Waiting For Sunday

Lately for me, the joys of life have begun to wear thin. For some people, this happens at 65, when work ends and, well, what then? For some, it happens at 18 when suddenly there is a baby and bills and work. For some blessed folks, it never seems to happen.

Is this the mid-life crisis I’ve heard so much about? I’m 42. I’ve got more material things than I need and there really isn’t anything I want (which doesn’t keep me from buying junk sometimes). My various hobbies that have drifted in and out of my life have never been consuming, nor have I desired them to be. I continue to work on a stronger faith, stronger marriage, and stronger ministry. But I find myself aching for adventure, the optimism of youth.

I see people around me who seem to reclaim the adventure in ways that are good (adopting kids) potentially good or bad (building a house, starting a business, buying a motorcycle) and bad (illicit romance). I understand the void that makes even sin seem alluring.

In the midst of this introspection, I read an article by Sarah Wright, in which she said:

I thought about the most spectacular thing in my life, God…Has He grown ordinary to me? Or is He that almost mythical God of the Old Testament that did all those interesting miracles? I can’t handle a common god. I need the One who still does miracles in my life. I don’t want to settle for less. I don’t care how foolish I sound; I want the jaw-dropping life.

Why do people say that I don’t need to aspire to do anything great, but can be ordinary and affect the people around me? Of course they are right, but shouldn’t I at least try to reach for the Brother Andrew-type life? How can we show God’s power if we don’t do audacious stunts that beg for God to help us out, like selling all our belongings and going to Uganda? That’s a life that I can look at and get fired up. That is a life that has stories to tell.

That’s what I want too, even if it turns out to be God’s jaw-dropping power in plain old ordinary life. I’m praying for it too.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

Aliens and Suffering - 1 Peter 3:8-22 - Dennis Mullen - 8.27.06
Listen (stream) - MP3 (right-click to save)

SERIES: Aliens, Strangers and Misfits
A series from 1 Peter on living as missionaries in this foreign culture. Part 6 of 8

Bookmark to:

At the Willow Creek Leadership Summit, our group got to see a short video from World Vision depicting AIDS through one woman’s eyes. I found it moving. Now I invite all of you to watch it online. You’ll need a high-speed connection and about 15 minutes.

Our church is raising money for a water well in Zambia to bring health and life (and, indirectly, fight AIDS) in one village. This video, and the passion of our youth and leaders behind the project, motivated me to get involved.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

Aliens and Authority - 1 Peter 2:13 - 3:7 - Dennis Mullen - 8.20.06
Listen (stream) - MP3 (right-click to save)

SERIES: Aliens, Strangers and Misfits
A series from 1 Peter on living as missionaries in this foreign culture. Part 5 of 8

Bookmark to:

Cindy and I were in Denver shortly after Christmas, 1996, when the JonBenet Ramsey murder was oh-so-briefly just a local story in the Rocky Mountain News. It soon became a national media obsession with enough steam to run for most of the past ten years. It’s back this week with an arrest.What a horrible thing for a young girl to be molested and murdered. What an unspeakable tragedy for her family.

But why is there so much interest in THIS girl, THIS crime? Is it because she was so rich, so perfect, so WHITE, so American? That’s it exactly.

Look at the reports about yesterday’s arrest. The very last line in the CNN article (the very last line for cryin’ out loud!) says that this guy traveled frequently to Thailand, “a country notorious for its child sex trade”. Eight words to cover thousands of broken lives and devastated souls which were housed mostly in yellow bodies or brown. Who tells their stories for ten minutes, let alone ten years?

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible, a white family in Africa suffers a tragic loss which scars them for the rest of their lives. Yet some of those family members begin to understand that their loss finally unites them with the Congolese around them. Their loss is the world to them, but it is only one raindrop in the jungle of Africa’s grief.

Losing precious people is one thing we all have in common. White people, rich people, beautiful people don’t love their children more. Africans and Asians and South Americans don’t grieve their children less.

When we finally grasp this, we’ll DO something. And we’ll actually have something to say to the world.

(This was originally posted at my MySpace blog, which you may want to check out occasionally).

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

Last week at the conference I attended at the mega-mega church Willow Creek, I took a stroll around their massive campus. At one point I found myself walking across the back of their “old” sanctuary, worship center, whatever they call it, a room that has been replaced in the past few years by a much larger space (pictured at right, from my phone camera).A woman behind me, evidently a Willow member, said to her friend: “Oh, I haven’t been back in here for a long time. The young people use it now.” Then she added: “I miss this room. It’s so much warmer and more intimate than the new one.”

Folks, the old worship center must seat a couple thousand, and looks like nothing so much as a theater! Now you can see from my fuzzy photo that the new room is far from intimate. But what a lesson on perspective, on tinting the past with a golden hue.

I haven’t heard anyone complain about missing our old sanctuary, though who could deny it was WARM - 85-90 in the summer! But we all have to be careful about longing for the old days, for the way it used to be. We’re six months in to our new building, and the newness of change has worn off. Don’t let that fact gild the past.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

One of my reasons for skepticism about megachurches has been that I thought of it mostly as a white-suburban concept. Go somewhere where the population is exploding, start an excellent seeker service and you’ve got a pretty good chance of tapping into the same public preference that is creating larger and larger Wal-Marts, Home Depots and Best Buys.

Then at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit, I heard James Meeks, megachurch pastor (who lead a church from a few hundred in 1985 to 20,000 today). His most memorable line: “I learned church growth principles and applied them, and the principles didn’t know I was black, so they worked for me.” It is Meeks’ church, Salem Baptist on the far South Side of Chicago, that boasts the largest worship center in Chicagoland, larger even than Willow’s new building.

Christianity Today did an excellent story on Meeks a few years ago, writing about him as the most effective megapastor you’ve never heard of. A remarkable fact is that Meeks is not only a pastor but the Illinois State Senator for the 15th District which includes some of the poorest places in the city. At first blush this seems unwise - “If God calls you to pastor, don’t stoop to be a king” and all that. But in a poor area, the justice and poverty issues that hamper people’s lives call for political measures as well as spiritual ones. Meeks convinced me that he is ministering in the Senate just as surely as he is from his pulpit.
Salem Baptist, like Willow, demonstrates the strength of a megachurch. In 1998, Meeks and his members united to “dry up” their community and close 26 liquor stores. In another effort, they visited all 800-plus street corners in their community and talked about the Lord to prostitutes, drug dealers and anyone they could find. They gave free Bibles to every home in their community - 33,000 in all, a monumental delivery task.

Now Meeks and Bill Hybels, lead pastor at Willow, have formed a genuine friendship which they both find joy in discussing. Several dozen leaders from the two congregations took a bus tour last year to visit many of the significant civil rights locations, and Meeks and Hybels meet the group in Selma to walk across the famous bridge there. As a result of this trip and other activities, members of these two churches actually KNOW one another as friends, and care about each other’s experiences.

I still don’t think that the megachurch is the only way, and of course it has its problems just as surely as the microchurch does. But with all the other blessings these two churches have given, add this: Meeks and Hybels have given us an example to follow.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

“The greatest use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.” James Truslow Adams. Last week at Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit, I heard Bill Hybels interview rock superstar Bono on his faith and his passionate work against poverty and AIDS in Africa. Bono is one of the world’s most famous people, even though my Dad thinks he used to be married to Cher and many folks under 20 don’t know him as well as I expected.

Bono said in the interview that celebrity is a ridiculous thing, an exact inversion of the Bible’s principles on value. But, he says, since he HAS celebrity, he chooses to spend it on Afirca. Celebrity gets him in to see the President, Senators, UN Leaders, and other wealthy and powerful individuals who can DO something. Celebrity also connects him to the masses of us who can each do a LITTLE something that can add up to MUCH.

Bono is directly involved in the One Campaign which, among other things, calls the U. S. to use one percent of its budget for basic health, water, food and education in the world’s poorest countries. I like this idea because I read in both Testaments of the Scriptures that God takes interest in nations as well as individuals and how they do justice.

Another group I’ve been impressed with is World Vision’s One-Life Revolution, a Christian-based organization that MHCC has worked with in the 30-Hour Famine. For the past 11 months, some of our youth have been raising money to dig a well for an African village to provide clean, life-giving drinking water to the people there. The last event in this effort will be a spaghetti and salad dinner here at MHCC on Sunday night, September 10 at 5p before evening activities. Come and donate!

More importantly, find your place in Africa, South America, Asia or other parts of the global south where poverty and disease is rampant, and then read Matthew 25:31f and see where Jesus is in such circumstances. Find your place to pray about daily and where YOU can get involved.

Many of you have enough money to know that it doesn’t satisfy. So start spending it (and your life) on something that will outlast it.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

A Rockin’ Church… - 1 Peter 2:4-12 - David Pryor - 8.13.06
Listen (stream) - MP3 (right-click to save)

SERIES: Aliens, Strangers and Misfits
A series from 1 Peter on living as missionaries in this foreign culture. Part 4 of 8

Bookmark to:

In the interest of becoming more of a “world Christian” I have been spending a little time each day reading news stories from around the world at worldnews.com. This site is a nicely-built clipping service that organizes news from every continent by practically every news organization in the world. This ain’t Fox or CNN. If you’re used to reading the news through American eyes, you’re in for some shocking enlightenment as you discover what the rest of the world thinks about.

For starters, you might try this article from the UK called Requiem for Baghdad.
P.S. Don’t mistake this site for weeklyworldnews.com.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

Holiness that flows from love - 1 Peter 1-2 - Dennis Mullen - 8.6.06
Listen (stream) - MP3 (right-click to save)

SERIES: Aliens, Strangers and Misfits
A series from 1 Peter on living as missionaries in this foreign culture. Part 3 of 8

Bookmark to:

I’m not a big fan of church message signs, but I can at least ignore them when their messages are cute, trite, sappy or irrelevant. This one makes me mad. Of course the problem isn’t with “Share your faith with others” but with “Keep your doubts to yourself”. This advice makes us look like anti-thinking, anti-rational simpletons to the world because it suggests that doubt is a powerful enemy to faith, and as such it should be ignored, denied, stuffed down deep until it disappears.

“Keep your doubts to yourself” also makes it impossible to authentically “share your faith with others”. After all, if I sometimes have doubts (and I do), and yet I still stake my life on my faith (and I do), I think that makes for a more compelling testimony about faith, which by definition isn’t a 100% certainty. On the other hand, if I feign certainty, I tend to come across as a blinded fanatic.

I recently read Daniel Taylor’s The Myth of Certainty, a great book that gave me more freedom to strongly affirm my faith even in times of doubt, or at least uncertainty. Taylor writes:

“…Job’s friends spoke many so-called truths to him which taken abstractly are theologically unimpeachable. Scripture recognizes, however, that the cool self-righteousness with which these truths were offered renders them useless to Job or anyone else. Christ, on the other hand, repeatedly modeled truth as relationship” (p. 129)

How do I know my wife loves me? I could pull out our marriage certificate and study it, and then keep my doubts to myself. But it is in the relationship that I find meaningful certainty.

Blogged with Flock

Bookmark to:

When The Passion of the Christ came out, Mel Gibson was accused of painting the crucifixion story in an anti-Semitic way. I didn’t agree, although I have to admit that 1) Gibson was more nuanced in his presentation of the Romans than the temple leaders, and 2) passion plays have been used historically to stir up anti-Semitic feeling.

But when Gibson was arrested recently for drunk driving, he apparently made some remarks that are more than a little anti-Semitic and vulgar. You can read about it here (but beware of Gibson’s rough language).
James 3:1 says: “Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” This is a scary truth. I have my sins just like Mel Gibson, just like you. But when we presume to speak in God’s name about the things of God, people look at us more carefully than we would like, and our witness is on the line.

Blogged with