There was an interesting juxtaposition in our local paper this past Sunday. I don’t know how many of you saw Sunday’s Garfield comic but it made a great point. Garfield, for those that don’t know is an overweight cat with food always on his mind. In Sunday’s strip he is sitting at a table with a bear that is exhilarated having just escaped from the zoo. He throws his arms up in the air shouting, “I’m free!†A “Yahoo†and a “Yippee†later he is already looking a bit unsettled. Finally in the last panel he says, “Well gotta get back its feeding time.â€

Sound familiar? That’s what the children of Israel wanted to do. They had been delivered from bondage in Egypt and were on their way to the promised land eating manna every morning. They soon grew bored with it and complained that they were better off as slaves in Egypt with three meals every day than depending on God to provide each meal for them. I guess that’s why bondage works so well. At least you get fed!

A section or two over from our comics on Sunday was an article about pet myths. One of the myths they debunked is that cats can survive in the wild. The article said once wild animals have been domesticated they lose their ability to survive in the wild.

The comic strip and the article said a mouthful. We’ll never really be free until we learn how to feed from Jesus ourselves (John 6) and not think we’re dependent on anyone else. Abusive religious institutions through history have maintained their captive audience by convincing people that they are the place where believers ‘get fed.’ Regrettably they have convinced many that is so and instead of learning the joy of freedom that can only come when Jesus becomes our soul source of life and provision for things spiritual as well as physical. Over the years on this journey I’ve met many people who wanted to leave an abusive system but couldn’t, because they don’t know how they will be fed spiritually. And I’ve known many pastors who wanted to leave such systems but couldn’t because they didn’t know how else they could make a living.

I guess this much is true. Until we learn to feed on Jesus himself, we’ll be the captive of anyone who pretends to do it for us.

Someone sent me a link they other day to test to self-diagnose how much like a Pharisee you are in your thinking. It’s cute and makes some incredible points. I like the first one best of all and referred to it in our most recent podcast, “A Death Worth Dying.” But it bears repeating here for those who might miss it there.

To a Pharisee, “truth is more important than love.”

To the spiritually healthy, “Love is the most important part of truth.”

Isn’t that a great way to say it? In Jesus love and truth come together. You don’t have to sacrifice truth in the name of love, and truth dispersed without love really isn’t the truth at all. If only we followers of Christ would live like that, the world would not be turned off by our passion for the truth we have found in him.

U-2 lead singer, Bono, recently addressed the National Prayer Breakfast where President Bush and other national and international leaders gathered in Washington, DC. I am not much of a rock fan, but I find his remarks refreshing, authentic and a real call to action. Of course I did not agree with everything he said, but a lot of it is really great stuff. Here were some of my favorite bits:

Yes, it’s odd, having a rock star here—but maybe it’s odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line… One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God’s second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment… I must confess, I changed the channel

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives… I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.

There is a continent—Africa—being consumed by flames. I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did—or did not to—to put the fire out in Africa.

If you’d like to read the entire transcript you will find it here.

Finally! The Jake book, So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore is at the printer’s and we will have copies in hand for a March 1, 2006 release date. It is a bittersweet time for me. I have never finished a book before with such sadness, both because the process is ending with my co-writer on this project, Dave Coleman, and because I will miss one of the characters in this story that has truly shaped my life. Writing his words made me think in ways that stretched me spiritually and opened doors in my own life to recognize the Father’s hand. I can truly say I was a better person on those days I wrote John’s material and I will miss those afternoons I spent with ‘him.’

For those who don’t know about this book, it is the story of a man transitioning out of religious ways of thinking about his life in God, to discover a life in Jesus that he had only previously dreamed was possible. It transforms his entire way of looking at God, the church and the world around him.
To be honest, I never thought this project would get done. This started as a shared whim with a friend of mine on a project that every contact I had in the publishing industry said could not be published. We wanted to tell a story of someone disillusioned by the power of the system of religious obligation who found freedom through some incredibly painful circumstances. We were told it’s perspective of organized religion was not palatable to booksellers and that its make-up fell between the cracks of fiction and teaching—not really being either one.

Thus I have been shocked at the response from this little story. Daily I receive email from people all over the world who have found this story a valuable encouragement for their own and told me how closely it parallels their own experience. People have helped proof it and made suggestions that improved the story. We even had someone I hadn’t known from Chicago send us the cover design for the printed version. I look back at this whole process amazed at what God has put together out of simple obedient steps.
Let me share one of those emails with you:

I found the book about three weeks ago on cpcoaches.com and read it in 2 days. I am changed. I have never read a book like this in my life. It is not about the church stuff but how you feel Jesus is speaking right to you. Everyone around me has noticed a great change in the way I look at life and ministry. I am living in the Mediterranean working with YWAM. I immediately started sharing with coworkers about the book and have been getting the same response from them as I had. They are sharing the book also. I heard some pastors from the southern side of the Island are reading it now. Don’t be surprised if you start hearing from people around here. How did you do it?

Only those who’ve been behind the scenes know how amazingly God has brought together a number of pieces to pull this story together. It will be available in a few weeks. You can pre-order it if you wish from Lifestream or from the Jake Colsen websites. And if you haven’t been to the Jake Colsen site recently, come visit. It has been completely re-designed to go along with the release of the printed version.

I’m finishing up today in Harrisburg, PA, where I’ve spent the weekend with a broad spectrum of folks sorting out what it means to live deeply in the life of Jesus and how to share in that life with other believers and how to share it with people around us who do not know him. It’s been a wonderful time and I’ve really been blessed to be alongside some people I was with before here a couple of years ago, and lots of new ones I’m just getting to know.

On the flight out here I read the current issue of Christianity Today. It has a review of Barna’s Revolution that gives a distorted view of the book and a caustic reaction to it. That’s too bad. Now more than ever we need to be talking as believers about the effectiveness of the institutions we’ve inherited and what might we do about that, rather than dividing into a new faction between those who champion the congregational model and those who are finding life in alternatives.

But there was one quote from this issue of the magazine that caught my eye and has captured my heart over recent days. In an otherwise tedious article about “How the Kingdom Comes†by Michael S. Horton, I found this quote:

Instead of being in the world but not of it,
We easily become of the world but not in it.

He’s speaking about believers who embrace the world’s values closeted behind religious terminology. We’re still looking for power, money, convenience and fulfilling our preferences, but we use religion to do it and end up only gathering in our own ghettos with people we consider like-minded. We end up more like the world, but no longer among it to demonstrate the life of God. Religion does that. It makes us irrelevant in the world and no longer accessible to it. which, as long as we’re caught up in religion, might be a good thing.

But it’s not what he has in mind. Jesus wants to transform us so we are no longer of the world. Instead we are citizens of a more incredible kingdom and live in that reality the same way he did—filled with the Father’s love and demonstrating that to others. Then we won’t be secluded from the world in our Christian activities, but among the world by the way we go about our jobs and lives in our communities—in the world, but no longer of it!

I love that and want that to be increasingly true of how I live in him, and in the world where he has put me.

First, let me share a few housekeeping items. I don’t think I’ve notified this bunch that we posted a new edition of The God Journey podcast last week, entitled Removing the Clutter, which re-visits some issues about learning to listen to God’s voice. Also, today we’re hopefully delivering the Jake Colsen book to the printers, so that’s a relief and first thing tomorrow I fly out for five days in central Pennsylvania… Whew! What a crazy week!

But the real reason I’m writing today is to share with you an email I wrote as part of an exchange I’ve had with a brother longing for fellowship and not finding any with others on this journey. This is how I responded to him:

I certainly understand the feelings you’re going through. Of course I have no idea what he might be doing in your area, but I would encourage you not to look for the church he is building as a thing, or group or activity. It will be people in whom he is working and you’ll be able to encourage that work in others as well as be encouraged in his work in you. Over time enough people might connect that will allow it to be a bit more visible to the human eyes, but that is not essential.

The time of de-toxing and learning to look only to Jesus have been important. It sounds like your friends are still going through some of that. I am convinced we keep sorting out our hurts with the system as long as Jesus hasn’t become a real person to live with each day. Once he becomes real to us, those hurts get healed and we can move on to so many other things he has for us. Perhaps God has ways for you to encourage your friends how to know him better and they won’t feel the need to continue to rummage through the brokenness of the system they were in.

So I would encourage you to look for ways God would give you away to people around you (believer and unbeliever alike) and you will see his church emerge as those relationships grow. One of the dangers of people who wander outside the box is that they can become ingrown and look out only for themselves and their needs and not see that God has put them where they are to be a demonstration of his character to people around them. This is a marvelous process and it really pulls us outside of our needs/wants/desires to truly find the freedom to live as he lived in the world. Ask him how he wants to give you away right where you are, to people you already know, and maybe some ways to connect with others you don’t know yet.

I realize it may not look like there is a lot of concrete direction in what I’ve said, but there really is. Getting outside ourselves and loving others is when we begin to see church grow around us. And to that end you have my prayers.

What a crazy two weeks! We’re trying to get So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore off to the presses for the printed version of Jake’s book. The response to this book has been incredible and I know many of you have waited to see it in print, knowing you can read through the entire story. That is about to be come a reality, though we’ve still got some proofing to do and some corrections to make. It is a ton of work and has overshadowed everything the last few weeks.

I did meet a man for lunch Wednesday from Oregon who was doing business down here in Southern California. On the way down he had been reading He Loves Me on the plane when he said he had a pretty weird moment. Sitting there with a book in his lap that said He Loves Me on it and a daisy on the cover, he began to wonder if other folks around him might have thought he was reading a gay self-help book! And since he was traveling with another man from his office…, well, you know! He said he thought people would think of that before they would think of it being a book he was reading on marriage to be more sensitive to his wife’s point of view.

So he found himself reading the book while trying to keep his hand over the title so no one would have any of those thoughts. Wow! I’ve never heard that before and never thought of that myself. We had a great laugh over it. I told him I never did like that title and when we run out of those books in my garage, we’re going to republish. I like Living in the Father’s Affection. He liked Shattering the Favor Line. Hmmmm… I could like that too. Well, we’ve got time to decide. I still have a few thousand in my garage.

But it’s interesting the kinds of thoughts that can go through our heads when we’re worried about what others might be thinking about us. It’s certainly easier just not to care about that. As the popular saying goes, we wouldn’t waste so much time worried about what others are thinking of us if we realized how little they did.

Sorry there hasn’t been much action on the blog here. Too busy these days. I will get back to it, however, when things settle down.

Our latest edition of The God Journey entitled The Angst Between Innies and Outies has just been posted on our sister website thegodjourney.com.

Christianity Today’s current review of George Barna’s book, Revolution, highlights the misunderstanding and increasing polarization between those who see the church only as a traditional congregation and those looking for more relational expressions of body life. Wayne and Brad wade into the conflict between those who are in and those who are out to invite us all to lower the temper of the debate and open the doors of communication and compassion between fellow-believers however he calls us to walk out our life in him. It is easy to understand why those who embrace more traditional forms would feel threatened by those leaving it, and why those leaving might feel the need to condemn what failed them so. But is this really serving Father’s purpose in the world?

A dear sister from New Zealand wrote me the other day about something God is doing in her life. She was responding to something I wrote in an earlier blog: “Your work is to simply follow him there. When you do he will place you among the body just as he desires and you will know the joy of sharing a growing dependency on him with other members of his body.†She wrote to tell me how Jesus was doing this in her life.

I am beginning to experience what you talked about here. First there is Ingrid. She is employed to help me at the swimming pool. She has a police record but she had the chance of a job because I signed a disclaimer. She comes from a Mormon background and has done some foolish things in her life. Father told me to offer to pray for her. She accepted. I see her twice a week and just share with her as Father leads. I have given her your book, He Loves Me and I just keep telling her he does. That idea has revolutionised my approach. I used to start with the fact we were sinners.

Next there is Alannah who I used to know at the Sunday meetings. She was a bit disillusioned with the Sunday services and has since left. I just kept bumping into her ‘accidentally’ but now we often arrange to meet.

Yesterday I met Maureen at the pool. Another I used to know at the Sunday meetings 20 years ago. She has left the Pentecostals and is attending the seventh day. She is not the first I know, who being disillusioned with the Pentecostals, has gone to legalistic (non spirit led?) groups. We had a good talk and she said, “I can see Jesus in you.†What more could I ask? I gave her the Lifestream website.

Life has become so exciting!

I love this. It is amazing what God can do when we’re just free to give our lives away to the people he’s already put right in front of us, instead of trying to find or organize people into some kind of group experience that we want. Relationships are about people not groups; groups happen because enough people have found relationships with each other and desire to share those relationships with others. I love the simplicity and power of this process and how it encourages us to keep our eyes open for people we can love and serve.

Emails like this really touch my heart… Obviously this man is feeling quite desperate, but I love the reality with which he is sorting out the empty place religion leaves in the human heart, even for those who think they lead it. Here is his cry and my response:

Well, how can I say this? I am 51 years old, been involved in ministry all my life, thought I loved the Father and knew Him but over the past 3 years I have become painfully aware that I have never had any significant relationship with the Father or other people. The struggle is intense. I feel as if I have thrown my life away.

I want to know and love the Lord. The hunger consumes my every thought and is my only desire. He seems so far away and disinterested. I need to find the Father and His love. This burden of doubt and distrust is eating me alive.

Please, if you find time, pray for me and my wife and my children.

My response: As painful as this may be right now, Father is undoubtedly opening your eyes to some incredible things. Yes, I know how painful it can be and how wasted our previous years might seem. But I think you’ll find that even though we may have been less aware of his presence in us, his work was still going on. No doubt, with a heart like yours, you’ve had a profound touch on people in the past about which you might be completely unaware.

But I want to encourage you to keep leaning into him and let him grow this relationship with you because there is nothing better. Though he may seem so far away and disinterested, that is not his nature. It often seems that way when we are focused on our own efforts to know him, rather than his power to draw us to him. I know that is easier to write than live, but God does not begin what he does not complete.

You have my prayers, and I’d be happy to help however I can. If you want to read my own personal journey through a similar time you might want to read my book, He Loves Me. It is available on my website as a free download in PDF version… That might help some, but ultimately this is something God is sorting out in you. This will be a wonderful season in your life, though you will know that far better by hindsight than you can possibly appreciate today.

Just ask him to make himself known to you however he desires. Don’t think of all you ‘should do’ to make this happen. Just keep a surrendered heart before him and do whatever he puts in your heart to do…