But thankfully my family is much more exciting than this.

The boys and I made this a bit ago.  Fun with blocks and catapults.  Proof that I’m not only a book worm.

An essential failure in disciple in our church, and perhaps in evangelicalism, is dawning on me.  Not only a failure to follow Christ in his radical discipleship, in his self-giving love, in his calls from/against the world, for the sake of the world.  This failure of discipleship is of course the great omission of which Dallas Willard speaks.

I’m thinking of the failure to understand discipleship as becoming a child of the Father, of knowing the Father that Jesus knew.  The Fatherhood of God is the most distinctive aspect of God of Jesus’s teaching.  The Old Testament refers to God as father only a handful of time while Jesus teaches/refers to God as the Father over a hundred times (just in the Gospels!) and the rest of the New Testament picks up this thread.

In the evangelicalism that I come from, and the missional churches I know, the hard calling of following Christ is rarely linked to the high calling of being a child of the Father.  Our discipleship is rightly based in seeking the Father’s will just as Jesus did, of learning to say with Jesus “Take this cup from me.  But not my will, but your will be done” (Mark 14:36).  But this picture of selfless abandon in the Garden of Gethsemane, as right as it is, is incomplete because we often exclude the first part of the verse (“Abba, Father…”) and the relationship of trust and love that flows between Father and Son.

Jesus knew, in everyway, that the Father loved, valued, and rejoiced in the Son, and it was only from this place that Jesus could obey, live, suffer, and die according to the Father’s will.

I fear that we too often call ourselves, and others, to live, love, suffer, and die for the mission of the gospel of the Son, but do it without knowing the Father’s love for us.  And I’m not talking about the general-generic love that God has for the world, that God loves us and died for us, that God’s love saved us.  I’m talking about the specific knowing, rejoicing, celebrating, and protecting of me, of you, of individual people that our Father wants to pour out on us.

Of course I understand how an overly sentimentalized, even therapeutic, or health-n-wealth view of God in many evangelical or charismatic churches has caused this reaction and shift to radical discipleship in Christ, but we must learn again to balance being disciples of the Son and being children of God.  As one in our congregation said, “The radical calling of Jesus is a call to be children of the Father rather than children of the world.”

Whose child are you?  If we labor under the banner of Jesus, but not also of the Father, I fear we will most often end in despair and dejection or legalism and triumphalism, rather than the joy and peace available to us.

I posted Augustinian Inversions: How would the Bishop Contend in Postmodernity? over at church and pomo. This is how it begins…

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Over the last several years of studying contemporary (continental) philosophy and theology and the theology of Augustine, I’ve noticed several recurring themes, or rather, inversion of themes between contemporary theological battles and those in which Augustine was involved.  Of course these inversion only makes sense from a broadly Augustinian point of view (which you can feel free to contest), but I think noting these inversions may demystify some common differences and misrepresentations between theologian camps.  These inversions do not function uniformly, and they really have more to do with Augustine’s opponents and how they have become inverted: the Philosophers (transcendence), Pelagius (virtue), Donatists (purity).

You need to bake the bread before you give it away.  Likewise, we need to nurture the church to bless the world.  These are the basic movements of the church gathered and scattered.

So often we forget one of these steps.  For some, the moment of blessing the world is so emphasized, of going to the poor and oppressed, of transforming, of advocating, that they neglect the preparation of the bread.  In the haste to bless the world, some feel the church is expendable, secondary, and often times positively a hinderance to God’s mission in the world.  “Why are you so focused on the church when God loves the world?” they often complain.  But this overemphasis often leads to burnout, self-righteousness, and the lack of a developed maturity in Christ.

For others, the moment of nurturing the church is emphasized, the moment of discipleship, of depth of wisdom and understanding, of community and spiritual formation.  In the excitement of nurturing the church it is mission that becomes secondary, an advance step of discipleship, or something that only those with the gift of evangelism do.  Or it takes the mentality that if we build it ‘they’ will come.  But this perspective often leads to stagnation and also keeps the full maturity of Christ from being manifested in us.

But the life of gathering, of baking, of contemplation leads to the life of scattering, of blessing, of action.  To neglect one is to ruin the other.  To bake bread and not share leads to its wasting and rotting.  But to bless the world with something other than the bread of life within us is not blessing at all.

“May the Holy Spirit fire take the individual kernels of our lives and bake us together into one loaf, that we might be the sweet fragrance of the gospel and a blessing to the world.”

Here is an interesting piece by NPR on Evangelicals, spurred on my McLaren’s book.  Listen to it below, or read it at NPR.

So here is a picture of the dangers of homebrewing.  This is a porter that we started last weekend.  If Ivan hadn’t discovered the clogged airlocks (which let the little yeast farts out), the lid probably would have blown, spraying perfectly good almost-beer all around the basement.

When I say mercy is for mission,  I’m not talking about the mission of mercy and justice in the world as a witness to all of the power of the gospel (at least, not right now).  Rather, I’m talking about the mercy God has poured out on all sinners in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus.  For “Christ has become a servant of the Jews on behalf of God’s truth, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs so that the Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy.” (Rom. 15:8, 9)

The mission of God has always been to pour out his mercy on all peoples, first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.   This had always been the purpose of God’s promise to Abraham that through him “All nations will be blessed” (Gen. 22:18).  But this mission causes church conflict. In fact, you should expect and welcome conflict in your church.

Its true.  St. Paul says as much in Romans 15.  Verse 7 says that we should “welcome one another just as Christ welcomed you,” and the act of Christ welcoming us is the act of God’s mercy.  But how each person receives God’s mercy is based in exactly how it is they have been astranged from God.  For me, my pride and arrogance kept me far from God, but the humility of Christ finally overwhelmed me.  But for someone else living in fear, it might have been the love and power of Christ which expressed God’s mercy most potently.  Now, as I reflect and live in the the grace and mercy I’ve come to know, it is usually through a lense of pride because that is where I came from .  But for others it will be different.  Now extend this to entire cultures.

This is exactly what happened when Jews and Gentiles began worshipping together.  God’s mercy extended to the Gentiles and some Jews began wondering if they needed to be circumscribe and needed to follow the Jewish food laws, etc, etc (Read Acts 15 and Gal. 1 for more details, also Romans 14 and 1 Cor. 8 and 10).   God’s mission caused all sorts of church conflicts, the conflict between cultures, but also between individuals.

But often times we end up using God’s mercy against others, we use our faith history as a weapon against others who have experienced God’s mercy differently.  Some want to preach the gospel through social action, some through street preaching.  Some want to save the poor, others the environment.  Some see a besetting sin, others a disputable matter.

And these naturally cause conflicts.  But we must remember that God’s mercy is for mission, and the mercy we have received should help us to build up our neighbor (15:2) and our freedom should not become a stumbling block to a brother or sister (14:13).

So I finally passed by Qualifying Exams, which is the test to end all tests.  So that means I’ll be back blogging, reading/responding to blogs, and other things.  It has really been too long.