Impact Day

All I did was shovel mulch around play areas, scatter pine straw around flower beds, and help construct a nine square game in one of the housing areas at Woodland Christian Camp. On a scale of one-to-ten, I’m guessing those particular activities rate a one or so – at least according to the value system of the world around us. But by the economics of the Kingdom of God, I think that rating is not the right one. Let me explain.

I did those things as a participant in Impact Day – Point University’s name for the day each semester we close down the academic program and invite students to be a part of a team of faculty, staff, and students serving our community. At some level, that makes Impact Day a gratitude issue – it is a way to thank the communities around us for accepting Point University as a part of the Greater Valley Area and beyond. The New Testament I’ve been reading all my life puts gratitude beyond a ten on that proverbial one-to-ten scale. So it seems a little foolish to think that if by shoveling mulch, spreading pine straw, and similar activities I was able to demonstrate gratitude, those simple tasks were well worth doing.

I can’t forget that in doing those simple tasks, I was with a group of about 30 faculty, staff, and students from Point who were there for the same reason. Serving together is such a blessing from God. It reminds me of Paul’s sense of “mutual encouragement” in Romans 1:11,12 where the great apostle suggests that just being with the believers in Rome would be to enjoy the spiritual gift of mutual encouragement. I think I experienced that spiritual gift yesterday, as on a cold, blustery March day, I hung out with some other people wanting to show gratitude.

Then there is the issue of outcomes. On the play grounds where I helped spread mulch, hundreds of children will find a place to play, rest, interact with others, and learn about Jesus during summer camp. How could that not be worth doing what is otherwise viewed as menial labor? If Jesus could wash feet within hours of His arrest, trial, and crucifixion, I’m guessing I can’t really see myself as too important to do what our culture defines as menial because I’m too important!

Most, if not all, of our 40+ projects involving somewhere near 400 students were done in the context of non-profits serving the communities around them. Perhaps the most obvious common denominator among non-profits everywhere is that they are understaffed and underfunded. Yesterday, Joey Westbrook, executive director at Woodland Christian Camp, told me “You can’t imagine how many hours of work you all saved us. Our staff can get to other important things because of what you all did.” My guess is that every director of every place we served yesterday said something similar. If by spreading mulch, scattering pine straw, and the like I helped employees of places committed to making the world a better place have more time to do their “more important work,” I’m thinking those were tasks well worth doing.

As the Gospel of John introduces the foot washing story in John 13, we are told that “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” (13:3) In other words, He knew [a] who He was, [b] where He had come from; and [c] where He was going. As a human, knowing the answers to those questions enabled Him to wash twelve sets of dirty feet – including those of the one who would, before long, betray Him. That’s pretty impressive. 

When we know who we are, where we come from, and where we are headed – we are children of God, serving in the Kingdom of God, and headed to eternity with God – we will never rate scattering mulch and spreading pine straw to enhance a place where ministry occurs as a “one.” Actually, the scale is yet to be invented that can measure that!

100 Days

Earlier this morning I attended a special convocation of Point University faculty, staff, and students – live in West Point, via podcast in East Point, Savannah, Peachtree City, and Birmingham – where President Dean Collins invited the Point community to join together in 100 days of prayer and submission. 

Thanks to the generous hospitality of West Point Presbyterian Church, we were able to fill up their auditorium with Point faculty, staff, and students as the details of this 100 days of prayer and submission were explained.  Our hopes are that this invitation will be accepted and acted on by friends of Point everywhere. 

The reason for the 100 in 100 Days of Prayer and Submission is that Sunday, March23, marked 100 days until the end of Point’s fiscal year on June 30. Obviously we want to continue praying and submitting after the 100 days are over, but thought that a clear focus on such important spiritual disciplines couldn’t help but make us – individually and corporately – more effective witnesses to the gospel which can transform our individual lives and the whole world around us.

President Collins reminded us that God is in the habit of using ordinary people – like we are - to do amazing things. We often say at Point that the issue for us is not so much “who you are when you come to Point” but “what are you willing to become while here.” That seems to be the point of the conversation that Jesus had with sanctimonious Simon and the sinful woman in Luke 7:36ff. Simon was proud of who he was; the sinful woman interested in what she could become. The question for each of us for the next 100 days ultimately boils down to “What am I humble enough to let God do in and through me?” The challenge for many of us is that so often we let our own pride become the barrier to God’s work in our lives. So we are going to talk a lot over the next 100 days about prayer, but also submission.

All of that reminds me of many things Jesus said and taught, but perhaps none more directly than what He said in Mark 10:45 (Matthew 20:28 also). “For even the Son of Man did not come to be waited on at the table, but to wait on tables, and give His life a payment price for many.” Could anyone possibly write a sentence that reflects less pride than this one? This is the divine Son of God who is simply describing how He lived while among us – not as one to be treated with royalty, but as one who would humble Himself to do whatever needed doing – waiting on tables.

Often the challenge to submission is pride born out of status. The marketing world tends to define us based on our zip code’s  per capita income. People all around us make judgments about us – and we do the same to others – based on what kind of car we drive, what our level of education is, the clothes we wear, the titles we have,  ultimately becoming a “right v. wrong side of the tracks kind of issue.” Surely because I have the title “vice president” associated with what I do, submission should look different for me than for the person who has “janitor” as the term to describe what they do.

That’s an odd thing to think if I am following one who “though He existed in the very form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking on the form of a bond servant because He was made in the form of a human – and as a human, He humbled Himself and became obedient, to the point of death, even on a cross.” 

We live in a world where function determines value – and find ourselves wrapped up in the pride of our function, assuming that makes us more valuable. But in kingdom economics, function has nothing to do with value – our value is rooted in the fact that we are, when all is said and done, “children of God – where there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free.” 

I welcome the challenge of 100 Days of Prayer and Submission. Looking at a key biblical text each week over the next 100 days will be good discipline. Praying in a way that helps me better see who I am and how God can work through me more effectively is a gift from God Himself. 

I thank God daily for the “function” I have as a part of Point University. I get the privilege of being a vice president of a Christian institution of higher education with about 1450 students. But the flip side of that same coin is that about 99.9+% of the world’s population don’t even know that Point University exists. That, however, doesn’t make what I do unimportant – but it probably does speak to how foolish it would be for me to exchange kingdom economics for worldly economics and become prideful rather than humbly submissive.

It’s an invitation, so no one is being forced to “pray and submit” over these next 100 days. But quite frankly, it seems to me to be an invitation I would be foolish to ignore.

Whenever . . .

Most followers of Jesus keep coming back to the Sermon on the Mount. There is something about those words from Jesus that attract us to its message and ideals, and something about them that is convicting. The Season of Lent is a great time to spend some quality time with the sermon of all sermons. 

My guess is that when I read comments in the gospels about Jesus out “teaching and preaching” or “heralding the gospel of the kingdom” I should think “He’s preaching that sermon again.” In our cultural context, perhaps it was the sermon He kept in the back of His Bible, always read to preach it when asked or given the opportunity.

Among the issues that Jesus addresses in the sermon are giving, prayer, fasting.  In each of those three situations, He introduces the topic with a little Greek word that is often translated “whenever.” This particular word means something like an act this is possible, and perhaps regularly repeated. So it could be possible that Jesus is saying something like “since you regularly give, pray, and fast.” 

What seems to be obvious in all three examples (Matthew 6:2 for giving, 6:5 for praying, and 6:16 for fasting) is that the question of why we do such things is an important one. The one who gives should do so without trumpets announcing the gifts. The one who prays shouldn’t seek an audience. The one who fasts should not look like fasting is going on.  Rather, Jesus tells us, give, pray, and fast in ways that honor God, not self.

While Jesus has more to say about prayer than He does giving and fasting in the sermon, He apparently thinks all three activities are the kinds of things those who follow Him “regularly do.” These actions get to be very complex issues in our culture. Most capital campaigns to raise money in church and para-church ministries are centered in “a lead donor” whose gift is used to encourage others to be generous givers. Prayer as a “public issue” in church can easily become more for the audience than the intended audience. Fasting – what church youth group hasn’t done a 40 hour fast to raise money for some mission that intrigues them?

Can we become so private about these matters that we still miss the intended audience? Should I not expect an end-of-the-year statement from the church and missions my family supports t use for tax purposes because “the left hand shouldn’t know what the right hand is doing?” Should I never pray in public because of the temptation to forget to whom I’m actually talking.   Since early January, I have been attempting to fast one meal a day, spending that time praying for specific things on my heart. Should I have not told you that?

Some people are critical of the Season of Lent for this very reason. It is making “fasting” too public an issue and Jesus said we should fast only for God. But those are the same people who pray long and lofty prayers in church and sometimes use the benediction to make announcements. There’s something incongruent about a prayer to God that says “Lord, help us to remember the study we are starting in Wednesday night prayer meeting this week at 7 p.m.” Did God not know that or need to be reminded?

My senior year in college, the last semester, required that I take what I now describe and the absolute worst class I’ve ever taken. As we, the all-male group of students, were sitting around before class started talking about what an awful class it was, the professor came in. Thankfully he didn’t hear what we were saying (and I’ve repented of it since). As was his normal practice, he called on one of us – thankfully not me! – to have a prayer. The student who prayed thanked God for what a wonderful class we were in and for the opportunity to learn something important about being a minister! I promised myself that day that if I ever became a professor in a Christian college, I wouldn’t put students on the spot like that! And I haven’t.

In my own study of the Sermon on the Mount, I think that is the kind of thing Jesus is concerned about – whether it be giving, praying, or fasting. It isn’t so much “be so secretive that no one ever knows you give, pray, or fast.” Rather, it is simply a matter of “remember the real audience.”

I’m personally grateful for the Season of Lent – it reminds me of my fragile nature and my desperate need for God. It serves as a great reminder for the “whenevers” of the Sermon on the Mount.  That’s why its words are both attracting and convicting.

Ministry and Bureaucrats

I just spent an hour speaking with a great group of students from Point University who will spent their summer work either working in camps on behalf of Point or at Christ In  Youth conferences. It is always refreshing to meet with these teams, and I’m grateful that I am one of the people asked to help them get ready for the summer experience.

Inevitably, these conversations lead to the all too obvious conflict between doing ministry as Christ calls us to and staying inside the boundaries the bureaucrats establish for us. We had an interesting conversation over should a college student be friends with a minor on Facebook and should a college student give a phone number to a camper. The obvious issue of “what’s a 20 year old kid doing texting a 14 year old member of the opposite sex?” and “are you sure that your Facebook page – not the things you might post but things other people might post – is appropriate for high school kids to see?” From the bureaucrat’s point of view, the answer to those questions is “probably not, don’t take the risk.” From the ministry point of view, “are you saying I shouldn’t keep up with kids I meet at camp who need the influence of a person like me in their lives?”

But that isn’t just a “summer camp team” issue! Churches and para-church ministries are constantly caught in the middle of seeking to do ministry and managing the bureaucratic context in which ministry can occur. Since there are no Holy Spirit inspired by-laws for ministry groups in the New Testament, we are left to improvise, as N.T. Wright might describe it, when it comes to what the relationship between ministry and the bureaucracy that surrounds ministry ought to be. Truth be told, beyond the idea that elders are the spiritual overseers of the church, there seems to be nothing at all in the New Testament about structure for ministry. Perhaps Paul’s comment at the end of 1 Corinthians 14 where he tells that rather dysfunctional body of believers that “all things should be done decently and in order.” But that comment seems to be directed at worship experiences, not structure.

Wright’s idea of improvisation involves understanding the tension that modern believers live in – the tension between the example we see in the early church under the leadership of the apostles and the expectations God has for the church when Christ reappears in glory at some point in the future. This seems to me to be precisely what Paul is talking about in Romans 13:11 when he says, “you know what age this is, how now is the hour for you to rise up from your slumber. Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.”  We live in the “age” between “example and expectations,” and the “hour” is our own point of tension – when we have to see what following the example and living up to the expectations actually looks like.

In our own “hour,” it is important to determine what the relationship between “ministry” and the “bureaucracy” that enables it looks like. We live in a far too litigious society to not have a bureaucracy, and a far too desperate society not to have ministry. Like shifting plates beneath the earth’s surface will sometimes cause earthquakes and tsunamis, when kingdom leaders avoid the challenge of managing the relationship of ministry and the bureaucracy, we can expect an earthquake or tsunami to catch us unprepared.

The challenge is enormous. Bureaucrats like to build walls, ministry like to climb over walls. Bureaucrats believe there can be a handbook for everything; ministry believes there are some important tasks for which there is no handbook. Bureaucrats believe that success is measured by carefully defined criteria; ministry believes that “success” is the wrong word – it ought to be “fruitful” and that’s how we measure ministry. Bureaucracy builds silos; ministry feeds the cows. Bureaucracy likes expanding control, ministry like expanding transformation of lives. Bureaucracies function from the stand point of rules to monitor behavior, ministry functions from the stand point of principles which transform people’s lives. 

In my twenty years of ministry in a local church, I established some “bureaucratic rules” for myself and the rest of the staff. We were never to be alone in the church building with a member of the opposite sex (not our spouse). We have similar “rules” at Point, and I cautioned our summer teams about the same issue. That’s just plain common sense. Our “far too litigious society” makes that a no-brainer.

But our “far too desperate society” screams for help and sometimes being a kingdom person has more to do with courage to climb over walls than it does recognizing boundaries. So there is a great need for what I like to call “sanctified common sense.” That kind of common sense comes from God, not Ben Franklin. For ministry to really happen, followers of Jesus must learn the difference between foolish risks and necessary ones. A foolish risk means I am standing on the railroad track of a bridge, looking at an on-coming locomotive. A necessary risk means that I’m trying to rescue a disabled person off of those tracks before the locomotive gets there.

Ministry means that I never allow cultural expectations to define what the Kingdom of God looks like. Jesus “dined with sinners” and seems to have cared not at all that the religious bureaucrats saw that as scandalous. Bureaucrats reminded Him that people would think that He was condoning their sin if he ate with them.

Bureaucrats expect that the rules fix things immediately. Ministry knows that transformation takes time. Do you remember what the servant who owed a gazillion dollars said to the king?  “Be patient with me, and I will repay.” (Matthew 18:21ff) Even when the other servant in that story, the one who owed the wicked servant for the Burger King Whopper his friend had bought for him – a manageable debt, sought relief, the question was the same. “Be patient with me, I will repay.” 

Perhaps that is why, as he lists characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22,23), Paul includes the noun form of the verb used in Matthew 18 – patience. Maybe the biggest difference of all between ministry and bureaucracy is their differing view of the value of patience.

For me, I’m praying that I never allow the impatience born of bureaucracy to short circuit the power of ministry for transformation that is always present when Jesus shows up.

Sitting Among the Ashes

We aren’t out of the prologue to the Book of Job before we read, “Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.” (2:8) Just prior to that comment we are told that Satan has had his way with Job and just after the verse Job’s wife utters the infamous “Curse God and die” advice.

Earlier in the prologue to this intriguing story, we are introduced to Job as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”  So what’s a guy like that doing “sitting among the ashes?” Unless my sources have misled me, pagans used ashes as signs of grief, signs of recognition that all wasn’t what it was supposed to be.  Apparently a righteous man was comfortable using symbols that were also used broadly among ancient Oriental people as a sign of their own grief, humiliation, and concern for their present circumstances.

Fast forward a couple of millennia later, and we aren’t out of the opening paragraphs of Mark’s account of Jesus before we hear Jesus saying, “”The time has been fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15) I don’t think it is an accident that the first words Mark has Jesus saying in his gospel include the word repent. What could be a more natural thing for any human being to do, when confronted with the presence of Jesus – the kingdom has come near – than to repent?  If I were to paraphrase what Jesus says, in the context of the Job story, could I say something like “What God promised is upon you in ways you can’t imagine, you ought to go sit among the ashes so you can hear and believe the good news”?

People much smarter than I have written extensively about Job, but it seems reasonable to me to think that even though I am a follower of Jesus and even though I try hard “to fear God and turn away from evil,” the idea that, like Job, there are times in life when I to should be “sitting among the ashes” is not too farfetched. The Lord himself says of Job that “there is no one like him on earth.” (1:8) Yet, a few verses down the page and Job is “sitting among the ashes.”

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day in the Christian calendar when more liturgical Christians will attend services all over the world to mark the season of Lent. Lent, of course, is often described as a season leading up to Easter when followers of Jesus are encouraged to take out a piece of potsherd and scrape off the evidence of our sin as we sit among the ashes repenting.

It isn’t unusual, especially if you aren’t from a more liturgical background but pay attention to Ash Wednesday and Lent,  to be reminded that neither Ash Wednesday nor Lent are in the Bible. Seeing ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday a few years ago, an elder in a Christian church said, “Where is that in the Bible?” I quickly replied, “The same place where we learn about church buildings and church boards.” I no doubt needed another “sitting among the ashes” moment!

It just seems a bit odd to me that Job can use the very same symbols – a piece of potsherd and sitting among ashes – as was commonly used by people who clearly aren’t where he was in terms of knowing God, but evangelicals are prone to throw the baby out with the bath water, to make sure we aren’t confused with Catholics, Episcopalians, Anglicans, and other more liturgical followers of Jesus.

An honest look at how non-believers tend to view the church these days might suggest that we would all do well to spend some time “sitting among the ashes.”  Whether or not we are comfortable with the idea of Ash Wednesday and Lent, a season of repentance can’t possibly hurt any of us.