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Twice over the last month I’ve had people pull out the Hebrews 10:25 gun when a group of folks I’m with start talking about finding real community in places other than the Sunday morning congregation. It makes me cringe. Not for the people I’m with, because they usually know that Hebrews is talking about something incredibly more powerful than just having your fanny in a pew on Sunday morning. It’s about having your lives intersect with other believers in ways that allow each to encourage the others and in doing so stimulating each other to love and good deeds. That’s not about what meetings we attend, but how we live our lives each day.

The reason I cringe is for the person saying it. If the only reason they go to a congregation is because they’re convinced Scripture tells them to, then they have missed what’s beautiful about fellowship. It’s not a chore, it’s a joy! When we reduce body life to a ‘have to’ instead of a ‘get to’ we’ve already admitted that we’ve lost the life in it.

Someone on the Lifestream list the other day used the word irresistable to talk about their connections with other Christians. I loved that. Because sharing our life in Christ with other believers on similar journeys is not onerous. It’s irresistable!

I’m in Corbett, Oregon at a men’s retreat this weekend as we talk through living in Father’s affection rather than living by religion’s obligations. I’ve got some wonderful guys here who are sorting that out in a very real way. I also had the chance to meet some lovely people near Salem before the weekend got started who are looking outside the box for relevant ways to connect with God’s people.

Today I read a link someone sent to a website of a good friend of mine. Lynette Woods, formerly of New Zealand and now of Washington, DC (where I’ll be in a week and a half) has a lovely article on her website, unveiling.org that contrasts life in an ocean tide pool with swimming in the ocean. Our little boxes of religion are like the tidepools, that appear safe for the moment, but actually keep us from growth that takes us to the fullness of his love. You can read the entire article here.

I really liked her conclusion:

In the past I have prayed for revival, yet it seems to me that I often missed the point.Often I have prayed for the Lord to refresh and feed me while the oceans of His love have remained waiting for me just beyond the rocks. Because of fear and unbelief it is easy to become afraid to leave the familiar surroundings I have grown comfortable in. I am forced to wait for storms or the occasional extra high tide to refill my pool.

Yet His purpose for the extra high tide and storm is not to refill my little pool but to get me to move into the limitless depths of the oceans of His Love. I cannot really grow in the pool. There are NO large fish found in rock pools. Yet out in the fearful depths I am out of my depth and cannot see the bottom. There are unseen dangers that in my fear I think will harm me In His Love there really are limitless depths and I will lose many things, but in gaining Him, I find that the “dangers” were imaginary.

I think that the ‘”revivals” down through the centuries have been “high” tides. They are not supposed to fill the pool we live in but draw us OUT of the pools into His ocean of Love, into Him!

My latest book, So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore, has arrived from the printer and all the pre-orders have gone out. So they should be arriving soon. Thanks to so many of you for your help and patience as we sorted out this book. They arrived just as I left for Portland so I did get to take some with me. So my small, but dedicated office staff, worked on them yesterday to make sure we could get them on their way long before our release date.

We have heard from so many people who have been deeply impacted by this book and are amazed and blessed at how far it has traveled via the Internet. I thought I’d share with you bits of a few of those that have been such an encouragement to us:

Jake has given me a voice and a vocabulary for things that have been stirring inside my heart for many years. Stephen in Illinois

I appreciate that this book is not “church bashingâ€, but that it is Christ exalting. Thank you for giving words to feelings that I have had for so long, yet have not been able to express. Sarah in Arizona

My husband read your story and is a changed man! He’s struggled with guilt and just not measuring up. He’s never gotten the ‘relationship’ part of it. He’s got it now! He’s been on cloud nine the last few days. Heather by email

Terrific story, I am recommending it to our pioneer church planters around the world. — Brian, Director, International missions organization

Exceptional story that will make you laugh, cry, and be in awe of the love that Father has for ALL His children! It will challenge you to rethink what ‘church’ is all about! — Chris, a student at East Tennessee State University

To anyone who is wondering if God still moves among us as He did in the Bible, here is a story to show the truth—He does! It spoke to something so deep inside me that I couldn’t relax until I reached the end. and even then I knew it was just the beginning. — Jillene, Camp Director, New York

This book has proven to be the most radically confirming piece of literature I have ever read. –Becky

Searching for GOD’S truth is stranger than fiction. —Dottie, a searcher, Orlando, Florida

You can order the book from lifestream.org. Don’t let the author’s name, Jake Colsen, confuse you. That was the synonym my co-writer, Dave Coleman and I used to tell this little tale.

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.