization.

But a mere shell of what it used to be…

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Former shellI would guess one out of my one readers here already knows that I used to serve on staff at what churchites like to call a local body here in Aurora CO. For almost five years the pastor and I labored to “build the church”. I drove by day before yesterday after dropping a friend off in the neighborhood. As I understand it, the group that meets there has changed quite a bit, and several times since we were there. The first thought that went through my mind, knowing what I do about the last fifteen years of it’s history was what a shell it is of what it was before.

Outside of some external cosmetic updates, and some minor indoor remodeling efforts, today, eleven years later the place still looks just like it did when Julie and I arrived there almost fifteen years ago. To those passing by, nothing but the weekly quote sign changes, cars come in and go out, and the language congregation meeting there has changed. Other than that, it’s the same place it used to be.

And yet, as I processed these thoughts it occurred to me that it was a mere shell back then, looking just as it does today. What was different was the community that gathered in that shell. A community of people who were living out what they believed to be the Kingdom life. A life which required them to spend consistent time inside the walls of the shell and then “go out” to try to bring others inside.

Since those days there have been several generations of community gathering there with some long standing threads connecting all the generations. Some of the relationships which germinated inside those walls continue today. Geography has changed over the decade and more, the shell itself has not, I wonder how many of the lives which were part of the community through those decades are different today… or if they are merely living out the motions they parroted in another empty shell?

Self Righteous, Self Serving, Isolationists

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So one of the many things I have the privilege of doing is helping tend the Web Store for a friend’s band. Recently the band has been challenged by an opportunity to perform in a very public and noteworthy venue. That’s prompted some interesting responses from those who claim to be fans. Today, I saw an email from a supposed fan that pushed me over the top.

In his email he was chastising the band for calling themselves a “Christian” band but playing “secular” venues and music. He pointed out verses of Scripture (out of context mind you) which he thought helped him build his case for an isolationist approach to living “the Christian life”. What he must have forgotten was the verse which was in his email signature and went out on all of his emails:

” And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. ”

—Mark 16:15

How can you “Go” if you stay in the walls? And it actually carries a meaning of “as you are going”. How can you preach lest you are in venues that provide and audience for the message? He likens the band to Satan who elected for power and tried to overturn God. He called for them to drop out of the commitment to participate in the venue in order to keep commitments to “the Christian community”.

I watched the End of the Spear the other day. First time I’d seen it. One of the things that struck me about the movie was the comment of the dad about the missionaries not shooting the natives if the missionaries were in danger because the natives were not ready to meet Jesus and the missionaries were.

Too bad this guy who sent the email was a missionary who was ready to shoot the missionaries for going to the natives.