Posts Tagged ‘missional living’

Watch this…

Where Do Churches Come From? from Aaron Youngren on Vimeo.

A couple of years ago, my friend Mike Gunn, of Harambee Church in Renton, WA, mentioned that they were sending a guy (Aaron Youngren) to Chicago with A29 to plant a new church, The Line. Immediately I got excited. “Why?” Because I love Chicago, often times I claim it as home, when I am introduced to people overseas. (I know, I know, I was merely born it what is today a suburb of Chicago, and I have a WI driver’s license and etc. I know, I know…) Seeing guys who are going on mission into urban centers to infiltrate the city with the Gospel gets me fired up. I also mentioned it to a friend, Andrew Lisi, who was moving up to the Chicagoland area to go to seminary, and the rest is history. Lisi and Aaron got connected and I’ve been following the birth of this new church in the “2nd City” for sometime via their blogs, twitter and etc. It’s been fun to pray for them and watch God do this from a distance. I would encourage you to check out what they are doing and pray for them and the city of Chicago. More over pray for all the men and women (guys like Reid Monaghan, who’s planting in Jersey!) all over the world that are trusting God to plant churches amongst people.

The Line website
Aaron’s twitter
Lisi’s twitter
Lisi’s blog

I got to see a few of the 9 minute vid spots from “The Nines” on Wednesday (9/9/09), but not all of them. They are starting to circulate around the web. Here are a couple I really appreciated:

Ed Stetzer - The 9s from LifeWay on Vimeo.

If you have found any more out there, leave a comment and let us know where! Thanks.

Quite some time ago, I read a post over at theresurgence.com , entitled The Liberated Puritan, which peaked my interest, but I never blogged on it and recently this week, for some reason I returned to it. I’m not sure why, but I think it was in my frustration as of late, with us (Christians) trying to moralize people!

“Moralize people Zach? What do you mean?” What I mean is this, we become so reactionary to the “so-called evils” of the culture and the world, we start trying to make the culture or people more moral! It’s as if we think, “Hmmm if I could get this person to stop drinking, or stop sleeping around, then they will be a better person and then the Gospel will make sense to them.” As I look through the pages of the Bible, specifically the New Testament, I don’t see this. I don’t see Jesus going around on moral crusades attempting to clean people up morally so they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I see Jesus, and his boys, moving within culture and peoples’ lives as they are and watching God change the hearts and then their actions follow. The examples of this would seem to be endless throughout the pages of Scripture. Take your pick! In every case of Jesus interacting with a moral “nobody,” so to speak, he comes to them, as they are. Then their interaction with Him changed the outworking of their life. It was never, “Change your sinful way, then I will come to you, and you will be good enough.”

Yet for some apparent reason, we, as Christians, continue to try to do this. Why? Why? Why? As you can tell, this makes me uber frustrated! Why can’t we love people as they are and bring a real Gospel to them that says, “You know what you, like me, are jacked up beyond what we can believe, and you can’t do anything on your own to clean yourself up, but my God says, ‘I love you anyway, and I’ll invade your world and give you the ability to break out of the rut you’ve been stuck in, through the life, death and resurrection of my very own son!” Can we get there? Or are we going to continue to push our morals on people who have absolutely no categories for them?

This brings me back to the post, The Liberated Puritan, it was interesting reading, because it breaks down the stereotype so many have against the puritans. It would appear he, Douglas Wilson, blows that up in looking at the earliest puritans who in his words had been slayed by the Gospel of grace and liberty not the Gospel of moralism and empty works!

How easily we forget! The potency of the Gospel is always seen best in what it does to old wineskins. Religious man, ethical man, always wants a certain kind of ecclesiastical doing and bustling about. This doing is always careful to color inside the lines, and to keep off the grass. But whenever the Gospel breaks forth in the church, slaying its thousands, one of the first casualties is simple moralism. In the Gospel of Christ, men are charged to repent of all their doings, and to be something other than what they are. This of course provokes the hostility of religious man because he is always in control of what he does, but only God can be sovereign over what a man is. The Gospel of grace is therefore obnoxious to such a man.

Hmmm… Strong words. There might be some disagreement with his words, but I see his words playing out in my life. See, before I left for college, I was the ethical/moral young man, who gazed down his nose at others who drank, smoke, fooled around with the opposite sex and more. College had (has) a way of undoing that to a degree, and I started to see myself slip away from my “moral self”, and it was in that season of life that the Gospel slayed me and I was free. However, something changed. As I became more and more entrenched into, what could be called, “The Christian Ghetto,” I found myself falling from the Gospel of grace and liberty and once again turning to a form of ‘baptized moralism.’ It’s this form of ‘baptized moralism’ that Wilson unpacks in the article. Generation, after generation something changed in the lives of the Puritans, they resorted to a mere moralism, which I can see happening in the life of a Christian within in a matter of a couple of years, not just a couple of generations.

Now please hear me, I’m not saying morals are bad, and I’m in no way endorsing license (going off and doing as we would like and then just dropping the ‘Grace card’ on sin and saying I’m forgiven!). Indeed, when we enter into a relationship with this God of grace and liberty holiness will naturally follow, in the process of sanctification. What I’m calling for is, us, as Christians, to bust out of pushing morals on people, and start getting grace in front of people! Thus, meeting them where they are at and allowing God to then change them! Oh I dream, long and pray for this of myself, my organization and the Bride of Christ, the Church! How would our lives look different? How would our organizations look different? How would our churches look different? How would others’ perceptions of Christians look different? Ultimately, how would the world look different? I will pray and dream to this end!

At this moment I’m laying down typing this on my iPod touch enjoying a beautiful sunset over the south Moravian landscape, which is amazingly beautiful! I’m at the Josiah Venture (a ministry in Eastern Europe that works primarily with youth) hotel and training center for a church planting conference with my friend Mike Gunn (Acts 29 int’l director, pastor in Seattle and former AIA staff guy who helped plant Mar’s Hill in Seattle) and thus far it’s been a blast! The conference starts in an hour but I’ve already had so much to think and pray about while interacting with Mike, who’s a dude! It’s been good. Mike has encouraged me with where I am and what I do know (working with AIA until God raises up Czechs to replace me and/ or says, “move on,” clearly to my director, Billy, and myself) but he also stokes the fires and encourages the dreams of planting churches in Prague, Czech and beyond I have for the future! This should be a cool next couple days. There will be current planters or perspective planters representing 7 European countries here, which is so cool! Well, I wanted to give you all a shout out from Moravia and also ask you to ask our Great God, who is the Chief Church Planter, to show up here in south-east Czech over the next couple of days. Please pray God gives me vision and excitement about what I’m doing now (how I’ve, to a degree, began planting, but in a “less than traditional” way than most) and what I feel He is calling and leading me to in the future here in Czech! Thanks! Off to dinner…

||DISCLAIMER|| So the intent of this post isn’t to upset people (Yeah, I know that is a great way to begin a post, bear with me here), but merely to ask questions, to get you and I thinking and ultimately to see the local church in each of our communities flourish. For those of you that are regular readers of this thing I call my blog you know my choice of writing style is random stream of consciousness, and for those of you who are new to my blog might have to get used to it. One of the reasons I’m writing in these random streams is because a lot of these thoughts are merely fluid, they are just kind of floating in the cerebral cortex that is my mind. I pray that this will add to or begin conversation and help us as believers consider the role of the local church in our lives and our communities. I do regret not having the ability for my readers to post comments, because I view this as a conversation that is on-going. I apologize about not having that ability for you. Well to the thoughts.

Upon moving back to the States for some time and having the initial support raising phase behind me has meant that I have had to get settled down for a period of time here in Xenia, OH. And that means I have had to decide which grocery store I would use, which garage I would use to get my car repaired and so on. But more importantly I have had to make a decision about the church that I would call home while I live here in Xenia.

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Last week I was blessed by my former boss, Curtis Riskey, the owner of Basic Books in Oshkosh, WI. Curtis is one of my favorite people! He seeks to resource and provide the means by which people can grow closer to the Lord by operating a Christian bookstore.

The great thing about Curtis is that he is aware of the crap that is coming out under the umbrella of Christian Consumerism. When I worked for Curtis I struggled mightily with stupid t-shirts that we sold (I’ll confess I even wore some, like the own that was the Volkswagen rip-off that said “Disciples Wanted” instead of “Drivers Wanted” and the VW logo was tweaked and turned into a cross), the scripture mints and the rest of the so-called “Jesus junk.”

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