Category: Church Leadership

  • Incarnational living and the busy family

    Photo by fhwrdh via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    Here’s the deal: I don’t have nearly as much time, resources, or energy as I wish I did.

    And I certainly don’t have as much time, resources, or energy as my church expects me to have.

    Will you come to a meeting? Will you join a committee? Will you come to a picnic? Will you come to clean the neighborhood? Will you join a Bible study? Will you go on a mission trip? Will you help on Sunday mornings?

    The list never ends.

    I’m just happy to make it to church on Sunday. Literally, that’s about all I can muster most weeks.

    But in the churches eyes? You hear the groaning from the staff, “We can’t get anyone to do anything…” “People don’t support us like they should.” “We could do so much more if people just pitched in.” “80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people.”

    This exposes a deep disconnect between those in leadership and those who are a part of the congregation.

    There’s an assumption from church staff that I have lots of free time that I will give if only they can pitch it to me in a way that will motivate me. And I have an assumption that my church staff just look at me as a body who should be serving more. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

    Not the church– the neighborhood

    It’s so easy for me to confuse what incarnational living is all about.

    At its root, that’s just a fancy word for “living like Jesus.” Jesus, 100% God, chose to become 100% human. (Phillipians 2:6-8) As John 1:14 says, “He made his dwelling among us.” And while he was on earth he chose to invest in things of the community instead of merely hanging at the Temple.

    If we are to follow Jesus’ example of how to live… we need to spend way more time with the people of our neighborhood than we do with churchy people.

    That’s where the frustration lies for me. The invitation/temptation is constantly to get involved with the things of my church. All I have to do is say yes! Yet in reality, living incarnationally is an invitation to bypass most church involvement for the sake of living like Jesus in my neighborhood.

    A realistic pace

    Here’s my week:

    • Monday – Friday: Get the kids to school, go to work, come home, spend time with the kids, do some chores, spend at least 15 minutes alone with Kristen. Go to bed. Monday night we have community group, [taking time off from that with baby] Tuesday I help with youth group, Wednesday the kids go to Awana. That leaves Thursday and Friday night “open” each week.
    • Saturday: Get stuff done around the house. Mow the lawn, weed the garden, etc. We try to do something with the kids like go to a movie or play mini golf.
    • Sunday: This is our day of rest. We lounge around a bit in the morning before church. We go to church from 10:30 – 12:30. When it’s warm, we go to the beach.

    That leaves very little extra time for other things. And there are a whole lot of voices telling me how to best utilize that time. (More time with my kids, shuttling my kids to sports, I should be working out, take a seminary class, volunteer at the school, volunteer at church. This list never ends.)

    We have an infant in our house. Want to know how I want to utilize that extra time? Sleep!

    Sure, I could squeeze a couple more activities into that weekly line-up if I wanted to. But I’ve also learned that if I jam too much in there, there’s no joy there. It’s just not a realistic pace for this stage of life. I prefer to leave Livin’ la Vida Loco to Ricky Martin.

    Ultimately, squeezing the life out of a busy schedule for the sake of one more thing at church is not incarnationally living, is it?

    If I’m really honest… loving my neighbors is really all I can swing.

    The question is simple: Is that enough?

    What do you think? How should we teach people to balance involvement at church with involvement in the neighborhood? If the net result of ministering to people with full lives is less programs, how could the church impact more people with less programs? What would the roll of church staff be?

  • It’s going to take all types

    The church in America isn’t growing

    In every community around the United States only about 5-10% of people attend a church on any given weekend. (Easter & Christmas, let’s bump that to 15%.) If you believe that Jesus intended His church as the primary instrument of the Gospel spreading and prevailing in a community… this is a problem we need to deal with.

    First, some people question my math. My encouragement, do the math for yourself. In the next hour call every church in your zip code and ask them for last Sunday’s actual attendance. Then divide that by the number the census bureau says lives in that zip code. You’ll see I’m being very generous by saying 5-10%. It is likely 4% or less. Even less when you consider that each church you called probably rounded their numbers up and there are a good number of people who are actually actively involved in 2 or more churches.

    We don’t have anything to be proud about

    I cringe when I see church leaders bash one another. Gluttony, arrogance, and pride are the sins of pop culture Christianity today. Everyone has something smart to say. Everyone thinks their theology or practice or church or worship is somehow morally superior to everyone else’s. When people comment on blogs they say, “I agree with you ___, but I disagree with you ____.” David summed it up well, “In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect or hate their sin.” (Psalm 36:2)

    None of us have it 100% right. All of us are equal in our failure to reach more of our community. Save your swagger for going out dancing with your “smoking hot wife” on Friday night. Name the biggest church in the country and then do the math. You’re rocking 25,000 in a metro area of 2 million? (1.25%) You have nothing over a church of 250 in a town of 14,000. (1.78%)

    We are all just doing the best we can to figure out how to reach our communities. We should encourage one another– instead of wasting our time lining up to bash people.

    Your theology isn’t any better or more perfect than the church across the street. (Within the confines of orthodoxy, of course.) And no one is impressed with your ability to make yourself look intellectually superior. If those theological legs aren’t walking next door to love your neighbors… well,  perhaps you’ve made Jesus your hobby and not your Lord?

    It takes all kinds of churches

    It’s easy to look at the style of church you like and say, “The world needs more of that.” But the reality is that each community needs all kinds of new churches. We should celebrate rich diversity in the body of Christ as opposed to espousing that one way is ideal and the rest are second best.

    We need big megachurch-copying-rip-off-artist churches. We need Jim-and-Tammy-Faye-money-grabbing churches. We need earthy organic churches. We need old-skool-indie-fundy churches. We need go-to-church-to-watch-a-dude-on-TV churches. We need stiff-necked-hymn-loving-Presby churches. We need clothing-sharing-community-development-loving-missional churches. We need almost-disneyland-just-built-a-slide churches. We need honky-tonk-country-music-loving churches. We need hip-hop-driven-urban-family churches. We need big-hat-potluck-loving churches. We need all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people with the love of Christ.

    There’s no room to say what kind of church is right and what kind of church is wrong when you are only reaching 5-10% of the population. We just need churches and we just need to reach people!

    What’s worthy of celebration?

    Churches working together. Churches loving one another. Church leaders choosing to unite. Churches choosing to reconcile age-old problems. Churches sharing resources. Churches sharing staff. Churches coming together for the greater good of the community. Churches flinging the doors open to newfound ethnicities in their community. Churches feeding the poor and caring for widows, orphans, and otherwise needy people. Churches tearing down the walls of their fifedoms for the sake of the spread of God’s Kingdom on earth.

    Let’s celebrate and talk about that. Tearing one another apart? I’ve got no time for such worries.

  • Discovering the secrets to church growth… in the Bible!

    My favorite verse in the Bible is Genesis 50:20. “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.“

    But my favorite book of the Bible is Acts. Acts is what happens when Jesus finally unleashes the hounds. Peppered through the Gospel narrative is a desire by some disciples to overthrow the government and usher in the new millennium. Acts documents that while the people wanted a full-frontal-assault to destroy the enemies of God, God’s Son unleashed a counter-insurgency of grace, the forgiveness of sins, and the binding of people together in love.

    In Acts, Jesus takes Genesis 50:20 and widens the application from me and you as individuals, to entire cities, people groups, and nations!

    In a way Jesus re-writes Genesis 50:20 with his very life, “Satan intended to destroy us by pitting us against one another, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

    I’ve read Acts upwards of 100 times. I’ve read commentary after commentary on the Luke-Acts narrative. I love how Luke puts things in order. It unleashes my strategic, creative mind. For me, it is full of AHA moments. Even this morning, as I read a big chunk of the narrative again, I’m in awe of how effective they were.

    Sitting back and looking at the Luke-Acts books as a whole it makes me hypothesize. Perhaps the reason the Holy Spirit wanted Luke to put the Gospel narrative in sequential order might be so that future generations could pick up on the patterns/agendas/strategies that the Apostles implemented to completely obliterate the strongest empire the world has ever seen without using a single army?

    If so, that’s a pretty cool strategy.

    Man conquers the body; Jesus conquers the heart

    The modern church movement in America largely depends on a single strategy morphed into a thousand different variations. It’s a Field of Dreams strategy: “If you build it, they will come.” A program, a good preacher, a building, on and on.

    The weakness with that strategy is that it’s resource dependent. If you don’t have a great program manager you are sunk. You you can’t afford a great building you are sunk. If you don’t have a great preacher you are sunk.

    And it all somehow flows back to money. As much as we hate that it’s about money, money lubricates the gears of the modern church machine.

    The last 5 years, with the economy crashing down and churches re-thinking everything, has begged the question: Without money, what would church look like?

    That’s actually the strategy we see employed in Acts.

    Read it for yourself. In one sitting, right now, read Acts 17-20. Come back when you’ve read it. I’ll wait.

    (more…)

  • The other 90%

    I think some people are writing me off as a deconstructionist. As if I’m a leftover from a bygone fad when it was hip to rip on the church.

    Part of me says, “Call me what you want, who am I to tell people what to think?”

    But I think that’s an incorrect label.

    My aim is the opposite. I want to be a reconstructionist. I have this crazy, insane belief that the best days for the American church can be in front of us and not behind.

    If you need to label me something, label me this: “Passionate about the other 90%.”

    I will take that to the bank all day, every day.

    The simple fact is that I won’t be satisfied with reaching 5-10% of the population with the Good News of Jesus Christ. If that were a grade in school it wouldn’t even be an F… it would be an I.

    Incomplete work. I know we can do better. I know I can do better!

    I’m unashamedly passionate about that. And I readily admit that I keep company with people who think the same way.

    When I run into “satisfied Christians” I kind of wonder what is wrong with them? How can we be so comfortable and happy when we believe what we believe and 90% of the population doesn’t even care?

    • Nearly all Christians believe that a life on earth knowing Jesus will be better than a life lived on earth without Christ.
    • Nearly all Christians believe that when you die you will be judged. Those who know Jesus spend eternity with Christ, those who don’t know Jesus spend eternity separated from Christ.

    That drives me to think: What is “wrong” with the “system of church” we practice that leads to reaching only 5-10% of any given community? And what could we change, while holding on to what is dear and true, that would help us (the church, the body, the people of Jesus) reach… 11%. 20%. 25%. 45%. In my lifetime.

    It is up to me and you.

    When I go down this road, people always say the same thing: “Adam, we don’t have the power to do anything about that.”

    I reject that idea. Flat out.

    You may not be able to change entire systems of power or government or even the momentum of your church.

    But you can change you.

    And if you can change you and God has called you to lead others. They will change, too.

    When I look at reaching 10% of the population I don’t first think, “We need to change everything.” I first think, “What do I need to change about myself?”

  • From information to action

    click to see full size
    click to see full size

    Our society is in desperate need of Good News

    Therefore, the question for church leaders is simple: Will you be the source of Good News in your community or will someone/something else?

    The Sunday Disconnect

    Like clockwork, we have trained our people that the place to be on Sunday mornings is the church. That is a great thing: People show up!

    There is expectancy in that. Something innately in us instructs us, “Sunday morning is the time we gather for corporate worship of our God.” Whether its your first Sunday, you’ve been in the church your whole life, or you work at the church, we all come together on Sunday mornings: We are going to the church to worship God!

    That togetherness ends in the parking lot. As we arrive at church I find that we each family & individual has a slightly different agenda as they come on Sunday morning.

    The difference in agenda is fascinating, mind-numbing, and ultimately a sign that we need corrective leadership.

    My Sunday morning agenda – aka “Things I am hoping for“

    1. Get there, all of us. On time is preferable.
    2. Get the kids to children’s church.
    3. Corporate time of worship, prayer, and the reading of God’s Word.
    4. Drop off my offering.
    5. See some friends during the soft time after service, meet some new people.
    6. Avoid invitations to help out with things that don’t interest me. Check in with things I am interested in.
    7. Hear reports/testimonies of what God is doing in my neighborhood through His people.
    8. Hear about corporate opportunities to do something. I only have 2-3 hours available per week, but if something can be done, I want to do it.
    9. Hear what’s going on in my neighborhood.
    10. Share ideas, process what’s going on, and form action plans for the week to come.

    The Sunday morning agenda of the staff – aka “Things I perceive they need to see the morning as a success.“

    1. Make sure the building is ready for visitors.
    2. Make sure all of your people are in the right places and they know what they are supposed to be doing.
    3. Invite people into a deeper relationship with God.
    4. Communicate God’s Word. (Song, sermon, prayer, etc.)
    5. Announce stuff.
    6. Check off the mental check list of people to reach out to (Some, to see how they are doing or follow-up. Others, to recruit or check-in about stuff you are announcing.)
    7. Make sure the service happens. (You want it to be worshipful for yourself, but largely it’s not because details overwhelm you.)
    8. Oversee staff, volunteers, and check-in with all of them after to see how it went.
    9. Count stuff. I don’t know why but church staff have to count everything.
    10. Troubleshoot. Something always manages to go wrong.

    See what’s happening?

    Largely, the people coming want to be called to action. Sure, they want to gather. But they also want to do something with their faith outside of the walls of the church in their own community.

    Largely, the church staff want to call people to help make church happen. They want to do stuff outside of the church, too. (Don’t read that the wrong way… the church staff largely is on staff because they want to impact the community!) But they can’t even think about that unless their bases are covered.

    Questions: What are some first steps to alleviating this disconnect on Sunday morning? What are ways you can transform Sunday morning from information sharing to a call to action?

  • Snake bit

    Darkness creeps in at weird moments.

    A comment. A ungaurded remark by the wrong person. A glance or a stare that you can’t get an explanation for. All of those are things that can set me off inexplicably.

    Normally, I’m pretty happy-go-lucky. Why do those tiny things trigger the my mind so wildly? I wonder those things as I lay in bed with my mind literally swirling in the darkness.

    At times when darkness creeps in I’m left asking myself questions like this:

    • Are these people playing me?
    • Am I just being set up to be the fall guy?
    • How do I get out of the way of this situation I’m imagining?
    • Am I prepared to go another direction, right now?
    • What would happen if….

    If what? That’s when I snap out of my anxiety-filled, irrational Risk game and wake up to reality. No one is out to get me.

    Disappointed with myself, I am left self-reflecting: How did I get to that place… AGAIN?!?

    Snakes in a church?

    You see, like a lot of people who are involved in Christian leadership, I’ve been bitten by a snake before. And once you’ve been bitten you don’t ever want it to happen again. As a result, people who work in churches tend to have a healthy fear of snakes.

    In 2002, Kristen and I left an over-resourced church we loved to accept a call to full-time ministry. It was the culmination of years of hard work, prayerful steps of obedience & preparation, and a lot of sound advice. We left Chicago and headed west for an under-resourced church in an area which described itself as the armpit of California. A huge unchurched population. Rampant adolescent problems. And no viable, functional Christian ministry to those kids.

    Our hearts were way ahead of our skill level. The church wasn’t nearly as willing to reach “the wrong kids” as they originally said. The meth epidemic was exploding all around them and they didn’t know how to respond. So instead of reaching out the leaders decided to close the shutters and try to ride out the storm.

    Within a few months every friend and mentor I’d ever had was telling me the same thing: Bad fit, get out.

    So we did. I began a quiet process of finding another place to do ministry while at the same time respecting my obligation to the church I was serving at, holding out some hope that things might turn around as I was looking and we’d be able to stay.

    A few months later, Kristen and I found a much better fit, well-suited for my skill level, and closer to our family. We accept that churches call, signed a contract, and were eager to close things up at one church to move on to another, better fit. We had kept everything on the up-and-up. I’d asked the advice of people far more seasoned than I and followed their advice closely.

    All that was left was to tell the elders.

    The meeting didn’t go well. They turned on me. These men slobbered angry tears at me about how they wished I was going to be the son they wished their sons had been to them. And they told me I was a horrible husband to Kristen. And a horrible father to my daughter. And that I was unfit for any kind of ministry. And that the devil must have confused me into thinking I was called to ministry when I was clearly not.

    I took it all in. I apologized for disappointing them. If the room full of men turned into bitter boys, I’d be the one in the room to stand up and take it like a man.

    Then they explained to me that they couldn’t allow me to quit because that would be an embarrassment to them. I couldn’t quit because they were firing me! Later, they produced a letter and “a review” of my performance based purely on things they had heard, filled with quotes from my volunteers, things they later told me they never said, and the viscous letter even went so far to say that Kristen was an unfit mother.

    And I was told to read a different letter to the church the next Sunday. (I read parts of it, ad libbing the rest. Oops.) And they were to pay me off to get me out of their sight. Then, when that was all over- phone calls came because they said things about me in private to other people. Letters arrived at our house. People drove by our house slowly to stare. My neighbors wouldn’t talk to me.

    The next 30 days before our moving van left were the worst 30 days of my life. It made no sense whatsoever. I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I had done was quit one job to take a job that better suited me. But, the men I had trusted suddenly turned into snakes, biting me repeatedly.

    I’ll never forget my last conversation with one of the elders. The one whom I’d been closest too. As he walked me to our car on the last Sunday, he handed me an envelope full of money and pretended to say nice things. He tried to apologize for how the elders had acted, but since he was also delivering their hush money, it was all kind of a lie and he knew it. He said, “You know, I’ve wanted to know this whole time something, maybe you can help me? From the first day you’ve loved kids here that none of us would love. You’ve reached out to people we don’t want to even look at but probably should. What book did you read that taught you how to love those kids?” I looked at Kristen. Her jaw dropped. She shook her head. One statement summed up the entire disconnect that haunted the last year of our lives. I help back a smile. I said, “Mark, I learned those things from the life of Jesus. That’s the entire point of the New Testament. The Gospel isn’t just for people born into the church, it’s for everyone.”

    Snakes. I never felt so sick to my stomach in all of my life. As Indiana Jones so famously said, “Why did it have to be snakes?”

    Darkness creeps in

    The last 24 hours, memories of the snakes have crept back in. I wish I could explain it. I guess old fears lurk just under the surface. But these fears paralyze me. I wish it weren’t true. But it is. It’s a weakness I wish I could grow out of but I fear it’s become part of my DNA.

    It’s not a fear like the fear of the boogie man. Instead, it’s a fear of knowing that one day in the future you might have to face that same situation… and how will you respond differently?

    “Am I more prepared today to deal with that situation? Am I more mature? Am I more self-confident?”

    Questions that wake you from a deep sleep. Or prevent you from sleeping to begin with.

    Fear is irrational. It comes from an emotional place. When darkness like that swarms in I’ve learned to rebuke it. That sort of fear isn’t from God.

    That’s where truth always wins.

    The Groom would never treat His Bride that way. Though Jesus had the power, he chose to win our hearts instead of capturing our hearts. He’s doesn’t demand our trust, He asks us to freely give it to him.

    Whom do I trust?

    If I learned anything from being bit by a snake it’s that I need to be secure in whom I put my trust.

    Let love and faithfulness never leave you;
    bind them around your neck,
    write them on the tablet of your heart.
    Then you will win favor and a good name
    in the sight of God and man.

    Trust in the LORD with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
    in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight.

    Do not be wise in your own eyes;
    fear the LORD and shun evil.
    This will bring health to your body
    and nourishment to your bones.

    Proverbs 3:3-8

  • 2 Things I Learned from the Mishnah

    A couple weeks back Kristen and I took Jackson into the pediatricians office to get circumcised. This is one of the things that has changed since we had Paul 7.5 years ago. Now they wait until a baby is two weeks old before doing circumcision. When Paul was born the nurses took him for a bath and a hearing check and he came back circumcised. Don’t ask me why this is so, it just is.

    Our pediatrician is wonderful older Jewish gentleman in his early 60s. He’s the kind of doctor that when you tell other doctors who your kids pediatrician is they all go, “Oh, he’s a great, great doctor.”

    After he explained that the latest research thinks it is best to wait a couple of weeks to circumcise I quipped that maybe Jewish law had been right all along, waiting until the 8th day. As he continued preparing little Jackson for the procedure he and I struck up a conversation about Genesis 17. (Kristen rolled her eyes, she’s heard my little rant about this 100 times.) My initial thought went OK well so I moved on to my main point. I told him that when I was in Bible college I asked the professor two questions about this passage: When Abraham circumcised his entire household in one day who went first? And did God give a diagram so they knew what to do and how much foreskin was enough?

    I was showing off and he wasn’t impressed. Kristen smirked.

    He didn’t laugh. Everyone laughs when I tell that story.

    Instead he said, “You see, this is a problem for the Protestant faith. While you’ve rightfully elevated the written revelation of God you’ve completely discounted thousands of years of oral tradition.” He went on to explain that parallel to Moses’ recording the Torah in written form an oral tradition was passed from priest to priest explaining how to interpret the laws, how to translate many things into daily life, and how to actually do some of the things that the written word commands.

    In other words– Mishnah told ministers how to do their job. That’s how they learned how to do things like circumcision. Later, about 200 years after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, it was decided that they needed to record some of that oral tradition because the Jewish people were increasingly scattered. This resulted in what is now the beginning of the Talmud, what’s called Mishnah.

    I was a pretty good student. All I remember learning about the Talmud as a student was that there was Mishnah, defined as oral tradition, and Midrash, defined as commentary. It was literally just a test question and a couple of paragraphs in a couple of books.

    After the procedure we took Jackson home. And I went on Amazon and bought a Mishnah translation of  for my Kindle. With 25 other books I could be reading, I’ve been reading 1800 year old instructions on how to be a good rabbi.

    Reading through Mishnah has opened my eyes to two things:

    1. I never understood the non-temple responsibilities of a priest, Levite, or rabbi quite the way I do now. The Old Testament makes the job seem mostly ceremonial. In fact, their job was deeply engrained in daily life. The entire first section is about farming/gardening. I can envision the rabbi in the field with the farmer, “OK, you need to put wheat over there.  Yes, you can plant barley in an adjacent field, just angle it like this. Now make sure your furrows are as deep as they are wide, about the width of your foot. Now, the vineyard. The reason you don’t want to plant onions between rows in the vineyard…” This wasn’t an office job. It was literally and out-in-the-ministry-field life, helping congregants understand God’s way for doing just about everything.
    2. Perhaps one of the problems in the Protestant church today is that we don’t have Mishnah? We disregard (disrespect perhaps?) oral tradition so much that we’ve assumed that those old time ministers didn’t know what they were doing. When was the last time you spent a day making house calls? Visiting jails? Visiting hospitals? We don’t bother with such things– let the volunteer deacon and small groups do that. We have important stuff to get done in the office. Like meetings and preparing for our programs and updating our Facebook status to complain about going to meetings all day. I think this has lead to the average minister considering himself more of a manager than a minister. They consider their sacramental duties limited to the things they do in the church itself. Teaching the Bible, preaching, communion, baptism, etc. Sadly, our profession is no more engrained in the daily life of our congregants than the occasional appearance at a congregants home or a visit when they are in the hospital. Instead of going and being with people every day we spend the majority of our time thinking about how to best serve the church when they come to us. Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t supposed to be like that and our predecessors had it right and we have it wrong?

  • That’s Local Funny

    This is one of those things that is funny and not funny at the same time, isn’t it? I’ll admit I find it hilarious for all of the wrong reasons. Look at your neighbor and say, “F you.”

    What’s the lesson here?

    • Some things are funny on paper, will work live, but probably aren’t appropriate.
    • You really need someone to look over your notes before you preach/teach/speak in public. A true friend would have gently said, “You know what? This is really funny. And it makes a great point. But no. Don’t do that.“
    • Sometimes your creativity has unintended consequences. Like you congregation walking around at work the next day going, “F all of you!“

    HT to Britt

  • Worth fighting for

    The last few days I’ve been following the story of Shaun King, an Atlanta church planter and friend of YS, who recently discovered his former boss & pastor has admittedly molested and raped some children.* After doing some further research Shaun learned that other church leaders were aware of the situation but remained silent.

    Not Shaun. He took to Twitter to expose the problem. Here’s how he kicked things off:

    Bishop Johnathan Alvarado of Total Grace Christian Center is a child molester. In the name of Jesus I declare this must end RIGHT NOW. @shaunking – March 13th, 2011

    Here is the crux of his demand:

    I have heard the worst, learned of his admission of guilt, yet he continues to serve and preach. Kids get the raw end of this deal. No more. @shaunking – March 13th, 2011

    And he didn’t back down from there. He has continued to press on. Laying out his case and defending it with more evidence. Even if you don’t like Twitter, please take a few minutes to read through Shaun’s tweets from the past few days.

    You will see righteous anger in action. As he says, “I will STAND FOR KIDS 100 out of 100 times.”

    It is the embodiment of Ephesians 5:11-13:

    Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.

    I know many are offended by Shaun, his tactics, and think that he is somehow giving the church a bad name. Are you kidding me? If these allegations are true, (and it seems the pastor admitted to them) young men were raped, families paid off, and the pastor went right on preaching? That’s a disgrace and we need to applaud Shaun for speaking out! To be silent, to deal with that in private, is disturbing. If you’ll protect a rapist… who wouldn’t you protect?

    This morning I’m asking for 3 things:

    1. Pray for Shaun, Rai, and his kids. Pray for the victims and their families. Many in church circles are denouncing Shaun for speaking out. And sadly other people have sent him death threats. Pray that God protects Shaun as he stands in the gap for children in his community. Pray that justice prevails, not in the court of public opinion, but in a court of law.
    2. Reflect on the types of things worth fighting for in your life. What are things that you, as a child of God, would cause you to stand up and fight for, putting your reputation on the line for, even to the point of receiving death threats as you expose light to darkness?
    3. Act, act, act. I believe there are countless stories like this hidden in the confines of the church today. Expose them. Today. There is a devil-inspired lie that “true believers” settle things without the courts involvement. I’ve even heard people say that it’s a sin to sue a church. That is a lie. Examine 1 Corinthians 6:1-11 yourself. Rape is not trivial. Breaking the law is not trivial. Extortion is not trivial. On and on. Examine the context and reason Paul wrote those words. But yet this untruth has lead to countless victims and the continued victimization by people originally called to represent Jesus. Expose them. Do not take refuge in the reality that God will judge them. It is your responsibility as a believer to bring light to dark places. Search your heart, discover what is worth fighting for, and act. Today.

    *I’ll admit in sharing this story that I’m confused on some of the details. I don’t know how a person can rape children and settle that in court without criminal charges against the accused. I firmly believe that a person is innocent until proven guilty. If someone could help me understand Shaun’s statements that the person has admitted guilt and not received a criminal complaint, please enlighten me. Is this a statute of limitations thing?

  • St. Patrick’s Day Prayer for the American Church

    Green beer, revelry, parades, and dyeing the river green.

    These are the things we think about to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

    However, when I think of Saint Patrick, I think of one of the greatest missionaries to have ever walked the planet. Born in Wales, trafficked as a teenager and sold into slavery in Ireland. Patrick miraculously escaped six years later, then after a time of preparation felt called back to the island of his captivity as a missionary. During his lifetime, despite early persecutions, he was instrumental to the success of Christianity on the island. By the time of his death he had planted nearly 500 churches.

    In honor of Patrick’s service, this is my St. Patrick’s Day Prayer for the American Church:

    Loving Father, Creator and Sustainer of our land. You are our Compass, our Standard, our Protector, and sole Provider.

    We are lost without you. In our own power we chose to make the Gospel about us. We are so busy being religious that we forget that it’s not only about us, it’s also about the lost.

    We are lost without you. We cannot sustain ourselves. We cannot rule ourselves. We cannot protect ourselves. We cannot provide for our people alone. We need you.

    Break our hearts, Lord. Help us to order our lives in ways that respect your Word.

    We are thankful, God, for Patrick’s ministry in Ireland. You called him from bondage to reach his captors. Instead of resentment you, you filled his heart with love. Instead of a life filled with nightmares from his past, he fulfilled his dreams day by day in the light of day.

    Raise up among us a new Patrick in our nation. A person to renew the heart of our nation for you. Millions among us have never heard Your Name nor felt Your presence nor tasted Your Grace.

    Prepare a young man or woman set free by your Spirit, who knows no fear, who will escape their present bondage and yet return to reach their captors.

    Awaken that person today, Lord. Echo Your calling in their ear. Begin in them an earnest desire to be filled with Your knowledge. Give them wisdom and understanding to penetrate to the marrow of our culture. Help them to cast out of our country far more dangerous realities than snakes.

    Give them boundless energy and laser-like focus.

    Open our ears, eyes, and heart to this new Patrick. Help us accept this person as Your servant among us.

    Refresh us, Lord. Awaken us, Lord. Remind us, Lord. Expand us, Lord.

    We need you now more than ever. Save us from modern day druids, from those who make us serfs, and from those who force us to acknowledge their power over Yours.

    Amen.

    See also: