It is finished

Today is a really special day for me.

Today a very tough season of my life comes to an end - God has again provided in an amazing way. As I look back on this trial, I'm left with a lot of different thoughts. I don't blame God for this trial, although I've been tempted to many time over the past several months. I wonder what I could have done differently that could have shortened this trial or made it go away altogether. I wonder if I should have been stronger, wiser, or prayed more. But then I realize that is neither here nor there. Perhaps in the same situation years from now I would have fared much better. Being stronger and wiser, I would have known exactly what to do and how to handle myself. But, again, that thought has very little value to me right now. The point is that a trial is a trial because it was tough for me where I was at right now. I can't be down on myself about what I might have done differently. But, going forward, I do pray to God that I've learned something that will help me in other situations I may face. Perhaps some time in the future I will be in a very similar situation and will know better what to do - but only God knows the balance of my story.

Lastly, I've been haunted by what other people thought of me through this trial. Where they disappointed, where they suprised that I didn't handle myself better though it? I don't know. I probably will never know. But, in the end, it doesn't really matter. Throughout this season, I've asked God to guide my actions and help me to honor him always. In the end, if God is pleased with how I handled myself through this time then I'm more than satisfied with that.

Praise God for navigating me through yet another stretch of troubled waters. Today is my victory dance. :-)

Are you happy?

I was reading an article online that I thought people would be interested in. Pew Research Center did a study on happiness and came up with some interesting results: http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID=1

One of the gigantic assumptions of this survey, however, is that people know what happiness is - that I would debate more than any one point of this survey. Either way, pretty interesting stuff for your enjoyment...

Three Images for Evangelism (the carpenter)

So after weeks of non-posting-ness I am back (!) to talk about the third image for evangelism. Frankly, I don't know what everyone has done in meantime without something to read on my blog. Anyways, sorry it took so darn long...

So while the first two images (the fisherman and the farmer) really focused on the task of evangelism prior to a person deciding to follow Christ, the third image (the carpenter) has more to do with what happens afterwards.

The carpenter is a critical image for the modern church to catch hold of since what it conotates is so severly lacking in most churchs' philosophy of evangelism. My dad (among other people I know) is a carpenter which makes me the son of a carpenter in several senses. What I admire about them is that they are truly craftsmen and care about their work. They take pride in what they are making. They are artists in every sense of the term, really putting a part of themselves into what they are constructing. Carpenters also see their "projects" (I'll come back to that) to the end. No carpenter worth his (or her) toolbelt would ever think of leaving a project half finished. Think of a table with three legs or a door with only one hinge on it. Carpenters know that if you don't care about your work you will, invariably, produce crap.

When we come to evangelism, the vast majority of churches have misinterpreted Jesus' call to go tell the world about Him. We have focused on conversions to the exclusion of discipleship. In other words, we'll move Heaven and Earth to get someone to pray the "sinner's prayer" but then, content with the notion that they're not going to hell, we leave them to figure out life as a Christian on their own. Denominations measure their success by how many "decisions for Christ" their churches acculmated over the past year. Most churches I have come in contact with run evangelism classes fairly regularly, but ask them about whether they have any classes on discipleship and they might look at you funny.

The point is that after helped someone come to the point where they are ready to follow Christ, why would we short-circuit that by basically "orphaning" them as baby Christians? New Christians don't magically become mature Christians. God doesn't just zap them and suddenly they are reading their Bible everyday in the original Greek and Hebrew. Just like the carpenter, we have to see our work through to its finish. The goal - a fully mature Christian that can then go out and help others follow Christ. Let me say that again in case someone missed it - our goal is help people become fully mature Christians that can then in turn help others beceome fully mature Christians. The church has largely missed this point for over a thousand years. If you were fully committed to helping someone start following Christ, be just as committed in helping learn how to do so for a lifetime!

I want to end with one final point I touched on earlier. In my analogy of the carpenter, I purposely used the word "project" to bring up a crucial issue that Christians need to understand. People that don't follow Christ are not "projects" for us to convert, they are people for us to love. It is not our mandate to see how many people we can shove into some "convert-o-matic" process that churns out decisions for Christ that really don't mean anything. I have actually heard Christians say, "I don't actually care if I know anything about their life, I just want them to 'pray the prayer'." It is this kind of cold-hearted mass produced evangelism that has largely been the church's undoing for at least the last 50 years.

If evangelism is motivated by love, we will see that the fisherman, the farmer, and the carpenter will naturally characterize our demonstration of the "Good News" to the world. And if entire churches began to adopt such a "strategy of love" we would surely hear people say as they did in Jesus' time, "look how the whole world has gone after Him!"

Three Images for Evangelism (the farmer)

So in my last post, I talked about the first image that helps us understand evangelism, the fisherman. Now I wanted to talk about the second image, the farmer.

The farmer is a helpful image for evangelism, namely for his patience. The farmer understands the delicate balance between diligence and patience necessary for a seed to grow. So, with faithful regularity, the farmer waters the seed but she knows that too much poking and proding will usually do more to jeoperdize its grow than help it.

The farmers primary tool is, obviously, the seed. Our seed is the Gospel (or "Good News"). Just like the seed, the Gospel has all the potential it needs to grow inherently built into it. Christians need not "oversell" the Gospel as if we were some used car salesman trying to dupe some moron into buying a lemon. No, we should have more confidence in our message than that. The truth is that, if the Gospel is displayed and demonstrated as purely and truely as it was intended by God, it will have no problem bearing fruit. God told us in Isaiah that his Word never returns to him without accomplishing the purpose he intended for it. So, like the farmer, lets go out and diligently "plant" the Gospel in peoples' hearts and minds by demonstrating the beauty of it in our lives. Our relationships and growing friendships with those around us is the "water" the Gospel needs to grow. And if we are patient and diligent, we will in time see a harvest in the world around us.

Praise be to God for these three images! They are far to clever to have come from me alone. I am encouraged and informed by them even as I write about them - I hope you are as well. This is enough for now, I'll write more about the third images (the carpenter) soon. Till then, remember the fisher and the farmer as you live your life today.

Three Images for Evangelism (the fisherman)

Of all the concepts and terms in Christian Spirituality that get misused, abused, and misunderstood, I'd have to put my money on 'evangelism' being at the top of that list. I don't have the first delusion that I'd be able to dispell all of the misunderstanding surrounding this very volitile word but I've been thinking lately about some useful images that might help convey the true meaning of what evangelism is as best I understand it.

The images I was thinking of are the fisherman, the farmer, and the carpenter. Each of them has a method to what they do that illustrates an important point about evangelism. They each also have a primary tool that we will use as well, in a metaphorical sense. And it probably goes without saying that all I've really done is shamelessly steal images that Jesus used in his teachings 2000 years ago.

First, the fisherman. What I like about the fisherman is that he (or she) is smart enough to know that fish are not prone to simply jump into his boat without him making an effort to draw them in. The fisherman has to go where the fish are because it simply will not happen the other way around. The fisherman's primary tool is the net which he casts out and then draws back in. Whatever fish happen upon the net as its being drawn back in are drawn in with it.

Much like the fisherman, the church will starve to death if it expects the majority of people that are not yet Christian to suddenly realize their need and show up at our door. There are cases where this happens but it remains a faulty assumption. Much like a fisherman's net, we use relationship, a network of friendships, to draw people into Christian community where they can see the Gospel at work in peoples' lives.

I hope to write more before the weekend about the next two images, the farmer and the carpenter. But until then, please post your thoughts on this first image, I would really appreciate your input. This is a series of images I hope to develop into a helpful tool for teaching effective evangelism.