Glorious Mud

Lauren, my wonderful bride of almost 20 years, has been keeping an occasional blog - and recently posted her thoughts on our son's first communion (on Good Friday at our evening service). It was the highlight of my year - Lauren's thoughts can be found here . themizels.blogspot.com

I was reading Scott Thomas's blog on The Ten Qualifications of a Church Planter over at Acts29 blogs - and wanted to pass it along to you as an excellent resource. A few sentences in his opening paragraphs caught me: Every church leader should be able to spot a church planter and then send him to plant as soon as he is ready. The problem I am seeing is that we are so desperate for good men that we are not sending them into the field. We take warriors and make them into administrative clerks. He followed up later with this: We prefer the men in our church to be mules. A mule does not act like a jackass and they are able to carry larger loads and endure longer than a horse. They are tamer than a jackass but do not seem to want to run like a stallion. I think many pastors prefer a mule to a stallion. Stallions are designed to run and not be penned up in a stable. We are generally afraid of stallions because we are afraid of our own masculinity, our leadership, and our "importanc...

After I preached the Easter sermon on Sunday, I was driving home and a number of thoughts were ricocheting through my head - specifically about the unique challenges the women in our community face. The statistics are alarming. 1 in 4 women sitting in our churches have been raped or sexually assaulted. 1 in 12 women will be stalked and on average the stalking will last almost 2 years. Approximately 1 in 5 female high school students report being physically or sexually abused by a dating partner. We live in a culture of boys who haven't learned to grow up and be men. These boys are bullies who haven't learned how to exercise self-control. Instead of showing respect and honor to our women, they act like overgrown children, lashing out in anger or abuse when they don't get whatever immediate gratification they want in the moment. There is no excuse for these half-men and their pitiful displays of abusive weakness. These men need to know that God knows their secret abus...

I recently read through Gary Thomas' Sacred Pathways and discovered that I experience God in ways I wouldn't have imagined. None of them fit me perfectly, but from what I can tell, I experience God as a sensate primarily. But I also approach him as an activist, and surprisingly, a traditionalist. That last one is a shocker because I have always been distrustful of the "High Church" and all their rote mumbo jumbo. I am a low church guy with roots in the house church and Plymouth Brethren movements. Neither of these movements put much credence into tradition (well, at least tradition outside of their own cultural patterns). In fact, it was normal for us to completely ignore the Christian calendar - even preaching on 1 Corinthians 5 on Christmas because, well, that is where we were in the text. So, this year, really for the first time, I have tried to attune myself to the traditional Christian seasons. I know this is on the far margin of what it means to be a tradi...

I am showing The Passion of the Christ (yes, the whole thing) this Friday night at our Good Friday service. If you were to come, you would enter a dark room lit by candles. You would enter in silence and sit meditatively - expectantly. The night will start with a brief explanation of the series of events of the passion week, so everyone knows how Good Friday fits in to the broader progression. You would then be led through worship music and scripture meditation to consider the cross. You would then hear a brief message on the purpose and value of substitutionary atonement followed by communion, silence, and then a showing of the movie. I know - old news - the movie has been around for over 5 years now. I know churches have been showing clips of it every Easter since. So, here is my confession. I didn't watch the movie when it came out - or when it was recut and re-released the next year...or when it came to DVD. In fact, I didn't watch it until this week. Why? Lot'...

Worth a few minutes for the smile.

Came across this quote today: The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities. - Sophocles I have talked to a lot of people lately who would agree with this statement. People like Chopra, for example. But the challenge comes not in recognizing our responsibility in our problems as much in how our world view impacts the way we process that culpability. As a follower of Christ, I am led to see sin as the source of all that is wrong in the world. When sin was introduced into the world, God's Shalom was disrupted and mankind lost balance with their relationship with God, with each other, with themselves, and with the created order. What used to be characterized by peace and harmony (balance) was now broken and characterized by disharmony, mistrust, distance, and shame. This helps explain everything from Hurricane Katrina to my childhood fist fights with my brother. But Sophocles is right - it isn't enough to see that all our problems are...

As you guys know, I am a huge fan of google and pretty much everything they produce. Once again, they have outdone themselves to help people like me - people who have way too much email. They have created an intuitive autoresponder they call Gmail Autopilot. I for one will be using this new feature. check it out here .