On being "Adorable"

While we were on our Snowbird Sojourn from late December through early April, Evie needed to buy a really good pair of sneakers.

She googled, "footwear." She found a store with a 4.9 (out of 5, not 10) customer rating and we drove there. The store deserved its rating. We were attended there by a very competent 40Something woman who set Evie up with shoes, inserts and socks.

The woman who took care of us was very patient. She invested more than a half hour with us. She answered our questions about shoes and herself and her family, in the way someone who's good at customer service does.

As we were finishing up, we were talking about personal stuff: spouse, children, hometown, etc. 

She asked, "How long have you two been married?" We told her. Then, she smiled and knifed me in the heart.  

"You're adorable."

She meant well.

"Adorable" is an adjective that fits two groups of people: Children younger than three and,...

...very, very old people. 

On this blog, I, frequently, refer to myself as a geezer. 

It's one thing for me to say I'm a geezer. It's quite another for someone else even to think it.

Twelve years ago, Evie was having chemo treatments. She shaved her hair before the treatments started. She didn't want to wake up in the morning with clumps of hair on her pillow. To support her, I shaved mine, too. And, I've continued to shave it.

The shaved head was sort of a lark back in the day. If you thought I was old, the joke was on you.

That was twelve years ago. Now I realize I am old. 

But, please, not "adorable." I can't be that old!

If you know me only from this blog, you may dismiss me as a Grumpy Old Man. 

If so, understand. We now have it from an unbiased, independent observer: 

I am adorable.

When you read the words, "We must repent," here, remember. Those words come from a man who is adorable,...not a crotchety, grumpy, old man.

We must repent. 

A Word on next week's General Conference sessions

I haven't blogged for a long time.

In the past, I've used this blog to speak as a prophet. For the times I have neglected that calling in recent months, I know that I need the Lord's forgiveness for my silence. 

Months ago, I read, in the eNews, that the theme of the 2022 General Conference gathering will be "Reimagine." When I read that, immediately, the prophet in me woke up. 

I don't feel prophety as often these days as I have at some times in the past, but, on this issue, my prophetic voice instantly came alive. 

Over the years, I've learned to listen to the Spirit before I speak as a prophet. 

As a result, part of my delay in transmitting this word is my understanding that, to be faithful to the Spirit, I need to be careful to get it right.

I could have written this long ago. Other issues, some of a spiritual nature, are involved in my delay. So, I ask for the Lord's forgiveness and apologize to you, my brothers and sisters. 

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Next week, the delegates of the General Conference will gather. Their theme? 

Reimagine 

My friends, the notion that the CGGC can reimagine its way back into God's blessing, very simply, turns the message of the Bible upside down. 

Back in our best days, the Church of God men and women, who walked in God's dynamic blessing, were committed to operating on what they called, "the New Testament plan."

Understand: There was no time, in the New Testament, when believers reimagined themselves back into God's blessing after they'd lost their way. 

Reimagining is human-focused.

The Book of Acts says little about what disciples did in the days after the ascension, but what it says is instructive.

Acts 1:14 says, very simply, "they were devoting themselves to prayer." And, they were together with each other (Acts 2:1).

Their focus was on God, and being together to focus on God. 

In 2022, the CGGC is in decline, no matter how you choose to define it.

These days, we struggle with decreasing numbers, shrinking income and aging congregations. 

Nearly 200 years ago, God's blessing was so astounding that our people struggled to keep up with what the Spirit was doing.

Revelation, the last Book of the New Testament, makes it clear that the Lord does not bless His people when they stop walking in the Spirit.

In Revelation 2, Jesus tells the fallen church in Ephesus, "...you have lost your first love," and, then, "...if you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place."

To the church in Pergamum, Jesus actually threatens some in that church if they don't repent. He says He will "war against them." 

To the lukewarm in Laodicea, Jesus warns, "I know your deeds"..."I will spit you out of my mouth."

In this, actually, there is comfort. True enough. The Lord of all authority and power and blessing is not blessing us.

But, we, in the CGGC, are not the first. 

It's true. His love endures forever. 

His invitation in Matthew 11:28, "Come to me..." is always available. 

But, the Lord's solution for people, and for churches, who have lost His blessing is not to look within ourselves. 

Our solution can't be found in our own imaginings.

Over and over, God's word to individuals, and to churches, is, simply, "Repent."

To be redeemed, we must focus on Him and walk in His ways.

We must repent. 

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One other word from the Lord: At this moment, we are not in the spiritual condition that makes repentance possible. 

We are content. 

The Beatitudes begin, "Blessed are the poor in spirit,...Blessed are those who mourn."

When Jesus invites us and says, "Come to me," His invitation is restricted to, "all you who labor and are heavy laden."

After they repented, Paul explained to the once-fallen church in Corinth: "...godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation." (2 Cor. 7:10)

I'm still in contact with a handful of CGGC people. I read the eNews as faithfully as anyone. My sense is that we're concerned about our decline, yet, we're as lighthearted as we've ever been. 

When I look across the universe of my CGGC acquaintances, I don't sense poor in spirit. I don't see people mourning. I don't see people who labor and are heavy laden. I don't see godly grief producing the repentance that leads to salvation. 

People who are poor in spirit and overwhelmed by godly grief wouldn't, for a moment, think that, by their own reimagining, they can accomplish anything for the Kingdom of God. 

Our answer? Repent. 

I know that our brothers and sisters who planned General Conference sessions, and conceived this time of reimagining are sincere. They only hope for the best...

...but, this will come to nothing. 

We must repent. 

What Podcasts do you Recommend?

If you are familiar with my harangues, you know that I believe that the sermon, especially what the sermon has become in the last 100 plus years, has been a disaster for institutionalized Christianity. There are no sermons, as we practice sermonizing, in the New Testament.

As the emphasis on preaching and the teaching of sermon creation and presentation has increased since, say 1900, the reality is that the Kingdom has declined in the West. 

Nevertheless, if you are familiar with my harangues, you know that I'm convinced that the place Kingdom disciples need to begin in reversing the reality that the Lord of all power, authority and grace and mercy and blessing is not blessing us, is in the search for His truth.

I find myself hungering for truth.

It seems to me that a fresh avenue for Kingdom disciples searching for truth to find truth could be the podcast.

So, I'm asking for recommendations.

As always, responses on and off the blog are appreciated.

Thanks ahead of time to all who respond.

Blessings.

Sharing Jesus at the Obligatory Sales Talk

Gang, I wrote this about a month ago in rough form but didn't get the chance to polish it up. It fits the "mission" of this blog as well as anything I've posted here.

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We're in Virginia Beach this week. 

Evie got us a deal at a nice, but certainly not luxurious, "resort" on the Boardwalk. In fact, it's called The Boardwalk. Our "suite" is ocean view. Evie works the internet until she can find a steal. If fact, as I write this, dolphins are swimming up the coast.

Evie is one of those people who can squeeze a penny and get five dimes out of it.

The place we're staying is owned by one of the resort companies that sells points their members use to take vacations, cruises.

When we checked in, we were directed to the person who gives you your, uh, guest gift packet. That person's real job is to get you to sign you up for a sales presentation. 

Her schpiel began with the offer of a bride. We've been through this many times. You have to say no a bunch of times to get away.

This time, however, the bribe was in Evie's wheelhouse: A free week at one of the resorts owned by the chain. (Evie also finagled a $50 gift card to Evie's favorite restaurant in town.

So, we agreed to attend a two hour,...I don't know what their euphemism is for it,...but it was a sales talk.

We showed up on time, met our "counselor" and then went off with about eight other attendee couples and then met again with our counselor. 

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Since I stopped working at the store, my opportunities to function as an ambassador of the Kingdom of God are far fewer than I used to have but living as ambassadors is our foundational mindset. Both of us.

So, we met with the counselor and, at the same time, engaged in being ambassadors. 

Needless to say, at one of these encounters, our own, well, Kingdom message isn't often productive, but this time, it was.

The sales guy asked me if I'd always been a grocery store manager. 

He opened the door. Getting inside it in my ambassadorial role took several more steps and he led me directly to the spot.

In less than a minute, I was sharing the part of my testimony that I'm most passionate about. 

(The counselor's name is Alfonso. By the end, lightheartedly, we were calling him Fonzie.)

The Fonz asked me why I left the ministry and I told him my story in the way that often inspires "unchurched" people...probably because its so purely honest and authentic. 

I told him. We are more committed to Jesus than we have ever been. We obey Jesus as carefully as we ever have. But, over the years, we just became so disillusioned with institutionalized Christianity that I chose to make my ministry out of living for Jesus, especially, among the kids I worked with.

We began to connect. Further into our meeting, the Fonz gave us a tour of a model unit and, while we were there, he invited us to sit down in the living room and the three of us had what, later on, he called our "heart to heart."

We talked for a few minutes  about the program and how the points work. 

Then, Fonz said, "So, Bill, what is sin?" 

He describes his ethnicity as mixed. He wasn't specific but, apparently, he has some Puerto Rican and Muslim in him. 

Evie and I talked about what sin is in the Christian way of thinking. He explained what he has learned. 

Evie is so amazingly empathetic and, from her heart, so effective in communicating God's grace and mercy at times like this.

To be clear, the Fonz didn't pray the sinners' prayer. Still, he said, repeatedly, that our openness to each other, and to him, was something he's almost never seen. 

We know how sales people are, but we're convinced that he was sincere because he kept saying it after the sales part of our meeting was settled. 

To be honest, I've been discouraged during COVID with the dearth of opportunities to be an ambassador. It's truly what we believe in and it's how I, especially, am gifted.

It's a way of life. I don't get to live it on the edge like I did with the Fonz. It's amazing how the Lord creates opportunities out of whole cloth.

A Reason that there is no Effective Leadership in American Evangelicalism

What follows this paragraph is a sentence from a Wall Street Journal article from a week or so ago detailing reasons white Evangelicals are being vaccinated for COVID at a lower rate than much of the rest of the American population. In my opinion, a substantial book could be written on the Journal's observation. 

"Some evangelical leaders are afraid their churches will lose members or donations if they openly support vaccination, said Curtis Chang, a former evangelical pastor who co-founded Christians and the Vaccine, a project designed to increase vaccine acceptance."

If you are a long term reader of my blogs, you know that I reject the notion that humans can be leaders in the Kingdom of God. In a kingdom, there's only one leader: The King. In a kingdom, everyone apart from the king is a servant of the crown. In a kingdom the appropriate question is not, "How can I be a better leader," the only acceptable question is?, "How can I better serve my king?"

If you are a long term reader of my blogs, you know that I point out that our very modern era in which people have fretted about Christian leadership has been disastrous and has resulted in Christianity losing Western culture. 

If you are a long term reader of my blogs, you know that I have bruised my fingers typing that Jesus said that the greatest person in the Kingdom will be the slave of all and that greatness, in general, is not a function of being a leader but of being a servant. 

If you are a long term reader of my blogs, you know that the challenge of Jesus was not, "Come, let me lead you," but, "Come, follow me." I've said that it would be appropriate to invent the term followership for life in the Kingdom but not to adopt the secular term leadership. 

If you are a long term reader of my blogs you know that, after the ascension, the people whose ministries, through the power and blessing of the Holy Spirit, propelled the expansion of the Gospel into the world, spoke of themselves as servants of Jesus, never leaders of the church. 

And, if you are a long term reader of my blogs you know that perhaps my most fervent criticism of the clergy/laity divide in the modern church is that the clergy has become the providers of religious products and services to be consumed by the laity. 

It's this last of my harangues that the Wall Street Journal article illustrates. 

The people who are followed in today's church are not the ordained and licensed members of the clergy but the people whose primary role is to consume, the people who determine which "church" is successful by the standards of the world because they sit their fannies in seats and they open their purses and wallets to pay the bills.

Members of the clergy today are dependent on their congregations to pay their salaries. The bottom line in the church today is that, nearly every successful member of the clergy, that is, the "pastors" who can afford a nice home and car, know how to dance to the music their congregations want to hear...

...and, no matter what the truth about COVID vaccines may be one way or the other, as the Wall Street Journal points out, a prominent reason that evangelical pastors are not speaking forcefully and with vision about COVID vaccines is fear that the consumers in their congregations won't want  to consume that message and that they'll plant their fannies and open their wallets and purses next week at the church where the pastor is clearly an anti-vaxxer. 

In today's evangelical world, members of the clergy have become providers of the religious products and services that please the consumers in the laity they service. 

This ain't right.  In fact, it's very, very wrong.

It most certainly is not the way of Jesus. 

If you can't understand how the Gospel that proclaims the Lord of all authority and power and grace and mercy and blessing is losing the culture, understand. This is one very important reason. 

My Five Greatest Heroes from the History of the Kingdom

A few days ago, a friend sent me a link to a Vimeo video by Evangelical Seminary (my alma mater) President Tony Blair entitled, How the Pietists Made Disciples. 

I watched it. It's awesome, but it was all the more fascinating to me because the video traced Pietist disciplining strategies to the seventeenth century German minister Philipp Jakob Spener. 

It turns out that, years ago, I began to ask myself who, among all the great heroes of the Christian faith, inspires me most: My Five Greatest Heroes from "Church History"...

...and, Philipp Jakob Spener made my list.

I settled on this list in a relatively short time and the membership of the list has remained the same for a long time even though, for my own amusement, I have reconsidered it many times.

Some of these names are relatively obscure. Spener is probably the most obscure but there are no Luthers or Calvins here. 

Here's the list in chronological order. The characteristics that set these (they are all) men, apart, and which I greatly admire, are  that they all attacked an existing paradigm and they all advocated for radically righteous lives. These are, of course, characteristics I aspire to, hence the fact that they are heroes to me personally. 

1. Tertullian (155?-220?)

2. Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705)

3. John Winebrenner (1797-1860)-well, I am still in love with the Church of God 

4. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

My guess is that no one who reads this blog would be amused for a nanosecond by creating a list of greatest Christian heroes. But, if you have thoughts...

...on or off the blog, of course.

We "Went to 'Church'" Today

It's been a looooooong time since we walked into a church building on a Sunday morning to, uh, go to church. 

We're into what today, apparently, is faddishly now called "micro." When we began it, it was called House Church, then, later, Simple Church. 

I can't account for how long ago we last "attended church." I will admit to watching a church, ouch, "service" on line from time to time but, even then, that was mostly during the "two weeks to flatten the curve" (Wasn't that a joke? The longest two weeks of MY life).

A friend of ours whom we've been disciplining or, as Lance would say, I've been fathering...we have been spiritually parenting...was showing slides of and discussing a mission trip to Uganda at her church. We went to support her.

Going was especially traumatic for Evie who has never really been edified by what passes as church services. Several times yesterday she let go, unconsciously, a long, heavy sigh. After the first one I asked what was vexing her. She said, "Church tomorrow," and after that, I understood. 

(Just a quick note: I don't think many church people realize how far the standard twenty first century church experience has diverted from what is biblical as far as the gathering of disciples is concerned, let alone what is essential to building up each other.) Doing the Sunday morning thing doesn't edify her. At best, it's a neutral influence on her walk. Worse case, it actually impairs her life of obedience. 

It's little wonder to us that the group called the "Nones" grows so rapidly. It's possible, easy in fact, to be all about Jesus and even to love His Body but to be unconnected to the organized and institutionalized church. 

Anyway, out of love for our friend Elizabeth, we went.

A few observations. 

1. There were about 125 people present. Evie and I may very well have been the oldest people there. Clearly, this was not a CGGC gathering. There were many of youth age, lots of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings. And, surprisingly, a lot of males...perhaps even more than females. I'm not sure how to account for that. Apparently, one of the things this group DOES is intentionally connect with people who commit felonies. Most felons, I suspect, are men, so...

2. This group is guilty of the same theological atrocity that most low church evangelical-ish groups commit. They call, and think of, their music time as "worship." That's not what worship is. In truth, in the New Covenant, to worship is to offer your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. (Rom. 12:1) I wore out the finger prints on several of my fingers typing that out and entering it on Brian Miller's Emerging CGGC blog back in the day. Anyway, they worshiped for about 20 minutes. Contemporary music. A five piece band. Not very polished but the members of the band seemed authentic in "leading worship," not performing. 

3. The sermon was topical, not expositional. It was broadly on spiritual warfare, I think. Again, the preacher oozed authenticity. He preached for about 45 minutes and then invited others to give testimonies, which several did. This is not an introvert church.

As you probably know, I believe that Jesus "gave some to be apostles, others to be prophets, others to be evangelists and others to be shepherds and teachers..." (Eph. 4:11) You can choose to think that that truth is no longer applicable to our day but when I listen to a sermon, it's usually easy to hear the fruit of an APEST calling. It's a bit of a hobby for me to examine APEST fruit in a preacher and sermon.

This guy was, to me, an interesting study. From word one he connected biblical truth directly to lifestyle. He had three points, of course. (After all, if a three point sermon was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!). Anyway, in points two and three he declared specifically the necessity that we repent. And, shiver me timbers, when he commented on one of the testimonies, he quoted the verse I wear out on this blog, 2 Corinthians 7:10: "For godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation..."

Yikes! This guy is a prophet!

So,...

We went to church...to support Elizabeth. No doubt, we'll do that again...

I love Jesus. He still amazes me. I'm probably more in awe of His incarnation and our redemption through Him than I have ever been. 

I love the body of believers. I love the fellowship of the saints, but, the organized and institutionalized church? What it does when it gathers? Not so much.

I wish that the organized and institutionalized church edified us more. I  wish the usual church gatherings "spurred us on to love and good works" and promoted Romans 12:1 worship for us more than they do.

But, after today?...