Churches working together? Yep.

The Baptists do stuff together. (Really well, like in disaster relief.) The Catholics, ditto. The Methodists are perhaps famously ecumenical, reaching across all sorts of denominational and organizational lines. How about all the rest? Well...

I asked my friend Jeff, who's lived here for much of his life (and most of the rest in Central America), who was doing cool parachurch things in the Tampa Bay area. He mentioned Somebody Cares Tampa Bay, among others.

"Well, I've seen people try to draw churches together to do stuff my whole life, and generally it doesn't work. But some years ago, this guy Dan Bernard came in from 10 years on the mission field, which gave him a certain amount of street cred. Somehow, he got it to work."

So over lunch, my first question to Dan was, "How'd you do it?"

"Hard work and the Lord's favor."

I believe it.  Someone asked former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker what it was like to have his job. He replied, "Herding cats." (Sidebar:  fun cat herding video.) I've noticed that most things that cross organizational lines resemble herding cats. Especially where those lines include deep religious convictions. But you'll have a better shot at gathering a lot of cats if you plant some catnip. Or in this case, a word from the Lord and the Holy Spirit that moves Christians in all places and all times.

Dan, fresh off the mission field of Nigeria, heard the name "Ehud," from the Hebrew word for "Unity." It was his next assignment.

He started cold-calling pastors in the Clearwater area, finding those who would like to gather and pray together. A few became more, and after a while there were groups in St. Pete and Tampa, and a Unity Covenant, and cooperative work projects, and...you get the idea.

It looks like Dan went looking for common ground, and found it. The common ground tended to be serving others, which Jesus was pretty clear was a big deal. (Actually, the whole Bible is filled with that kind of thing.) God showed the people at SCTB how they could help churches do what they already wanted to do. He showed them opportunities to bring economies of scale to what had formerly been small, separate resource-buying endeavors by individual churches.

He mentioned that smaller churches often partner with others simply because they don't have the extensive resources of big churches.  They're motivated to practice interdependence. That's a good thing - and not just for churches, but for us individually.

God wants all of us, and each of us. How about those doctrinal divisions?  Dan (and I) quote St. Augustine: "In the essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty.  In all, love." Not everyone will agree to joining with other churches, much less various secular organizations.  But as for me...if God is reassembling the pieces of this broken world using some people different from me, well, he's the boss.  And I want to labor in his way and his favor.

Dan sets great store by the idea of "transference," which is the release of newly-empowered people to keep on doing great stuff without additional oversight.  So do I, which was a big part of my previous career in technology transition from lab demonstrations to end-products. More importantly, so did Jesus, not just in commissioning his disciples, but in how he constantly put them in the front lines of ministry.  That's the key to sustainable ministry that can outlive us all.

Sunday I wrote about Shevet Achim, whose inspiration comes from Psalms 133: "How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity!  It's like the costly anointing oil flowing down Aaron's beard..." Not surprisingly, Dan cites the same verse in his work.

May we seek the essentials, let the nonessentials rest, and experience the good and pleasant shalom of God flowing through our lives together.

Look...and See

I’m re-reading Mike Yaconelli’s book Messy Spirituality. I’ve mentioned Mike before, as the guy who said, “I think the Christians will be known as the people who have time for you: 'Wanna talk?  Sure. How long you got? Long as you need.'" For me, Messy Spirituality was like air to a drowning diver. It was a huge relief to see such simple “heresy” in print. I wasn’t the only person in the world who saw confusion where the preachers claimed order.

If you think “Misfit Christians” sounds a lot like it, well, that’s because his little book articulated a lot of things that were stirring me up about 7 years ago. We were seeing up close the enormous gap between real teens, real people and the attentive little rows in “big church.”  (Among other gaps.)  Those gaps are still stirring me up.  When I get to heaven, I’d like to give Mike a big hug. 

Here’s an excerpt from one segment called “Unpretending”:

Practically, pretending is efficient, uncomplicated and quick. Answering “fine” to the question “How are you doing?” is much easier and quicker than saying, “Not very well, thank you; my back is bothering me, my teenage children are disappointing me, I’m unhappy with my body, my husband never speaks to me, and I’m wondering if Christianity is true.”

Honesty requires a huge investment of time and energy from the person asking the question (who would then wish they had never asked).

Pretending is the grease of modern non-relationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren’t. People who pretend have pretend relationships. But being real is a synonym for messy spirituality, because when we are real, our messiness is there for everyone to see.

Pretending is the grease of modern non-relationships. Pretending perpetuates the illusion of relationships by connecting us on the basis of who we aren’t.

That is exactly what I was seeing, and am still seeing way, way too often.  We have whole churches based on the shock and awe of an amazing worship program, or aggressive missions, or a gifted preacher.  Of course those things are good.  But they aren’t God himself, and they aren’t each other.  The greatest and second-greatest commandments don’t mention advertising or organization or charismatic leaders.  Love God, love others.  The rest is details.

When we cling to those illusions they bind our future; it’s part of why we so often choose the status quo instead of change. What if we could distinguish the reality from the illusion, the wheat from the chaff? Would we would live different lives? I say, “yes.” We need to See, not just “see.”

But Seeing begins with Looking:  looking attentively, looking with prayer, dwelling on signs of life and finding the discriminators between interactive caring and casual habit. (I could go on about how living things move and dead things don’t, and how that’s like radar...but I digress.) Looking is hard and expensive and uncomfortable first because it’s active, not passive. It’s interrogative, questioning, probing.

But second, Looking is hard because we’re afraid that we really will See, that we will find no relationships at all among the non-relationships, that we will be left alone without even the illusion of relationships for comfort in the cold.

We won’t fill a gap we choose not to See.  But if we choose Sight for the blind (us), and freedom for the captive (us again), then we open our broken hearts to the God who desperately wants to fill them. It’ll take time, but we’ll find the real and bypass the pretend.

I’m still getting the hang of this. Maybe you are, too. Mike never got it all right; as he said only a year before he died, “My life is a mess.” But the same God who created Earth out of chaos is busy creating us out of mess. Like taking a lump of coal and forming it into the diamond he intended us to be all along.

And by the way (not really “by the way” actually), isn’t it just as amazing to watch a craftsman at work as to see the end product?  (Think Dirty Jobs, New Yankee Workshop, How It’s Made, etc.)