He begins with an assignment to pastor at the Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights, and ends up creating Homeboy Industries to give gang kids their first jobs, teach them how to work, remove their tattoos and give them a reason to live beyond the wasted world of gang life.

Now I know some of you are going to get a bit cheeky because it was written by a Roman Catholic priest and you’re going to get all bothered by what your disagreements with Catholicism. That will be to your loss. There isn’t much Catholic theology here. This is a Jesuit who ended up assigned to a parish in the heart of LA right in the middle of its two biggest gangs and found a way to love the people there that will make your heart thrill. This isn’t a bunch of religious gobbledegook, but a man living the reality

Some of you are going to be bothered by the coarse language as he captures the vocabulary of the barrio he lives in. That will be your loss as well. It is not gratuitious, but an important part of the story as he reveals Jesus’ ability to make himself known at the most brutal edge of human brokenness.

This is a great love story of transformed kids, told with humor and realness in ways that will inspire you to love the people around you. It is also filled with failure and tragedy as he buries some of the 168 who died in the senseless violence of a gang-riddled neighborhood. And there isn’t a taste of guilt in it for people who aren’t doing what he’s doing where he’s doing it. Seemingly this is not his assignment; it is his joy.

Here are just a few excerpts:

I will admit that the degree of difficulty here is exceedingly high. Kids I love killing kids I love. There is nothing neat in carving space for both in our compassion…

Isn’t the highest honing of compassion that which is hospitable to victim and victimizer both?

Jesus says if you love those who love you, big wow (which I believe is the original Greek). He doesn’t suggest that we cease to love those who love us when he nudges us to love our enemies. Nor does Jesus think the harder thing is the better thing. He knows it’s just the harder thing. But to love the enemy and to find some spaciousness for the victimizer, as well as the victim, resembles more the expansive compassion of God. That’s why you do it.

To be in the world who God is.

Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment about how they carry it. (p. 66)

Jesus’ strategy was a simple one: He eats with them. Precisely to those paralyzed in this toxic shame, Jesus says, “I will eat with you.” He goes where love has not yet arrived, and he “gets his grub on.” Eating with outcasts rendered them acceptable. (p. 70)

Jesus was always too busy being faithful to worry about success. (p. 178)

This book is a graduate school course on loving others. It made me want to love more freely the people around me in the simplest ways. Unloved people do the most destructive things to themselves and others. It’s the most basic cry of the human soul and what is most unmet in a culture that lives by independence and personal expedience. So many people have no idea what it means to be loved by someone and that alone sparks the potential for great transformation. What’s so real here is not the extraordinary place he is doing it in, but the potential we all have to love the people God has put around us.

One thing I notice about people who seem to end up in extreme places of loving others is they got there quite naturally as they simple lived out their faith. Rarely do I find effective people off to wild corners of the earth because they felt God demanded it of them, but because they fell in love with people there and couldn’t let them go through their painful existence alone. I love that. The message is: love where you are and see where God takes you, not go find some despicable place to love the most difficult people on the planet.

As an added bonus, you will never listen to “O Holy Night” again without finally understanding what “the soul felt its worth” actually means and its power to transform even the most twisted life into something, lovely, beautiful and holy!

The premise was brilliant. An unemployed young man, living at home with his mom begins to have dreams that appear to be from God. When the dreams come true, the Christians rally around him as a prophet. Then, the foretelling dreams begin to hit closer to home and the celebrated prophet becomes a pariah in the Christian community. There was so much about this set-up that I enjoyed, not the least was having God visit someone who wasn’t living a stellar “Christian life.” I liked the beginning conflict with those who had more vested interest in the status quo than in what God might actually be doing. The author is an engaging storyteller, making me believe the story and endearing me to its characters. I was hooked, until I got about 60% into the story. That’s when it all went wrong.

AT that point the characters surrounding our hero became horribly stereotyped, as did the liberal agenda that began to bleed from the pages. The dreams turned out to be less about God inviting people into a transformation with him and more about Christians become more politically liberal. Here’s where the author’s agenda really turned me off. I do think God would have us to be more loving especially to the poor and downtrodden, and I wish believers were more committed to good stewardship of the planet, but to have the story end there really cheapened what was going on in Peter, the protagonist in the story.

I have rarely been this unsatisfied with the ending of a story that started out with such promise. As I read the early portions I was intellectually salivating with the possibilities of how this story could turn out. In the end it didn’t satisfy any of them. Now, I don’t know Jeff, and his whole purpose in writing this story may have been fulfilled by its ending. I don’t begrudge him that. But in the end, it is not a book I’d recommend to others here. So, I guess I won’t be making that commitment again any time soon.

I don’t often say this about a book, but I will this time. If you are the parent of a child who seems like a prodigal to you, wandering in a far off place from God, go get this book! But even if you don’t have such a child, go get this book! It is a powerful read of a father’s love for a rebellious son. If you’re experiencing anything similar his journey will surely encourage your own. But it is more than that. It unveils the relentless love of the Father for all of us as he continues to seek us out in the places we get lost and restore us in his grace and mercy.

I talked more about this book on last week’s podcast if you want to hear it. It is toward the end. This book is an engaging read. Remarkably well-written, honest, and vulnerable this book describes the ongoing pain of having a child wander far from the faith of his father, and a father’s love that keeps believing the best in the face of such brokenness. And through it all he discovers a depth of God’s love for himself in his wandering moments.

In addition, Dan is a friend and has been for 15 years or so. But that’s not why I’m recommending his book as many of my other friends might attest. For me to recommend a book here, I have to be convinced that it is a really good read and that a many of you will find this book helpful for your own spiritual journey. This is all that and more. It is deeply touching and wonderfully encouraging, even though they story has not yet ended. There is a spirit of triumph in it, even though Dan’s son is still sorting through the damage in his life from alcohol and PTSD from his service in Iraq.

This book is not available in stores, but you can order it from Amazon.com or from other online retailers.

Here is some added info from the back of the book:

Hope is a butterfly
Fear is a stone
As the father waits
For his son to come home.

For anyone who has loved a prodigal child, here is a voice in the night that says you are not alone. ‘The Butterfly and the Stone’ is a story of fear and hope on a journey that leads from the safety of home to Iraq, and home again to face a fiercer enemy: post-traumatic stress and addiction. Woven throughout is God’s love… found in a most unexpected place…

You can find out more at Dan’s website, StoneButterfly.net.

He has just released a new book called The Remarkable Replacement Army, that I think many of you will enjoy. Following up on his earlier book Custom and Command that posed the question of whether our participation in our current Sunday morning institutions is a command of Jesus we are to follow, or is it just a custom that has grown up over 2,000 years of Christian history, his newest book is a protracted metaphor presented as a prophecy of the church in our time and for the future.

I love much of the content of this book and recommend it to everyone whose contemplating the nature of the church today, especially those who no longer feel connected to a traditional congregation. In it, Stan describes a time of transition between the traditional congregation as we’ve known it and a more relational networking of passionate believers that he says will define church life in this century. It will challenge many of you. It will encourage others of you. And it will help many of you who think how you can live more effectively beyond the traditional congregation.

That said, there are also things in this book that give me pause. Portraying it as a prophecy is problematic for me and unfortunately may discourage some from mining the incredible content here. I’m convinced Stan believes that it is, and I respect him for saying so. At the same time I’m not sure I agree with the value of getting people to see this transition in prophetic terms, knowing it can appeal to a fleshy desire to be in a significant movement. Certainly, the institutional patterns of the past are losing their grip on people and God is inviting many people outside those conventions to discover more relational ways of living and walking alongside other believers and touching the world. That’s a reality. but it may not be a shift in God’s priorities or methodologies so much as it is that our religious systems have grown so complicated and manipulative that they have choked out the life of the Spirit in many places and people have gone looking elsewhere for Truth and life.

God’s Remarkable Replacement Army uses an extended metaphor about a “replacement army” in Norway during World War II to resist the Nazi occupation and preserve the wishes of their king while he was in England helping to overthrow the German invaders. Stan has gleaned much insight from that period of history and uses it to share some of his observations about people who no longer fit into the religious systems they once did. As with all metaphors it can be pushed too far and draw people to the wrong conclusions. And, in this day of religious conflict around the world, I grow increasingly uncomfortable with military language to describe God’s church in the world. The title immediately was off-putting to me, but as you read the book you’ll understand why he chose it. I appreciate that he wasn’t calling believers to arms, but inviting them to live in service to their King.

Finally the former school teacher can’t resist telling us how to read his book and it does bog down at times when he lectures us about what we should read, when we should read it, and how it should be read. Get past those bits. They may seem a bit tedious, but theirs veins of gold running through this little book that will encourage and enlighten you. I don’t write these things to discourage you from reading the book, but to warn you not to take the exit ramps from his incredible content and miss the greater truths that Stan shares from his life.

This is an older brother sharing his most profound convictions. Many of you will know well what he means when he writes:

Up until about fifteen yeas ago, my wife and I were staunch church-members, always fully involved in the activities of a local fellowship, wherever we happened to be living. We had even spent nearly two decades in “full time service”, when I was a “pastor” (or “minister”). Slowly but surely, however, we had come to this conclusion about church life, which I have been describing—this conviction that the existing church system was no longer the way forward for our discipleship. It become clear to us that, in spite of the past, we could not continue to be “church goers”. We knew that our action would cause raised eyebrows—to say the least—among our relatives and close friends. Because of our previous extremely-church-oriented lifestyle, the fact that we had stopped “going to church” would seem , to those who knew us, very odd indeed—if not downright heretical!”

In the third section of the book, Stan gives some practical guidelines for thriving in the King’s purpose outside of those congregational structures. There’s really genius here if you don’t take this as a how-to book of methods to implement in your life. Stan warns us against doing so. But many of you will appreciate, as I did, his ideas on “cross-my-path-care”, intentionally socializing with others, and how the Scriptures and the Spirit work hand in hand to show us the Father’s purpose. I’ve used some of these things in numerous conversations already to help people see that living relationally is not less intentional, if anything it is more so or you may find yourself feeling empty and isolated, when you don’t need to.

Here is an excerpt:

I prophesy that the exiting regiments of the Army of the King of Kings (the various denominations) and “streams’ which currently make up the Church are going to disintegrate, sooner or later, during the 21st Century. Already I see many signs of that. Furthermore although there are individual churches and groups of churches, which at this moment are, to all intents and purposes, “fighting well”, I suggest that even they, in the long run, will all but disappear from the scene. I prophesy that the days of the Institutional Church are drawing to a close. I do not believe, however, that the King of Kings is discouraged—even though the army of Christians view the deteriorating situation with dismay. …There is no way that he will leave himself without a body of “soldier of Christ” to further his cause on Earth. My prediction is that, as the 21st Century unfolds, the King of Kings will come to be represented by an Army of a radically different style from the army that has previously represented him. I prophesy that he will replace his formal army (his formal church) with an informal network of dedicated believers—a veritable “resistance movement” of committed Christians.

Problems aside, this book is one that people thinking outside the religious box need to read. It comes from the depth of a man’s heart and wisdom that has lived these realities for years and you won’t want to miss the powerful insights that fill this book.

You can order the book from Lulu.com. Paperback, 320 pages. Or you can download a free PDF version here.

I’m reading To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings as a devotional of sorts and thought some of his thoughts particularly applicable as a new year approaches. He certainly captures some of the deepest cries of my heart:

May I live this day compassionate in heart, clear in Word, gracious in awareness,
generous in love.

Wow! Me too! And this:

May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love, to postpone my dream no longer but do at last what I came her for and waste my heart on fear no more.

That’s my prayer for you as this new year unfolds, as long as the dream was first Father’s dream. Chasing our own only leads to frustration. Following his is as much a joy in the going, painful though it be at times, as it is in the having! Happy New Year to all our brothers and sisters across the world!

I’ve heard about the story, play, and movie for years, of course. I watched the movie a number of years ago, but didn’t fall in love with the story until I saw a YouTube video a while back of Susan Boyle singing “I Dreamed a Dream.” The words of that song haunted me and so I read the full lyrics on-line about being used by others, abandoned, and living with disappointed hopes in this age. Then Sara and I got to see the play this summer while we were in London and the full story suddenly had more meaning. When we returned home we rented the movie again and watched it. Over the last month I have been reading the book to immerse myself in the story. Surprisingly my daughter had decided to read it at the same time, so we have enjoyed talking through it together. She finished the book last night, I this morning.

As with most stories, the book is so much richer than can be put into a movie or a play. Only a book allows you to get in the mind of the characters and their internal struggles. The poignant closing scenes of the relationship between Jean ValJean, Marius, and Cosette undid me. Here’s a man that was so hungry he stole some bread as a young man and served 19 years in prison for it. He gets out only to steal again from a bishop, but instead of demanding justice the bishop shows grace to Jean by his personal generosity. His act of loving sacrifice weaves its way into the fiber of Jean’s being. He becomes a different person and learns to love others and show grace to them even at great personal cost to himself.

His loving is often tragic, because his first thought is not to protect himself and thus he gets used, abused, and tormented even by the people he treats with grace. Rather than defend himself, he simply keeps loving even when it costs him most dearly. He is misunderstood and doesn’t try to clear the record. He forsakes his own personal happiness to ensure it for others. And because people only want to use him, they take advantage of his graciousness and miss who he really is.

What I love about this story is that while it is true that those you love the most will often lie about you and misuse you for their own gain, loving them anyway puts grace into the world to counteract all the selfishness already there. In the end, love changes lives and calls into question the way people live in their own self-interest. Grace is worth sharing, even when the objects of that grace don’t understand it. In the end love wins—not everyone, of course, but enough to make it glorious all the same.

The law is a cruel taskmaster, often used by those who wish to exploit others to make themselves feel important. It often weighs heaviest on the most marginalized in society and is used to dehumanize them. But love is the anti-matter to law! Love is the more powerful. It has the power to transform people and lift them out of their misery. Live by law and you become mean and empty; live by love and even when painful a greater purpose transforms your being.

In a note to the Italian publisher Victor Hugo wrote about the universal application of his story. Here are some excerpts:

The sores of the human race, those great sores, which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: “Open to me, I come for you.”

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable’s name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages. Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France… Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. Have you not indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? …This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,– I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being of use.

As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more patriotic for humanity… Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing… the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

The law can so easily be manipulated by the wealthy and abused by those who lie without conscience. Into the misery of our world, God speaks his love in the language of grace. Only those who are truly changed by that reality become a light in the world, treasure all of their relationships, and offer hope to those who are lost in the darkness.

After reading this book, I want even more to be that simple light, a voice of grace, to the next person I meet today. There is nothing more real, more significant, or more transforming than love freely offered, especially when it costs us something.

As Is: Unearthing Common Place Glory is a new book by a first-time author, Krista Finch. I actually saw this book a year and a half ago while it was still in production. I was taken at the time with Krista’s refreshing insights about embracing life simply as it unfolds and seeing God’s fingerprints and his grace in the most common arenas of life.

I wrote this little blurb for her book back then: “As Is: Unearthing Commonplace Glory offers the marvelous freedom to stop trying to control the events we cannot control and instead respond to God’s magnificent grace as it unfolds in our daily circumstances. With her humorous wit and fresh insights Krista Finch opens a door to the practicality of living by grace that will inspire your own journey and leave you hungering for more of God.” After seeing the final product, I’ll stand by that.

A few days ago my copy of the book arrived. I spent some time with it last night and was wonderfully refreshed and reminded to look for God in the common moments of life. This book is not deep theology trying to challenge your failed paradigms, nor is it filled with laugh-out-loud stories. I couldn’t applaud everything she’s concluded, but I love the journey she is on and a lot of what she’s learned.

This is a book of insightful observations and thoughts much as you’d experience in a relaxed walk with your best friend where your heart is re-focused on the things that truly matter. It is a wonderfully refreshing read, like a cool breeze that suddenly washes over you on an otherwise hot and stale day. Here is a woman who knows what it is not to have life fulfilled on her terms, and has learned how to embrace the reality of life in the deep love and presence of a loving Father.

To whet your appetite, here’s a sample of the journey she invites you to share with her:

We miss something remarkable when happiness is our pursuit. because happiness is a brief vapor at her very best. What’s more, there is something beautiful about getting what you get, something lovely in teh mess, something divine in the ordinary. And the something is grace.

Grace to smile in sickness, to dance in death, to carwheel in chaos, to trike a pose, thou all around us and inside us crumbles. Grace to understand that this isn’t the way things are supposed to be, at least not forever. But it’s the way things are now and here. Grace to believe there is plenty of grace for all of it. All we have to do is receive it; live, that is. Life, as is.

And if we’ll take what life gives, grace will find us—in all her fierceness and splendor, dressed in chain mail and armor, ready to pin a sprig of lilac on our collars. But she only comes to those of us who find ourselves in the places where brokenness and rejoicing coexist. Places where bitter death tolls harmonize with strains of celebration. Places where broken bones dance to the trumpet’s blast…”

“Steven, do you want to know why you are clueless about you? …Do you?” She stops again and stares. “Honey, I really need a verbal nod of some sort here.”

“Yes,” I say, “Yes, tell me why.”

“It’s because,” she says slowly and dramatically, “you don’t yet know who you really are. And Steven, you don’t know who you are because you haven’t yet learned grace.”

I stop her before she can continue. “Oh, boy. See, there you go. That’s all gibberish to me. I don’t want to be mean, but you and Carlos, you sound like cult members. Grace. Do you have any idea what that sounds like? It’s right up there with fluffy bunnies and unicorns. You’re aware there’s not a lot of grace talk in my board meetings, right? Look, I know you may not understand this, but in places where things get done, there’s accountability, and quotas, and deadlines. You know what I think God wants? He wants all of us to take responsibility for what we’re doing. Sorry, Cynthia. I was tracking with you. But if you wanna make sense to me, throw away the religious buzz words.”

Andy slaps his knee. “Whoo-eee! Yep, you got her there Steven.” He picks up his glass, swirling his ice. “Yep, first you start talking about grace. Next thing you know you’re skipping Sunday school and sleeping in ‘til noon. Then, a couple days later you’re down at the dog track, drinking whiskey out of a paper bag and dating a showgirl named Tiffany!”

“Why do you enjoy making everything I say sound stupid?” I ask.

“I don’t,” he says. “I only enjoy making the stupid things you say sound stupid.”

Cynthia takes over. “Steven, my friend, would you be offended if I told you that you sound to me like the one with the religious platitudes?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” she continues, “You sound like a carnival huckster, promoting to others something he knows doesn’t and hasn’t worked for himself.”

“Meaning?” I repeat.

“Meaning, grace is the gift waiting for the non-religious. They’re the only ones who can get it. They’re the only ones who can use it. Religious folk see grace as soft. So they keep trying to manage their junk with their own will power and tenacity. Nothing defines religion quite as well. People trying to do impossible tasks with weak and limited power, bluffing all the while like it’s working for them.” ” She leans even closer. “I just took in a lot of churches and religious institutions with that last statement.”

“Did you hear that?” Andy laughs. So, who’s the religious one now, my friend? “
Cynthia smiles. “It takes something a whole lot more than will power and tenacity to get anything done in the human heart. You gotta allow yourself to receive something you can’t find on your own, not keep bluffing at being strong enough.”

Andy folds his arms and raises his eyebrows at me.

“You’ll hear this next statement a lot around here Steven,” Cynthia says. ‘What if there was a place safe enough where I could tell the worst about me and discover that I would be loved not less but more in the telling of it?’ Do you know what happens?”

“Carlos says your stuff starts to get fixed.”

What Stephen doesn’t know yet, is that engaging real grace will transform you far faster and far more completely than accountability and human effort ever will. He will soon come to discover that God’s reality is far greater than he knew before.

If you haven’t read the rest of the story, you might pick yourself up a copy!

What

Her new book has just been released. I had the joy of reading some of it in manuscript form quite a while ago when she was considering publishing it with Windblown Media. Unfortunately for us, a publisher she had previously approached decided to pick it up before we had a chance to review it. But in reading her self-effacing humor, her brutal honesty, and her insights about the Father I love, I grew to appreciate this young woman I’ve never met and the courage with which she follows her Lord.

Love Has a Face: Mascara, a Machete and One Woman’s Miraculous Journey with Jesus in Sudan is now available and I just finished reading it. If you want some encouragement in your own journey, you might consider picking this one up.

This is not the usual mission books, meant to solicit guilt that you’re not doing enough for Jesus, or to evoke pity for the author. This is a real life adventure about following God in a very dark place and watching him work his purpose in spite of our humanity and lack of resources. I came away encouraged in my own journey to follow Jesus where he has asked me to go, and filled with an infusion of trust for a Father that is so much bigger than my limited knowledge and resources. I’ve already bought some copies for others.

That said, however, I’ll warn you that Michele uses some of the revivalistic language that regretfully may limit the audience for this book. I know it turns off many people who see through some of the excesses of that movement and how it unwittingly trivializes all the ways in which Father works. If you’re used to that slice of the body you won’t even notice it and most people who are don’t realize how off-putting some of their expressions of God sound to others. If you don’t understand or appreciate some of that language, you can easily read around it, just don’t let it discourage you from reading.

But do read it. Your faith will be encouraged, your love for the downtrodden will grow, and your passion for Jesus will be freshly fanned into flames. Here are some excerpts to show you what’s in store:

This love does not start wiht a good program. It cannot. It starts with being in love, being intimately connected to Jesus. It starts with knowing first that I am loved. I cannot give what I do not have. It is supernatural. It cannot be apart from Him. All living fruit in my life has come only from a living relationship with Him.

________________________________________________________________

(When she felt God asking her to let go of the need to be responsible in the face of overwhelming need and a dwindling bank account.) I knew the world looked at our ministry in the Sudan and said, ‘Look at all those children! Wow, you are responsible for so much.’ The Church saw the promises Jesus gave us and said, ‘Wow, what a lot of responsibility Jesus has given you!’ I had begun to believe the myth called responsibility, and it turned what had been spontaneity into suffocation in my soul. It made even breathing hard work. The storm around me stopped being an opportunity to dance with Jesus and started to loo like a sentence of drowning.

All the while, Jesus was saying. No!

Slowly I began to realize that Jesus did not give me his promises for Sudan as a responsibility to carry. He gave me His promises as a playground to embrace with him. All he desired was my ability to respond to Him. The lie of false responsibility actually stole the joy and even the ability to respond to the spontaneous moving of His Spirit.

________________________________________________________________

“What would a people look like who are fully embraced by love? What would a people become if they were totally set free to live out their own identity and sound? What would an army of love be, released from the darkest corners of the nations to carry the light of His face, seen through their own, as they see who they are in Love’s eyes?

“The wave dancers and light carriers are being released. The unpaved road is an invitation to the depths of Loves’ heartbeat. Watch out. Here they come: the unstoppable lovers of God whom nothing can deter. They bring with them life in abundance, light so bright that the darkness flees before its coming and night becomes as day at the rise of His glory in an through their lives.”

But he is! That’s what Darin Hufford discovers in his new book, The Misunderstood God that has just been released by the publishing company I helped get started, WindblownMedia book. This is a complete re-crafting of an earlier book Darin had written called The God’s Honest Truth. Though I enjoyed the content of the original book, I didn’t think it was put together in the best way to reach all the people that would be touched by reading it.

Over the last year we helped Darin take that book a part and rebuild it in a way that more people could benefit from its powerful message. In humorous and compelling stories, Darin shows how religion has disfigured the God of the Bible, giving him a personality that has more in common with the devil, than it does the Father of all love. He holds God to his own definition of love in I Corinthians 13 to show us that he is the very definition of love itself and as we come to appreciate that, we’ll find greater grace and freedom to live in his life.

I’m excited to see this book take fresh wing. If you have a heart to understand God’s essential nature, you might check out this book. It could transform how you view God and how you recognize his fingerprints in your life. And if you want to hear Darin talk about his own book, give a listen to the two recent podcasts we did with Darin at The God Journey:

• The Misunderstood God
• Living Freely in God’s Love

Honestly, I’m confident the reason why so many people have a difficult time embracing God’s grace is that it feels too permissive to them. We know that grace is the polar opposite to the performance-based conformity models of child-rearing that we’ve learned in our homes, schools, and religious structures. I’ve been asked countless times, “So God just loves us while we do whatever we want?”

People who think such things, don’t yet understand God or grace. Fear and intimidation only work so long, but never transform the human heart. That only comes through choice. Grace is not a permission slip to go destroy yourself. Grace opens the door to know God. And you can’t know God without wanting to be like him. There is no permissiveness in grace—just freedom. That freedom opens the door to an amazing work of transformation God does as we follow him. And if you don’t get that, he will still love you. But like the prodigal son, eventually the destructive consequences of living with you at the center will eventually overwhelm you. Grace opens a door to relationship, it doesn’t negate our destructive choices. If you want to understand this process better, go out and get a copy of Loving Our Kids on Purpose. You won’t regret it. And if you have young children you want to parent with God’s heart, so much the better.

A young mother with two children from South Carolina first put the book on my radar screen. She wrote:

At first I was hesitant because Christian parenting books and I have never gotten along very well, and it’s been so nice to not be living under shame, rules and condemnation — and they tend to heap those on me in spades (rather, I heap it on). But this book has been very different. It illustrates how we can relate to our children in the way that the Father relates to us — out of a heart of love and patience and freedom without spirits of fear and control, yet not being permissive parents — still being our kids’ guides and teachers. It’s not a book of strict how-to’s or magic formulas. They’re just very simple, fundamental principles that jive with the glimpses of the Father’s heart that we’ve seen the last few years.

It’s not a silver bullet by any means because it’s not going to be an overnight change and things will never be perfect because there are four very human beings in the house who make selfish choices every five minutes. But I do believe the overall tone of our home can change and that the girls will then see Jesus modeled in us and come to understand the true nature of the Father’s heart. The first step in walking this out will be self-control on our parts — not reacting out of selfish anger, taking time to think through situations before we act, and intentionally choosing to allow love and respect to dictate our attitudes. That won’t exactly be easy because we’ve nurtured some bad habits, but hopefully as we make the right choice more often, the right seeds will grow in our hearts. The next step will be extending to them the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them without shame and condemnation, being there for them as they experience the consequences of their decisions. In the end, it’s really about treating them the way we want others to treat us and the way God does treat us.

She’s dead on! I talked my daughter into buying the book and then read her copy two nights ago. I laughed. I wanted to shout AMEN on just about every page. I could easily have slipped the best moments of our parenting into his illustrations, even though I didn’t know why those moments felt so right at the time. And I lamented those things that I’d done that only sought to win their conformity to my rules with fear and intimidation. This is parenting that puts the heart to heart connection with your child above anything else and out of that instills in them a culture of respect, good decision-making and consequences for their own choices. This is parenting with a sense of humor, not anger. It offers the ability to motivate kids without alienating them, and loving them without giving-in to their baser instincts.

Let me share with you some excerpts from the book:

This book will show you that the goal of obedience and compliance is an inferior goal. It can actually be detrimental to both your children’s development of personal responsibility and their perception of God as Father. Although obedience is an important part of our relationship with our children, it is not the most important quality. If we fail to take care of the most important matters first, what we build on top of our foundation will not support what we are hoping to accomplish as parents….

There is a huge difference between a culture where obedience and compliance are the bottom line and a culture where relationship is the bottom line.

In order to train our children in love, our behavior as parents must reduce fear, not increase fiear. When happens when you go toe-to-toe with one of your kids? What happens when one of your kids does not want to obey? What do you do when your child lies in your face? What is your response when your child gives you something ugly like disrespect? …As much as love casts out the fear, fear will cast out love. Love and fear are enemies. They are completely different sources. Love is from God , and His enemy produces fear. We need some methods, tools and skills to respond to ur child’s sin in such a way that we create love, not fear.

And what’s more this grace-based parenting works with children of all ages—from our youngest toddlers to our adult children. It offers hope to restore that heart connection where it has gotten lost to our power-based conformity tactics with older kids. And what I like most is that while this book is incredibly practical, Danny doesn’t give how-to formulas for every situation. Instead he gives us a very simple framework in which to consider our possible actions and the opportunity to look to the Holy Spirit for direction as we work through the daily realities with our own children.

If you want to understand how God’s discipline functions in your own life and how that can change the way you parent, go get a copy of this book! Devour it. You won’t regret it!

It may be impossible to watch that video and not be deeply moved. There are lots of factors to that. If you want to read her back story, you can do so here. It’s great TV—the context, the diminished expectations, the surprise or an incredible voice and the passion behind her song. But I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something more. If you haven’t listened to the lyrics, listen carefully. This is the story of a young dream that life destroyed and the attempt to still find God in the disappointment. Here’s just a few lines:

And still I dream he’ll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather…

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed The dream I dreamed.

Part of the reason this is so powerful is not just her voice, but that her life seems a very parable of the song she sings. She had a dream to be a famous singer that had not be realized before last week, at 47 years of age. She’s not alone. A lot of very creative people live with similar disappointed dreams, and most won’t get this kind of break, even at 47.

Every child grows up with dreams, and the twists and turns of life often crush them. Sometimes that’s because they’ve been so abused and diminished that their spirit is crushed. Sometimes it’s simply that they don’t have the right look, or lived in the right place or had the right opportunity. But I suspect for many it’s because our dreams weren’t so much about the gift that was in us, but how rich, influential or famous we wanted that gift to make us. For every person that becomes a pro athlete, hundreds of thousands more get left in the dust. For every one who wins a gold medal, writes a best-seller, or cuts a platinum album, hundreds of thousands of others live like failures because they didn’t.

If our dreams hinge on the response of others, opportunities in this world are slim. By definition only a narrow few will end up playing professional sports, becoming a singing sensation or a best-selling author. If success only comes by being in the brightest spotlights, most of our dreams will be dashed as well. As I watched it for the fifth or sixth time last night, I couldn’t help but wonder if we’re not so deeply moved by the performance of this incredible woman because through her we are getting a glimpse into eternity. It’s not the crowd or the lights that make her performance noteworthy, but the fact that she is simply doing in the thrill of the moment what God created her to do.

In our twisted perceptions of the 21st Century, it is easy to think this talent wasted since she never got this chance until she was 47. But does the stage validate the gift? Was she, or her music, any less moving or less valuable when she sang to herself in the kitchen or in local gatherings in her village? Was it less moving to the kind of God who splashes wildflowers across mountainsides no human will ever see? Most of the best gifts I know in this life will never gather the spotlight, or wow the masses. I’m not sure God ever intended them to. Perhaps even the unrelenting attempt to find a mass audience or a bright enough spotlight so easily distorts the dream, or the gift, or the person as well. We all know how the realities of competition and glare of celebrity does more to ruin people than it does make them more whole or well-grounded.

When we finally arrive in eternity, no longer tethered by our false expectations, no longer competing against others with similar gifts, no longer measuring our worth by the false demands of a broken culture, we will all get to celebrate the full beauty of exactly what the Creator sowed in our lives. And I suspect we’ll celebrate it in each other, perhaps like we see it in Susan Boyle, and in doing so it will touch the deepest joys and ecstasies of our heart. And the Father will thrill right along with us.

I know the reality of disappointed dreams, as I coveted a mass influence through my writing from a very young age. It tortured me. The desire was a tyranny all its own, and God won it from my hands almost 15 years ago. For the first time I found myself for the first time content to write for the love of God and let him do with it what he will with the result. I found absolute joy in simply writing what was on my heart and making it available on a website. And I was blessed by each life it touched in the gentle obscurity of God taking it to those he wanted.

And now I know what it is to be involved with a best-seller over the last year and I’d be less than honest if I told you it was all the joy I dreamed it would be when I coveted it so long ago. Notoriety brings a different set of pressures and a different kind of audience, and it is now harder to do what God has asked me to do in the shadow of what the world calls success than it was before. I find more joy in helping one life find freedom than I have in perusing a best-seller lists. And now, I hardly write since my days are full of obligations and responsibilities far afield from that which God originally asked of me. Over the next few months I’ll be moving away from this space back to where Jesus has asked me to walk.

So here’s what I’m thinking as I watch that video: Isn’t it enough that all of us ply our creativity, gifts and dreams for an audience of One. It is enough that God hears us sing, that God reads what we write and that the truest joys are not doing it professionally, if we lack the opportunity, but doing it as hobby, sport and passion. Saying someone is an amateur has become a put-down today. But the root of that French word is people who do what they do for the love of it, not for money or the light of the stage.

And while I understand those who would love to see their passion find a greater voice and place in the culture, it is not failure for God’s grace in you to touch the people he has put before you, rather than the unknown masses. Your story is not validated because it spawns a book; your song is not more precious because it secures a recording contract. So sing, write, paint, plant, nurture, design, act, and build however it brings joy to your heart. And let God open whatever doors he has for it. Knock where you will, search as you have direction, but don’t despise the audience God has already given you—your children or spouse, friends and family, and local opportunities to touch lives in tens and twenties, rather than frustratingly trying to find a path to the thousands.

And I wonder if some of the dreams we carry in our heart, were never meant to find their fulfillment in this life. Perhaps they, too, are portals to a different age and time. Maybe they are a glimpse into that unrestrained eternity that will allow us all to be fully all that God created us to be. I’m convinced our greatest creativity and ecstasy lies beyond this temporal time zone.

And one day we will all know the absolute thrill of doing in freedom and joy the very thing God made us to do—that gives him and us the fullest of joys.

Love is always about giving up control, and people are trained to think of taking control—even of God. In my experience, most people would sooner be afraid and in control than in love and out of control.

Catholic theolgian Richard Rohr in Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety.

But I guess this begs the question, how much control can you be in if you’re so afraid? Isn’t control for all of us only an illusion that time will eventually unmask? Perhaps it is far better for us to find our peace in learning to live loved rather than in the frantic activities we employ to prop up our illusion of contro.

I’ve also planned trips in the next couple of months to Knoxville, TN and to Atlanta, GA. So I guess I’m back on the road again.

I also recommended this book on a recent podcast of The God Journey and wanted to make sure you’ve heard about it if you’re looking for a children’s Bible for kids in the 3 – 7 age range. A friend recommended it to me and it has become my granddaughter’s favorite book. She loves it, and what’s even better is that all the stories are framed in grace, with a relational God wanting to reconnect with his fallen children. It’s called The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd Jones with art by Jago. It’s tag line is “Every story whispers his name” and then makes the loving God part of every story. This is a great resource to share the Scriptures with your young children… And maybe even your older ones. I loved it and can’t wait to read more of those stories to Aimee.

Finally, I got this email the other day. I love the heart and spirit of it, so I wanted to pass it along to you as well. It captures the simple freedom of just living in grace.

I just wanted to write to you to tell you how much your book So You Don’t Want to Go To Church Anymore, the story of Jake Colsen, has meant to me. It was six years ago that we left a church where I had served as the children’s pastor. I thought I was there to help children become followers of Jesus, but the “power” of the church had other ideas. I have lived with the pain of the situation for so long thinking that God didn’t love me or have a plan for me and had no place for me in his kingdom.

In the six years since leaving, I have begun a totally new career and have really started to see how ministry seems much more fruitful and more satisfying not being part of anything organized. All my years of theological training though seem to make me feel that it was not adequate if it was not done through the church. Your book was like it was written specifically to me. Some of the things that Jake said is exactly how I had felt and was feeling. I now am starting to see such a different way of looking at the journey that God has for me.

One phrase that I have continued to recite to myself all the time from the book is, “You need to follow him, even when it creates conflict. Always be gentle and gracious to everyone, but never compromise what is in your heart just to get along.” This quote has given me so much strength to realize that it was okay to create conflict because of what God was doing in my heart and telling me to do. Going forward, I know I need to just keep tender towards God and his word and be strong in what He is telling me to do. God will need to take care of the conflict.

Thank you so much for writing this book and what it has meant to so many people. Someone recommended the book to me, and I have certainly recommended it to many other people since reading it last weekend. I can tell the people who are not ready to read it as they look at me with a blank stare when I give them the name of the book. I can not fully express to you the freedom that I have felt since reading the book.

How do we follow him? Live loved. Live free. Live gently with others and let Jesus take care of the fall-out. If we live only to avoid conflict, we may find ourselves avoiding him. I liked what Martin Luther said: “Peace if possible, but truth at any rate.”

It will take me longer to respond to email on a trip like this, because I neither have control of when i can access email, or when I have time to respond to it. I apologize for any inconvenience that causes.

Here is my schedule for that tour:

June 6-8: weekend with group in Lengerich, Germany
June 9-10: evening(s) with group(s) near Hannover, Germany
June 11-12: meeting(s) in Nuremberg, Germany
June 13: meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany
June 14: meeting near Stuttgart, Germany
June 15: group in Bonn, Germany
June 16-17: group near Kaiserslautern, Germany
June 18-19: near Zurich, Switzerland
June 20-25: Geneva, Switzerland

Keep me in prayer will you? Sara will be joining me part way through the trip as she finishes up here school term here at home.

And I love his point about religion is not really for the God we’re trying to serve, but for our own self-interest. I loved this quote:

The religious system of Israel (like any religious system today) was repeatedly used as a spiritual hideout for people with the guilty conscience. Rather than change how they live, the people of Israel simply added a little religion to their lives, to keep everything in balance. Like the godfather going to Mass on Sunday morning or going to confession before returning to his life of crime, religious systems make it all too easy for self-centered people to find complete familiar rituals without experiencing a change of heart or committing to a life of love.

Though occasionally he lapses into the vocational clergy habit of talking down to the reader, I love the premise and Cavey shares some wonderful insights. Many of you will enjoy the squirming he has to do in the end to make sure his religious system isn’t counted as one, and that people are encouraged to a set of priorities that he strains not to call rituals. I found this part a bit sad. It is easy to identify religious activity in others and yet exempt our own. I like the core of this book, though, I just wish he’d been able to take it further.

I also received Becky Garrisons, Rising From the Ashes: Rethinking Church. I was actually excited about getting a woman’s perspective on this, but unfortunately it’s mostly a rehash of the emergent conversation and that done through interviews and emails. If you care about that conversation you’ll find it a solid resource. However, it is difficult reading because the question/answer stream of consciousness approach makes it choppy. I would have preferred her to act more like a journalist and synthesize these approaches into a more readable narrative. But if you want to know more about the church views of Brian McLaren, N.T. Wright and others in the emergent conversation, you will find it very helpful.

Life After Church: God’s Call to Disillusioned Christians by Brian Sanders is an interesting read as well. He handles well the frustrations of people seeing through the failures and fantasies of organized religion and treats their concerns with empathy and compassion. That part is very helpful. But unfortunately he has another system he thinks is an answer to the malaise of organized religion. I like many of his priorities, but you’ll notice him harking back to the familiar lists of Bible reading, fellowship, mission and honoring leaders. There’s some good chicken to eat hear, but you’ll find some bones as well. In the end he encourages people to stay if at all possible, but also makes room for people to leave it and find other expressions of church life. In summary, he says if you can’t find something to participate in freely, you owe it to the rest of us to start your own and show us how it is done. That’s not advice I’d want people to take seriously. If systems could replicate God’s work on earth, you’d think we’d have discovered it after 2,000 years.

Take This Bread by Sara Miles was an interesting read, but I just couldn’t find the passion to finish it. It’s the story of another liberal finding here way to the reality of Christ. I was led to believe this would be similar to an Anne Lamott read, which got me excited. But, alas, it doesn’t have near the humor that gets me through a Lamott book. Don’t get me wrong. This is a personal story and one who really demonstrates a heart for the poor and marginalized in our society and how Jesus met her there and how she continues to pour out her life in the wider culture. It’s an honest, passionate story of grace. I’m sure many of you will enjoy it more than I did. It just felt like a story I’ve read dozens of time and other books on my shelf beckoned me away from it.

Now I’m reading The American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. Every once and a while you’ve got to break out of the ‘church’ books and read a bit of history!

Also, Sara and I are taking a few days off at the end of her spring break to escape for a few days. So, if it takes a while to get an email response or get or order filled, you’ll understand way. We’re looking forward to a brief break. Also, if anyone needs a CD duplicator, we have upgraded ours and are looking to resell the old one. Email me if you’re interested. I’m not sure how safe it is to mail this delicate equipment, so it will help if you’re close by…

Here’s what I wrote about about it: “Wide Open Spaces is an unabashed invitation to sail out of the shallows of stagnant, repetitive Sunday-only religion and plunge into the adventure of a life lived alongside Jesus in the wild, open currents of every day life. As Jim attests, the rewards far outweigh the risks!”

My favorite chapter is called, “Here is the Church, and Here is the Steeple.” I think this one chapter is worth the cost of the whole book. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite.

(About his days as a pastor) I came dangerously close to implying that organizational involvement was the very essence of Christianity. A Christian faithfully attended services, programs, events, and classes, tithed, filled a needed position or served on a committee in the church, and pulled his or her weight in contributing to a steady stream of visitors.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if we really were a ‘community.’ Seems like what we were facilitating was mostly meeting-based relationships. People would attend services, classes, programs, and groups, but outside the scheduled meeting time, there wasn’t much interaction between these people and the rest of the week until the next meeting rolled around. When the class or group came to an end, for all practical purposes so did the ‘relationships.’

. . . The last few years I’ve discovered that it’s not necessary to have buildings and classrooms, staff and programs, or even incorporate as a 501c3 organization and have a name in order to be the church. You can if you want to, but you don’t have to. Regardless of how you do it, what constitutes church is relationships—with God, people and the world. For me, ‘church’ is taking place in some form or fashion every where, all the time, with everybody. It involves an endless number of interactions and encounters that largely go unnoticed by the rest of the world. But it’s through those very unassuming daily happenings that God is transforming others and me.

When I say our experience of church is ‘everywhere, all the time, with everybody,” what I mean is that we experience the significant components typically associated with church life—such as worship, discipleship, fellowship, mission, service, . . . and giving—through an infinite number of combinations of places, times and people.

. . . I guess to some people this idea of church, ‘all the time, everywhere, with everybody’ may seem a bit chaotic, disorderly or flying by the seat of your pants. Admittedly there’s been a time or two I’ve considered trying to help things along a bit, but I’ve seen God is capable of working matters out just fine on his own.

. . . Church buildings are not essential to the true nature of the church. Christianity has no holy places, only holy people. Christians did not begin to build church buildings until about AD 200. I’m not saying church buildings are wrong. There are all kinds of practical advantages to having a place where people can gather for any given number of purposes. However, Jesus sayd ‘go,’ or disperse to where people are; but at times our church buildings can reverse it to say ‘come’ to where we are. During the first 150 years the Christian church had not even heard of church buildings. In those days the church was a mobile, flexible, relational, humble, inclusive reality that spread like wildfire.

May she be so again!

Here are some quotes from his chapter on Heavenly reign:

(In reference to Jesus’ statement, “the first will be last and the last will be first:) The antihierarchical last sentence shows that the symbolic-prophetic meaning of the Twelve has nothing to do with church governance below. The biblical scholar John Meier concludes that Jesus gave his movement no authority structure.”

“But what of Peter? Did not Jesus found his church on Peter…? The Catholic scholar Raymond Brown wrote, “Peter never served as the bishop or local administrator of any church, Antioch and Rome included.”

The idea that Peter was given some special power that could be handed on to a successor runs into the problem that he had no successor. The idea that there is an ‘apostolic succession’ to Peter’s fictional episcopacy did not arise for several centuries at which time Peter and others were retrospectively called bishops of Rome to create an imagined succession.

Jesus said, “Where two or three are met together in my name, there I am in their midst: (Matt 18:20). Why do (any of us) met together in Jesus’ name need a bishop from Rome when they have Jesus in their midst?

He goes on to talk about Jesus’ establishing heaven’s reign on earth, not through our hierarchical religious institutions, but through the presence of the Risen Lord. Jesus equates heaven’s reign with his personal presence, and that in groups of twos and threes.

And all of this is from a Catholic! Amazing. I forget who recommended this book to me, and while it does have a few problems, it is as incisive a book about the life of Jesus as I’ve read. The presumptuous title aside, I think he does peel back a lot of the religious veneer we have laid over Christ and gets to the heart of why he came and what he wanted to instill in his people. I think I’ve enjoyed it more than Sara, but it is a good read.

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations describes almost exactly (with one major flaw to be discussed later) how I understand the nature of the early church and what I see to be true in the body of Christ as it functions today in the world. Now, I’m not talking about organized religion here, but people who really have a heart for God and his work in the world.

The spider represents traditional organizations with CEO’s, hierarchical structures and heavy top-down management. If you cut off the head of a spider it dies. The starfish, however, represents decentralized communities that are far more effective and resilient. If you cut off the leg of a starfish, it will just grow a new one, and the leg itself will grow into another starfish. The starfish has no centralized brain, it is a system of neural networks that work together.

Granted the subtitle is a bit misleading. The authors aren’t really talking about leaderless organizations, but decentralized ones. Citing examples like Alcoholics Anonymous, Craigslist, Wikipedia, eMule, and others, they describe the power of individuals working together in ways that create incredible resources with surprising results:

This book is about what happens when on one is in charge. It’s about what happens when there’s no hierarchy. You’d think there would be disorder, even chaos. But in many arenas, alack of traditional leadership is giving rise to powerful groups that are turning industry and society upside down. (p. 5)

These starfish communities have tremendous power because they are not bogged down by the needs of an institution that compromise the values of the community itself. The contributions of the individuals who share a common passion are having far more impact than conventional institutional models. These communities prize relationship, engender trust, and pursue a purpose that transcends financial reward. One of the best discussions in this book is how leadership functions in these communities. They are not managers, but catalysts to ignite a passion in others and help them live it out. What the authors describe for a catalyst comes a close to the teachings of Jesus and the examples of the apostles in the New Testament as anything I’ve read before. They work behind the scenes, empower others, help people connect in circles of relationships, and never try to ensure that everything is orderly and certain. And what’s best, they never want to be in charge themselves, knowing how to work themselves out of the picture as others flourish.

They are much better at being agents of change than guardians of tradition. Catalysts do well in situations that call for radical change and creative thinking. They bring innovation, but they are likely to create a certain amount of chaos and ambiguity. Put them in a structured environment and they might suffocate. But let them dream, and they will thrive. (p. 131)

The Starfish and the Spider discusses the unique power of the Internet to allow these kinds of starfish communities to flourish. And, yes, these people are motivated by their self-interest. Imagine these decentralized communities, however, where people are functioning in the interest of Jesus himself. What this business model leaves out, of course, is the place of Jesus as the sole Head of his church that can never be destroyed. Imagine how the body of Christ could arise in our day if we experienced the power of these decentralized communities as people who are all listening and responding to him.

The world is now discovering the power of decentralized organizations in a way that we could have been living for 2000 years. I’m sure many believers did in those past generations, but unfortunately the powers of religion have always gravitated toward heavily authoritarian, centralized models as a means to amass riches and power. I love that so many of us are now discovering a different approach to life as the body of Christ that liberates us from the repressive institutions that destroy people to the freedom to demonstrate who he truly is in the world.

If that’s your passion, this book will show you just how powerfully it can happen. And if the business world can do it without Jesus, how much more powerful would it be for a community of people to live and work together like that who have surrendered their lives to Someone far greater than themselves. Maybe it’s time more of us embraced a new way of seeing the community of believers and how they can function in the world.

With his unique sense of humor Gayle retells the Old Testament stories and recounts the foibles of the early apostle, to drive home his point. God does not choose the most deserving people to work through, but common people who have known failure and heartache and who even make lots of mistakes trying to follow him. This book will encourage you cease from your own labors and learn to rest in his while it reacquaints you with a different side of our Biblical heroes than you usually hear.

It’s available from his Servant Quarters website. And if you haven’t read The Jesus Style yet, do yourself a favor and order that one as well.

Here’s an excerpt:

The more we look at the preconceptions of the apostles in the Gospels, the more we realize that Jesus chose a group that we would call losers. Keep in mind that he did not choose these men from the halls of academia. Education of that day was religious schools for Torah stud. Thos who lacked the intelligence or motivation to achiever were released to get a job. So, where did Jesus find these men? At work! These men were somewhere down the ladder in terms of intelligence…

So Jesus apparently chose the apostles to show us whom he could use. That overwhelms me with encouragement. For this inner circle, Jesus chose a group that affirmed the trend we see from the Old Testament—only the weak and foolish need apply. (I Corinthians 1:27)

I’m off tomorrow for a weekend in Turlock, CA and a weekend helping some people focus on the cross! Pray for us if you think about it…

It is not truly a novel. It is the story of a fictitious pilgrimage by a disillusioned mega-church pastor who is forced into a leave of absence by a crisis of faith. He ends up in Italy with his uncle who is a Catholic priest who guides him on a process to rediscover his faith though the teachings, life and example of the person who became known as St. Francis of Assisi. Though the story does degenerate into preachiness at times, it is a creative way to tell the story of St. Francis in a way that readers today can engage. And St. Francis’ story and impact on the church of his day is a great read.

I found the first three quarters of this book to be engaging and a great encouragement to my own journey as he discards his institutional objectives for a clearer understanding of God’s work in the world. But I found the last quarter to be as disappointing as the first part was encouraging. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth reading. Even the ending was enlightening as an example of the Christianity I don’t want to get caught in again. The uptake of the story is that the pastor’s crisis of faith is resolved, not in a newfound relationship with God but a new set of five priorities derived from his time in Italy. In the end he and those he influences are more enamored with chasing Francis than they are following Jesus. I doubt even Francis would have approved.

But it did help me understand what has bothered me about what is becoming increasingly known as the emergent church or the emergent movement. The publicity of this book identifies it with this movement and Brian McClaren has a quote on the cover declaring this part of that conversation. I say that because the ending of this book solidifies some of what has concerned me most about this movement.

I’m often asked what I think of the emergent church movement and in answering I’ve reminded people that I’ve had very little firsthand touch with it. Thus my conclusions have come from reading some of its authors and what others have said so that my conclusions can’t be construed as definitive. But I have said that I think the movement is asking better questions than many traditional congregations and in many cases has a better message that focuses on relationships with each other and a more relevant engagement with the world.

On the downside, however, they seem to be compressing that into the same institutional structures that will eventually subvert their message. They are still caught up in building, leadership and services. Also, I’ve not found that the ever-present Christ is an important part of the conversation. It is more a movement driven by principles and ideology that find identity in the movement and its leaders, rather than finding a deeper intimacy with the Father, Son and Spirit. Certainly God is referenced a lot, but it doesn’t seem to me to be the language of a growing relationship with him, but an exploration of ideas and practices that might be more relevant.

This difference is not small. If our journey isn’t leading us to a fuller engagement with Jesus and a more complete identity in him alone, then we just end up with another man-made movement that results from our efforts rather than his working. I don’t know if that’s where the emergent conversation is going, but if this book is any indication, building institutions off a new set of priorities isn’t going to get it done.

Will we ever learn that Jesus didn’t start anything like that nor encouraged his disciples to do so? He said he would build his church an framed that reality in the language of family, not the structures of a corporation. In the end, if the still-present and still-active Jesus is not at the center of the conversation and the goal of that conversation, we’re still missing the best this kingdom has to offer,

Last spring the publisher sent me an advance copy of a book titled , Divine Nobodies, hopeful I would find it worthy of passing on to others. I mentioned it on one podcast and have just been notified that the book has been released. The author used to be a mega-congregation staff guy and is now discovering life beyond the big-box with greater joy and reality. I think many of you will enoy this book and the stories it weaves of the most unlikely characters God uses to teach you more about him and what it means to live an authentic life in him.

I wrote a blurb for the publisher that expresses as well as I can what this book meant to me. I understand they used it on the back cover.

“You hold in your hands an amazing story of a broken man finding freedom in all the right places-in God’s work in the lives of some extraordinarily ordinary people around him. You will thrill to this delightful blend of gut-wrenching honesty and laugh-out-loud hilarity, and in the end you’ll find God much closer, the body of Christ far bigger and your own journey far clearer than you ever dreamed.”

And I’m not talking about a few bottle rockets or some firecrackers, here. I’m talking about the full-on huge starburst explosions that you see generally only at stadiums and community events—scores of them, one after the other exploding over our roof. When Sara and I passed through a Native American reservation about 20 miles short of our destination and saw dozens of firework stands, I wondered if that would be a problem… I had no idea they were selling the really big stuff.

Sara and I could handle it, but our 10 year-old Shepherd could not. She was in a constant state of panic, so we left early and drove home on Sunday and Monday. We actually made it from Eugene, Oregon to Moorpark in one 14 hours stretch on Monday, a distance of 858 miles. Sara drove all but the last 100 miles of that. She’s nuts!

The sudden end, however, didn’t destroy the awesome time we had. We had lots of time just to be together, to read looking over the sea, to hike through the Olympic National Forest to high mountain lakes and waterfalls with our dogs romping on the trail ahead of us. And we didn’t end our vacation, just because we got home. We still laid low, worked on some household projects and continued to enjoy our break. But today, we’re phasing back in and starting to wade into the mountain of things that has piled up in my absence. I thought I’d get a jump on them

And continuing the theme of the latest podcast released today, I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been reading during this veg vacation—my favorite kind! In addition to the magazines I brought along, my book list turned out to be quite an eclectic mix. I arrived still finishing a novel of Vatican intrigue called The Third Secret, which I enjoyed except for the last 10 pages, and Don Miller’s, Searching for God Knows What, which in the end I didn’t enjoy nearly as much as his first, Blue Like Jazz. Then I read an unpublished manuscript called Divine Nobodies by Jim Palmer, which will be published later this year. I really enjoyed the honesty and humor of someone’s journey shaking fee of religion to embrace a real relationship with Jesus. Then it was onto Robert McCullough’s 1776, which was not at all what I expected. It is the story of Washington’s Continental Army through that year. It was riveting and I was shocked at how little I knew of the war of revolution during that time. Next up was C.S. Lewis’ ‘Til We Have Faces, which I consider to be his best fiction. It’s a story I’ve read four times before, but it had been 20 years since the last reading. What a story! I’m going to quote a piece from it in a future blog. Finally I started a Michael Chrichton Novel, State of Fear about global warming.

As hydrogen and oxygen, two diverse elements, coming together produce an entirely new product, water, so the spirit of renunciation and the spirit of service coming together in a man make a new being, the most formidable being on earth-the terrible meek.

They are terrible in that they want nothing, and hence cannot be tempted or bought, and in that they are willing to go any lengths for others because they feel so deeply. Christ standing before Pilate is a picture of the Terrible Meek. He could not be bought or bullied, for he wanted nothing—nothing except to give his life for the very men who were crucifying him. Here is the supreme strength—it possesses itself, hence possesses the earth. It is so strong, so patient, so fit to survive that it inherits the earth.

No one gives the earth to those who have this terrible meekness; they come into it as their natural right, they inherit it because they have the blood of God in their veins.

On an unrelated note, I leave tomorrow for a week in the midwest. I’ll be in Windsor, Canada over the weekend with a Messianic fellowship that wants to sort out the freedom of relationship from the bondage of religion. Should be interesting. Then I’ll hang out in Detroit on Sunday night and Monday. On Tuesday I fly to Des Moines, Iowa to help a school district there deal with some harassment issues as part of my BridgeBuilders work. This is a tough trip to pack for!

Sadly, despite many charismatic renewals over the past fifty years, institutionalism remains. Even the most gifted leaders who reach freedom in Jesus and long for a greater outpouring fo the Holy Spirit perpetuate structures that prevent the free-flowing movement of the Body of Christ. With few exceptions, church in the West is still described in institutional terms: a worship service whereby passive laity sit in a sanctuary listening to a didactic monologue from a professional. Most of what we see today are primarily cosmetic changes expressed in the superficialities of style: music style, clothing style, program style, architectural style. Styles may change, but the systemic structure remains entirely modern. (p. 101)

“The real issues are not methodological or structural’ they are theological and deeply spiritual. The church was never meant to have a permanent (or stationary) residence because it was to be always enroute toward the ends of the earth and the end of time.… The problem with the church is not that it’s out of touch with the culture, but that it is out of touch with Jesus. Our powerless ecclesiology (understanding of church) reflects our powerless Christology (understanding of Jesus). We know about Jesus without experiencing Jesus. (p. 99)

It is a marvelous story of someone’s passion for freedom and the price he was willing to pay to help his entire nation get there. Many times he could have chosen a simpler course for himself that would have just made the best of the status quo, and instead he continued to risk his own personal well-being for a larger freedom. How could he do it? Perhaps this quote from the last few pages of his book give you some clue:

It was the desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free. Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and he oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

I have walked the long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.

I realize Mandela’s view of freedom is somewhat different from my own and I realize the price he paid has been far greater than I have ever been asked to pay. But I also find that we have a similar heartbeat. On my journey I have continued to hear the whisper of the Spirit, “Set my people free.” That has carried me through so many seasons, and as I stand at the bring of 2006, I second Mandela’s words, “my walk is not yet ended…”