Project TGM: Theology, Gospel, Mission

There was a new kid on the block in 2012 named Project TGM: Theology, Gospel, Mission, and they recently asked to make me the newest kid on the block (and the first woman to join their team.) I jokingly said to them yesterday that I have seven brothers and ain't skeered of them, but I'll be honest, it's a solid line-up over there and I'm humbled they asked me. I hope you'll join me over there today, but also make a habit of heading over there for some great pieces by regular writers (Owen Stracham, professor of Theology and Church History at Boyce College, Logan Gentry, pastor at Apostles Church in New York, and others) and occasional guests.

My inaugural post is up today on how the greatest need for women is not parenting/marriage/singleness advice or tactics, but gospel realignment. Please hop over and give it a look! 

What to do when you do not know what to do

I come from a Charismatic church so hands on heads and in the air is nothing unusual. I came of age over prophetic words and discerning spirits, and cut my spiritual teeth on words like woo and tongues and presbytery. I was 20 when I first stood in the doorway of my church; I was nearly 30 when I cleaned out my desk, handed over my keys, and left. I left with many things, some hard and heavy, some good and holy, some that will take me the rest of my life to sort out and some for which I will never begin to be thankful enough. This is the residue of us all and I cannot thank God enough that He brings us through fire and leaves on us ash, and the scent of smoke—is beauty made from anything less?

________________

A visiting minister put his hand on my head when I was 25 and stared at my face, shook his hand so that my head shook too, and he said words I have never forgotten:

Continue reading over at A Deeper Church

I Want to Give You My Money!

Full disclosure: I work for the media department of non-profit so I am properly subjective, absolutely biased, and in no way can my appeal to your emotions be trusted. I need you to understand that this is not about my particular non-profit gaining ground or having great financial success. God has immensely blessed the work of the hands that work here and He has sustained the work on the field for 20+ years. I am not jealous of those who have better media, better websites, better social media platforms, etc. My job is to tend my plot well, and one of the plots He's given me to tend is this blog and the message that goes out from it. This is something I'm personally passionate about—what I'm writing here is not necessarily endorsed by my employers.

Celebrity

I read an article a few weeks ago that is still ruminating around in my innards. I found myself nodding so much while reading my co-worker probably thought I'd forsaken Bon Iver and was headbanging to Metallica in my headphones. He wrote:

We cross into a culture of celebrity when we assume that merit in one field or one discipline necessarily carries that merit to other fields or disciplines. More particularly, it comes when we transfer theauthority of one field into another, so that we assume the guy with the popular blog must be a great expositor of the Bible (thus transferring the authority of his success in social media into authority the pulpit). Christian celebrity comes when we assume that the songwriter must be a noteworthy teacher, that the YouTube phenom is worthy of our pulpit, and that the guy who sells so many books must be able to craft a sermon on any topic or any text. Merit in one isolated field convinces us that this person has earned the right to every other platform. When we do this we have elevated not on the basis of merit, but of celebrity.

Read that again if you need to.

Golden Opportunity

America is the land of opportunity and one of the opportunities we have is free speech. Free speech means we can say pretty much anything we want and evolution means that the ones who say what they want the best win. This has resulted in many voices saying powerful, enlightening, and inspiring things. This is why we had Martin Luther King, Jr. and Langston Hughes and Flannery O'Connor and even Joel Osteen. Men and women who say winning things in winning ways—everybody wins, right?

Not right though.

Message aside (I'm in no way endorsing Osteen, for example.), the one who says it best still wins. Presidents are elected on this merit and pastors are procured on it, men are married and professors are picked on it. Merit on the basis of winsome words wins peoples affections, allegiances, and votes.

There's no way around that. It's beautiful if you think about it. Really beautiful how words and images resonated within us. I love that. It's why I've committed my life to using words and images to tell the stories of people everywhere.

In the non-profit world, or more specifically the charity world, however, this beautiful gift of telling a story can be very deceptive.

A Name by Any Other Name

I told you at the beginning of this that I was going to use the logical fallacy of appeal to emotions which is interesting because that is what the non-profit sector in many ways spends their energy doing best. I do it too. I want to tell our story in compelling and interesting ways, I want you to cry, I want you to feel deeply what the people we're helping feel. Then I want you to give. I do. I want you to give me two pennies or two thousand pennies. I want to show you that there's a need across the globe and you can meet that need. But I use the fact that you're a human with a predictable emotional response to get to that place. And I don't think that's wrong. The bible says that there's a relationship between our emotions and our finances and that's a good thing, I think it is.

Where it begins to go poorly, and where I am actually going with this post, is when you have someone with celebrity status or someone who rises to celebrity status on the platform of a social issue—but they are standing on nothing but the shoulders of financial backers. What I mean is that they have no numbers, no people, no proof that their passionate plea is actually resulting in lives being affected and changed—at least results equal to the amount of financial backing they get.

Because they have made a name for themselves, they become the authority on activity that might not actually be producing the results you think you're supporting.

And I know, I'm know I'm biased, but I also know that I have an insider's view on some of these non-profits and I'm not going to tell you who they are.

Because that's your job.

It's Your Job

It is your job to ask about financial decisions charities make—what percentage goes to the field?

It is your job to ask for numbers of lives changed? Sometimes it's hard to nail down exact numbers, but we can at least give you an estimate.

It is your job to ask whether the cost of paying for a pair of shoes, glasses, a tshirt, a bracelet, a watch, etc. is creating a sustainable and substantial difference in the places you're being told it is.

It is your job to look at the crowd a charismatic speaker draws and ask whether there is celebrity happening here or charity.

Cold Water

It is not impossible to have charity with celebrity at the helm, and some great, great work is happening when the headliner is a great marketer.

But do not be deceived by masterful campaigns and flashy marketing:

Sometimes it is the least of these giving cups of cold water to the least of these.

Deeper Church: Thirty Blackbirds or More

I've had a love/hate relationship with the Bride of Christ most of my life. In the times I have needed her most, I have felt failed by her, and in the times I have felt myself stray far from her, she has pursued and loved me. These are strange words to use about an entity, a full body of individuals, imperfect men and women stumbling through life and the Bible as clearly as they can, but they are true words. There is nothing on earth I love more than the Church. 

I have felt her failings near and I have chased her down in desperation—and there is no other place I would rather commune, break bread and share wine, than within her haven.

Ephesians 4 speaks of building the unity of the Church and oh how that resonates.

To see a whole body purified, strengthened, and grown into full maturity, ready to be presented to Christ—this I love.

And so I'm grateful that I've been asked to contribute monthly to a publication that pulls from every fold of her robes, every particle of her skin, and every joint and marrow, to build up and unify the Church as best we can with our earth encrusted words.

My first column is up today:

Bearing the Weight of Thirty Blackbirds or More

I pass a field of blackbirds every morning on my way from class to work. There are a thousand of them wide in a Texas spread and I can’t stop trying to count them with my mind. Thirty of them are perched on a shrub close to the ground, but its branches do not bend or weep. I marvel at its strength. I marvel at the lightness of the birds, all thirty of them.

This desert shrub carries the weight of the blackest birds and I think of Jeremiah 17 while I drive. Continue reading...

OIL, WATER, and the LIES we tell ourselves

I’ve got layers of lies that I don’t even know about yet. Sara Groves

Here’s what happened:

A friend told me something and I believed her. I do that. I’m a believing, trusting sort of person. The thing is, what she told me was only half true. Not half true to her—she told me the truth as best as she could, but it was only half of the whole truth. I didn’t know the other parties involved, so what could I do? I believed her. This is what friends do.

But the water has sunk to the bottom and the oil has risen to the top and with it all the floating particles that are still coated with enough water that I can’t look into that cup without seeing more of the whole story.

And my heart is sick.

Because her true-to-her story was only half of the story and now I know the other half, and the other half is my friend too, and when you love oil and water, even if they hate each other, what can you do? You believe them both with as much grace as you can muster. This is what good friends do.

But at some point the whole thing gets shaken up again and it takes a while for things to settle and while it’s still shaken you feel sicker and sicker still because there are always three sides to every story, hers, his, and the horrible, awful, honest truth. With a choice so divided, what can you do? You choose truth. This is what the truest friend does.

To choose truth, though, means to lose other things, namely trust.

Today trust was lost and I mourn that. I mourn it so hard and so deeply because I have been lied to, though neither of them did the lying.

I was the one lying all along. And that is the most heartbreaking of it all.

Paul admonishes the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you.”

I’m stuck on that today because I didn’t live quietly and I listened to the lies. But the lies were of my own making and they said something like this: You are big enough to handle the heartbreaking details of someone’s life all by yourself. You are big enough to have an opinion on lives that aren’t your own. You are big enough to discern truth from lies and from opinions and cries.

The truth is that I am not a part of the problem or the solution here; I am only a particle that floated to the top of his story, coated in the residue of her story. Just one small particle.

And if God did not give me the grace to handle this (at least without some amount of bellyaching), then it is probably best for me to simply bow out.

YOU, ME, and EVERYONE we know

Imagine with me a kingdom. A palace set on a hill with a town below littered with small homes of people—and a Troubadour making his way from Palace to People, back and forth. In the palace there are servants, kings, footmen, princes, cooks, and taste-testers; there are seamstresses, children, queens, and teachers. In the town there are servants, fathers, children, mothers, cooks, teachers, sellers, and tailors. And there is a troubadour making his way from Palace to People.

In the Palace everyone has a role and no one without a role is allowed in the door. There is a code of conduct within the castle walls and any outsiders are known, and all the insiders have things to say about them when their backs are turned.

Among the People outsiders are common and welcome, travelers pass through, sick people rest for a while, everyone earns his own way and they get there by the sweat of their brow. There is no protection out here and it is every man for himself. No one dares cross the threshold of the Palace.

And there is a Troubadour who goes from Palace to People to Palace to People.

From the People to the Palace he brings his stories, his lore, his songs, making melody from their harmony. He represents the town-people to the palace-people and they all clap their hands, their cheeks red with laughter and strong drink, they point and beg for more, more, more!

From the Palace to the People, he brings his secrets because who doesn't trust the ears of nearby troubadour? Plans and propositions fly mightily across the tables in the great hall when the wine flows freely and the kings toast in the presence of a mere entertainer.

The Troubadour never belongs in either place and carries with him the residue of both places, the People and the Palace. But kingdoms will rise and fall on the shoulders of this Troubadour, this ambassador, he who is never at home wherever he is, he who is just another person to the People and just another participant at the Palace.

Are you from the Palace or the People? Or are you a Troubadour, easily slipping in and out of both places effortlessly? There's no right or wrong answer here. I've just been thinking about cliques and culture and the people we trust to let in and the people we don't trust and, most of all, the people who purposefully don't fit anywhere.

Falling APART

When I was in bible college I had a paperback bible, the cheap sort they give away in church seat-backs, the sort zealots cover with stickers identifying who they are apart from the words inside the book. My stickers were hiking destinations, a round REI one, a Life is Good stick figure standing on the side of a mountain. The truth was my bible was falling apart and the stickers were holding it together. The spine was all but gone and the pages were falling out in chunks, particularly in the New Testament. One of my professors took one look at it and quipped, "A Bible that's falling apart is a sign of a person who's not."

I swallowed the line that day.

I may have been in bible college but I was not a Christian. Not in the sense that I understood the Gospel was not self-help rhetoric, but a life-changing, redemptive way—the only way. This was before my brother died, before a group from the Bible college traveled 14 hours to my home for a funeral, and shared the gospel with me over broken bread and broken bodies on the eve of Easter. I had that bible with me that night, clutched it in hope there was hope out of this nightmare.

The church I found shortly after that Easter used the NASB translation and a teacher/professor/mentor there gifted me with my own leather-bound bible a few weeks before my 21st birthday.

But I never forgot what the first professor said about a bible that was falling apart.

And years later when my NASB was frayed and torn and falling apart and my life was too, I wanted to shake my fist at everything I thought to be true about faith, which was this: the harder you try, the better it will go for you.

It is ironic, then, that the person who gifted me with my current bible, a simple black leather-bound, was someone who had left the faith in a way. He'd wandered across the world and the United States for years, landing in our small college town for a few months, becoming my friend. We would talk for hours about faith and argue and he would frustrate me and I wanted to shake him so hard sometimes because it didn't even seem like he was trying.

It took someone who was falling apart to show me a bible that is falling apart is not the sign of someone who isn't. A bible that is falling apart might actually be a sign of someone who is trying to hold their world together.

I left my NASB back in New York when I moved here, in a trunk in a dusty attic, not forgotten, but not necessary to prove my worth anymore. I need it, though, for a class I'll be beginning soon and so my brother dug it out and is mailing it to me this week. He texted me a photo just to make sure it's the right one.

Holy. I said. Yes, it's the right one.

Holy is right, he said back.

Here is what I know about holiness: sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have been torn and ravaged by life. And sometimes we bring rags before the King of Kings, rags because we have torn our own clothes, we have beaten our chests with candoitiveness and fortitude. We have shouted our worth and proved it by our piety. But in the end, it's rags we all bring before Him, falling apart lives, brokenness, emptiness, nothingness, and He breaks in, shouts our worth, and covers us with the finest robes, the signet ring.

And sometimes He does it in unlikely ways, through unlikely people, through people who are falling apart and a bible that isn't.

KILL your DARLINGS

It's humility that's got me down these days and I suppose that's not a bad place to be after all. I have no wish, desire, or need to draw any more attention to the recent happenings in the faith-blogosphere in internetdom. If you caught whiff of it, it was enough, and if you were in the unfortunate position of being a blogger yourself who is used to having people look at you for what to tweet and retweet next, well, even worse. I learned my lesson with KONY 2012—acts of division among the body are not my cup of tea, no matter what's in the water.

I sent a draft of a post of political nature to a blogger friend last week along with the question: should I post this? It wasn't the post itself, though, that made him warn me against posting it, but the subject: "People don't come to Sayable for this, they come for grace, for encouragement, and for the gospel." Or something along those lines. I deleted the draft and went on my merry way. In college a creative writing prof quoted William Faulkner in our class saying everyone needed to "learn to murder their darlings in their writing, and for pete's sake, Lore, would you quit murdering your darlings?" I've never been too married to my words.

But if there is one thing that these sort of hurricanes in the blogosphere teach me, it is that we maybe ought to perhaps at least divorce our darlings, sit down quietly, and let the Holy Spirit do what he does best—namely, to teach and guide his habitats into all truth (John 14).

So I've been thinking about humility this week, how low can we go, and all that.

John said, "He must increase, I must decrease." And Paul determined to "boast nothing but the cross." And I think we could learn a bit more from these apostolic fathers.

At the root of pride is the feeling that we have the corner on the market (or theology, or politic, or semantic), and the price of meat is just going to keep on rising. We feel, in error, that if we do not guard this piece of the pie with everything our mamas gave us, the whole world will go without pie. And what a pity that would be.

But the cross? The cross levels it. It somehow levels the misapplied doctrine, the faulty readings of scripture, and the sinner who can't stop sinning. We don't like to say this because we don't like to murder our darlings. We don't like to cross out the possibility that upon this doctrine He will build His church. But the truth is He's building His church and He's invited you and me to come along—pick up the bricks and slather the mortar. He's building it with or without us.

He's building it of people who know the only way to be first is to be last. He's building it of people who know the difference between close-handed and open-handed theologies. He's building it of people who will reach out to the least of these (even when the least of these thinks they're the greatest of these). He's building it of the little people, and dare I say, the little bloggers and tweeters and facebookers who think more than twice about stamping their feet, calling foul, and jumping on bandwagons, or defending their ilk with wit, sarcasm, and theology.

So maybe you didn't weigh in this week or maybe you never weigh in or maybe you were hanging laundry, shuffling littles, and clocking in at work this week and never caught a whiff of anything amiss. Whoever you are and wherever, He's building His church and He's looking for the lowly and humble to come along with Him.

He's looking for people willing to die on no mountain but the one on which cross stood tall and offered all: righteousness in Christ alone.

SHOOTING STRAIGHT

I knew it was going to be okay when I learned that I was an arrow—shaped, sharpened, and shot to hit a target the archers couldn't hit on their own.

I knew it was going to be okay, that my parents, my churches, and my own heart were all archers in their own right, forming and formulating strategies to wage war. And sometimes my parents, my churches, and my own heart would go to bed at night, lay down their arms, and rest knowing they had done all and stood well, and now it was time to rest.

This past weekend one of our pastors spoke about fatherhood and I broke.

I broke because I have failed as a daughter and have been failed too. Because in my family there is estrangement and brokenness. There is a failure to acknowledge the good that was and the bad that shouldn't have been. I broke because all of my misconceptions about God have been rooted in a failure to understand that parents are only earthly shadows, not even a particle of the real thing—and I have gotten it backwards. I broke because my pastor read this verse: For [our fathers] disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

As it seemed best to them.

Best. To them.

I broke, more than anything, because if there is one thing I come against again and again it is the failure to recognize that my life's circumstances, and the people in them, are mere archers. They have done their best to craft me and shoot me straight as it seemed to them. But I am the arrow—ultimately hitting the target is not up to them, it is up to me and the Master crafter.

We are a reactive generation—holding up our parents and churches and even our own wicked hearts at times, and we are saying, "None of that now! They have done us wrong! A new way! A better way!"

But here is the truth, more than anything: the better way, the best way, is to trust that every way that seemed best to those we feel failed most by, was part of the best way for God to discipline us for our good, that we may share in His holiness.

He took all our collective brokenness, the unfair rules and poor theology, the bad politics and dysfunctional church environments, even the abuse and shame, He took all of it, bore the fullness of it, and whatever He has given to us to bear is for our good. We get to share in His holiness because of it.

Even broken archers can shoot straight arrows and even broken arrows can still hit targets.

He's already won the war for us.

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior

are the children of one's youth.

Blessed is the man

who fills his quiver with them!

He shall not be put to shame

when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

Psalm 127:3-5