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I get this question all the time and have answered it often, but I will do so on my blog again for others who still haven’t found the answer elsewhere on the website. I got this email a few days ago:

I have a question for you. Do you still believe in Church leadership and Church discipline? How are those things to operate? Does a loving Father still chastise? Just some questions I have had for a while, I really like what you teach and was wanting your advice on these things. Thank you so much!

My response: I absolutely do, as the early church experienced them, but not how we’ve encased them in our institutional, shame-based caricatures of the church organizations today. Leadership is about equipping and facilitating, not managing and manipulating. And discipline is about loving people into wholeness not shaming them in their sin. We have twisted these things until they no longer reflect the intent of our older brother, Jesus!

I was on the road yesterday so did not follow the news through the day. When I got home and finally saw pictures of the devastation in Haiti, my heart just broke for these dear people and the calamity that has befallen them. I have heard from some folks wanting to know if we knew of a way to get money to the need in Haiti. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone directly who is involved with the people of Haiti.

There are many fine, large organizations intervening in Haiti at the moment. But Sara and I like to give relationally, where the vast majority of the money actually ends up providing for the needs of people, not the administrative needs of the organization delivering it. So we like to give to people or groups that we know firsthand, and who have a relational understanding of God and his kingdom. We don’t have anyone like that in this case.

So we look next for people we know that know people who are involved in this massive outreach. I know others are, too. So I thought I’d tap the readership of this blog to see if they know people or organizations that they know and trust in this situation. If you do, please feel free to post their information in the comment section below and also include any appropriate links for further information about the organization, or how others can help.

This will provide a resource for others who want to explore ways to give to help with those who have been ravaged by this catastrophe. Thanks in advance for anyone who can help us out here.

I recorded an interview this afternoon at KLOVE radio, which reaches five million listeners around the world. I was thrilled with the interview questions and the hosts drilling down to the religion versus relationship issue. It will air tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon (January 12) at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time. If you don’t have a KLOVE station near you, you can listen on-line on the KLOVE website. I’m not often excited about interview, but thought this one had a real flow and depth.

I got this in an email from an old friend the other day, who is freshly learning to live loved. I really like the way he qorded this.

Once I began to understand what it means to live loved, I started seeing the gospel afresh in many places. I’m seeing how essential it is to keep the gospel in the foreground, to stay near the Cross and not slide into a soft legalism of “practical Christian living” that makes what I do the main thing rather than what Christ has done (and continues to do) for me.

That’s a mouthful!

In the age of microwave ovens, Internet access and video on demand, we are being seduced to the illusion of instant answers and quick fixes. The renewing of our minds, however, is a process that does take some time. God is not interested in waving a magic wand and making all your circumstances glorious; he is interested in transforming us from the inside out. He’s works in the inner live to bring real change from within, and that just takes time.

So don’t get frustrated when you don’t see the results you want coming to pass quickly. They were never meant to. God is not about a quick fix, but real transformation over time. I meet lots of people who are frustrated in the middle of the process, not realizing that something real is going on at a level they can’t see yet. So it is always a great encouragement to me when I see someone move from painfully disillusioned, to gratefully disillusioned because of the fruit they see in their lives. I got this email a few days ago. I hope it is an encouragement to many others who are still in the middle of a transformation and can’t yet see the end of it. It’s coming!

I wanted to thank you all again for your great podcasts and books and all that you have done to bless my life!!! I’ve been wanting to write this letter for several months.

I have been listening to your podcasts for about 3+ years after someone recommended the So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore book to me. That book we cried through; it was so close to our own personal experience. Wayne, you came to my house in Michigan (the one with all the mosquitoes) and shared with us – thank you!

The first few years we didn’t know if the pain would ever subside and my husband suffered from frequent migraines as each family we had loved from the organization stepped away from us as we “deprogrammed” from religion and stepped down from our place in leadership at a church we helped start.

You guys always said that it will get better and that it will come, and it has. I didn’t know if it ever would at the time. We are now totally “gratefully disillusioned” and the freedom and joy we experience are worth it all. We can now thank God for the “baseball bat to the face” (as my husband calls it) of our organized group’s catastrophe (a situation very similar to the “Jake” book). You even spoke of how eventually even some reconciliations came over time, Wayne, in your own experience after you went through various betrayals. We also have been through layers of betrayals and would never have believed that there are finally some cracks in the walls of ice that came between us and our friends after the “shunning” we experienced.

We felt like the Spirit was clearly leading us elsewhere other than supporting that organization we helped start, but the emotional pain and agony were immense as for a time we even lost relationship with my parents while they were still at the organization that we were at and commiserating with our old friends on how “concerned” they were for us. That has now all been worked through and healed, my parents have left, the relationship restored, and my husbands migraines have subsided. New friendships have been made that are much richer and more meaningful to us.

Anyway! I am glad to testify that you were right and that you all have been such a help our own journeys. The freedom you have talked about has become our freedom, too, and we rejoice. God is good. Now we enjoy the daily adventure of walking with Father and how He leads us and who He leads us to love each day.

One of our most amazing experiences recently was to stand with a woman who was being “evangelized” by Christians in a co-op group we are in. Some kids from the religious families in our group were telling her kids on the playground that they are going to hell. We had this couple over and got to know their story and found out that this wife had been sexually abused by her pastor as a teenager. When she brought this to the light the deacons swept it under the carpet and her mother abandoned her. Needless to say this woman does not want much to do with organized “Christianity” anymore. Well we were able to stand with her and love her and be at least one Christian family in her life who didn’t mistreat her (the religious people in our co-op were pretty toxic to her). She really seems to have a real yearning for Jesus and even hears from Him, but doesn’t quite know His name after what she’s been through (just as The Shack talks about). It has been really neat how we have just been able to love her and not have any agenda and she has been so drawn to us and some other friends of ours that are “out of the box”.

It has been a beautiful and amazing experience to bring healing to others out of our wounds. We could really connect with her and her husband about the misguided ways of organized religion and how they go against Jesus’ ways. After her and her husband left our house one night they said, “I will never forget this night”. Thank you for helping us deprogram from “evangelism” and religion and be able to love people freely and help rebuild what has been broken down.

I praise the Lord for the reconciliations that have started to flow for us with a couple people from our old organized group. And also the rich fellowship we now have with others on the journey. At first we had lost our whole community and it felt like being in the desert for a long time, but in three years time our community has rebuilt now is so much more rich, diverse, deep and amazing then it ever was. It was worth the pain and change. It is like before we were eating fast food before (organized religion) and now we sit down to homemade feasts with candles and ambiance—that’s the fellowship we now enjoy. Especially one family who left the organization with us has been such an amazing experience of building relationships built of honesty, transparency and love instead of duplicity and “fronts”.

Tonight we are having over a family who feel they have never fit into any church. They were not shiny enough to ever take the notice of those in leadership (looking like they might be of service to the organization and inner circle). And their children’s worst verbal abuse has happened at church from the other kids – so much so that their oldest daughter really wants to be a boy since she had so many terrible comments from the girls at church. We see though that they have genuine hearts for Jesus and we want to love their children and help heal the wounds.

Let us stand together in being God’s people and loving those He brings into our lives! Thanks for being true brothers in Christ – a little ahead of us on the journey – and gently showing us a better way!

Don’t give up the good work even if some people are being stinkers!

Someone sent me this quote from a book they’ve been reading that seemed to go along with my earlier posting about washing someone’s shoes and how it touched their life. I haven’t read the book and don’t know anything about the author, but I sure like this quote:

The moment you are aware of your holiness it goes sour and becomes self-righteousness. A good deed is never so good as when you have no consciousness that it is good—you are so much in love with the action that you are quite unself-conscious about your goodness and virtue. Your left hand has no idea that your right hand is doing something good or meritorious. You simply do it because it seems the natural, spontaneous thing to do. Spend some time in becoming aware of the fact that all the virtue that you can see in yourself is no virtue at all but something that you have cunningly cultivated and produced and forced on yourself. If it were real virtue you would have enjoyed it thoroughly and would feel so natural that it wouldn’t occur to you to think of it as a virtue. So the first quality of holiness is its unself-consciousness.

The second quality is its effortlessness. Effort can change a behavior, it cannot change you. Think of this: Effort can put food into your mouth, it cannot produce an appetite; it can keep you in bed, it cannot produce sleep; it can make you reveal a secret to another but it cannot produce trust; it can force you to pay a compliment, it cannot produce genuine admiration; effort can PERFORM acts of service, it is powerless to produce love or holiness. All you can achieve by your effort is REPRESSION, not genuine change and growth.

The Way to Love
~ Anthony De Mello

I love hearing how other people are experiencing this journey and how God is freeing them from the bondage of human religion to embrace a realy walk with him. I got this from a twenty-three year old Swiss woman this week. What an encouragement it was to me and I hope to you too.

First of all, I want to thank you. Yours and Mr Coleman’s book So You Don’t Want To Go To Church Anymore has touched me deep down inside and it has helped me get a little glimpse of who Jesus really is.

In the past couple of days, I have started to realize what it really means to live with God as my Father. Born into a Christian family, I’ve always seen myself as a child of His, but I never quite understood the meaning of it. I felt restless and suspicious whenever I went to church, and with the years I felt myself getting pulled down more and more by feelings of guilt. Whatever I did, I always had the impression it was not enough. I met people in church who talked me into doing certain things, and every time I hoped it would make me feel better in front of God, but it never did. In the summer of 2009 I decided to be baptized. I was so hungry for this overwhelming peace and joy I admired in other Christians and I set all my hopes on the day of my baptism. It was a good day. But my expectations were disappointed. I still felt an emptiness in me that could not seem to be filled.

Before these feelings could break me, I got your book. And with every page I read, I could feel this heavy load on my chest be lifted away. This might sounds cheesy, but it’s exactly how it felt. I realized that I don’t have to earn God’s love. It’s right here. And I learned that God doesn’t bless us for doing things this way or that way. He blesses EVERYTHING we do together with Him, in Him and through Him. And He’s not a fortune teller who gives us predictions like “This is your job/man/house for life”. He puts things into our hearts and gives us what we need every day. I don’t have to ask myself “Is this right or wrong?”. I’d much rather ask the Lord “What is it that you want to put into my heart?”

It’s no miracle the God so many Christians have talked to me about couldn’t touch my heart the way I always wished He would. It was a God of rules and signs that never made sense to me. A God that blesses the ones who deserve it.

Reading your book felt like finding the God I’ve been looking for all my life. The God of love. The God of relationship. The God of trust. Only now I have started to understand what that means. And here I can finally feel it: a heart so full of gratefulness for what He has done for me! A heart of joy for this great promise of His never-ending love! A heart that can rest in peace, knowing that He will give me what I need, every day. This is the Lord I want to follow, this is the God I want to praise.

I’m only 23 years old and there’s so much more I have to learn. And this short time in which I have started to discover the wonders of being God’s child has already showed me that it can be a “lonely” way sometimes. Many people around me, who I always thought were devoted Christians, don’t seem to understand when I talk about this God I’m getting to know now. They’d rather hold on to rules they think God has created for them to be safe and they don’t see that these rules only keep them from experiencing God’s original and amazing ways of blessing them!! It makes me sad sometimes. And it makes me feel lonely, too, sometimes.

But I know that the Lord is watching over me. He knows what I need, and He knows what every single one of his children needs. He has ways that seem impossible for me now. But I do trust in Him.

Mr Jacobsen, I want to thank you and Mr Coleman for being “God’s tools” in the process of opening my eyes and heart to a new kind of life.

I wish you and your families all the best and God’s rich blessings and gifts.

We’re not much on big New Year celebrations around here, in fact we went to bed at 10:00 last night. But we know lots of people who are into it, so Sara and I want to bless you with a full and rich new year ahead.

And to do that, instead of pressuring yourself with all that you want to do to make your life better this year, perhaps you’d consider asking God what he is doing to make his life more real in you. Transformation begins with his will and desire, not ours.

And then you’ll realize what God knows. Transformation is not his goal, it is merely the fruit of living loved by him. His goal is not to change you, it is to invite you into his love, Change will happen as the fruit of that, not the goal!

What I love about God is that he doesn’t mark time on calendars and offer a fresh start once a year. His mercies are new every morning, so that each day is a fresh start in his life and grace.

(And if you want to see the many faces of Wayne and Brad while recording The God Journey, you might check out our new photos over there!)

Sara and I are taking this week off to refresh, enjoy our children and grandchildren and some time with some dear friends we have known for 25 years. Before I go, I thought I would leave you with this. It is one of the most touching emails I received this year.

A few months ago we had a young couple who was visiting Los Angeles stay with us for a couple of days and really enjoyed their fellowship. One afternoon we went outside for a walk after it had been raining. When we got back to the house we found the young lady’s shoes were coated with mud on the bottom. As she took them off at the back door, I scooped them up so I could wash off the mud, knowing they were packing later in the day for an early flight out in the morning. Little did I know what God was doing in her through such a simple act. Here’s what she wrote me later:

It really was such a blessing to be with you guys for a couple of days and hang out. I think I shared once with you that I didn’t have a great dad growing up. He was very harsh, unloving and absent. One of my most frequent conversations with God is that he would just help me understand the love of a father. Since I didn’t get to experience the earthly kind, I sometimes have a hard time accepting/understanding the spiritual kind. God is pretty cool, because since I started talking to him about it, he’s placed some of the neatest people and visual examples of it in my life.

I know you weren’t even aware of it, but seeing what an awesome dad you are touched my heart deeply. The way you interacted with your daughter was especially impactingl to watch. I love how you’re kinda sassy with each other (I can really relate to that), yet it was so obvious how much you adore her. Julie was joking about you washing my shoes… but it actually meant a lot to me. I can only imagine what it meant to the disciples when Jesus washed their feet. It was honestly humbling to watch you wash my shoes, yet it was also a very powerful act of love. What a beautiful visual picture of how much father loves me.

And what’s so cool about you, is that you are just so genuine. I think that when we genuinely love the people in our life, others around us can not help but see God in that. It’s so freakin cool! So, thank you for just being you. Because of it, I now have a great understanding of father’s love.

I love her statement that genuineness resonates with people where pretense doesn’t. I think that’s pretty cool as well. It also points to one of the things I love most about this journey. God seems to work best when we’re least aware of trying to do something for him or have a specific impact on someone’s life. Maybe that’s what makes it genuine.

I wasn’t even aware that she was being touched so deeply. For me, I just saw some muddy shoes that needed to be cleaned so they would have enough time to dry before she needed to pack them. It was the simplest of actions and yet it profoundly touched someone. And what I like best, is that I was completely unaware of it at the time. For one who used to be a performer, who couldn’t do hardly anything without the conscious thought of what other people would think of me, this is a great joy and glorious freedom. What’s more, for all that performing, no one ever seemed to get touched like this.

Could it be that simply living alongside others and loving them will accomplish everything God wants to do through us? We don’t have to have the conscious agenda of doing something so others will be touched. In fact, maybe it is best that we don’t.

Reality wins! It always wins! Performances, are just that. It’s who you are when the lights are off and the crowd has gone home that makes all the difference.

Due to the holiday season and our need for a bit of rest and refreshing, the Lifestream Offices will be closed from noon on December 24th, until the morning of January 4. We are sorry for any inconvenience this causes people with book orders and correspondence, but we really do need the rest this time of year and a break from our routine. Book and audio orders placed during this time will be shipped on January 4. If you can hold off other business related items until then, that would be wonderful as well. Thank you, and we pray that you’ll find some time for rest and refreshing during this season as well.