What Would Jesus Buy

Wow.   This is a clip from the new movie from Morgan Spurlock, the Supersize Me guy.  I need to see this movie.  I think a lot of us need to see this movie.  

I found it online and watched about 30 minutes of it before the video froze on me.  A wonderful eye opening film.

Integrating Faith

My roommate has gotten laid off this last year. Twice. He worked a total of about 2 months. During the rest of time he sought God. God told him to wait and be patient. So, he took on more responsibility at the church (including leading youth group as well as going to Costa Rica), buying a house, buying a truck, and getting engaged. Quite a lot for one who is "waiting". Waiting isn't being passive and doing nothing. Waiting is actively serving, like a waiter in a restaurant. He waited on God, making sure he was pleasing him in everything that he did. While he was praying and waiting, God showed him how compartmentalized his life had been. Work in this corner, church in that corner. What God was trying to show him was how to integrate all areas of his life into one.



I was reminded of this challenge as I read this article today. Though dealing with college students, it is addressing integrating one’s faith into all areas of life; becoming “wholistic”. This is what I am picturing when I speak of an intentional community. Bringing all areas of one’s life under the lordship of Christ.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jesuscreed/2009/12/missional-campus-ministry-inte.html



I am reminded of a story I heard a few months ago. A teacher was talking with a preacher and asked how he could live out his faith without compromising his job. The preacher responded, “You can’t.” How did we get to the place in this country where we domesticate christianity; try to tame it and make it fit our plans and our expectations? We shouldn’t be worried about losing our jobs; we should be worried about losing our souls! What happened to putting first the Kingdom of God? Do we truly trust that God is looking out for our welfare? If we are truly His, then it isn’t our life anymore. We don’t have a say unless God graciously allows it. We are His, bought with a price. When are we going to realize that that we are citizen of heaven first and foremost before anything else in our lives? Our faith isn’t something we can put on the shelf as we go to work, or go into the voting booth, or go to school. It’s our identity. We are dead to ourselves and alive to Christ.



Thanks for letting me preach a minute there. It just deeply saddens me when I look at the state of the church in this country. We have forgotten what salvation is. Not merely a “get out of hell free card”, but an invitation to join with God in an amazing adventure of restoring His creation to its original glory. That starts now.

Gesundheit for the soul

So next semester I have to integrate both my majors into a semester long paper and presentation. Talking tonight over dinner, I got the idea to research and write about a "Gesundheit Institute" (Patch Adams) type of center for counseling; taking the intentional community vision as well as bringing in counseling aspects. Face it, we all have baggage. Would you much rather open up to a trusted friend that you know has your best interest in heart, or some stranger that while trained, has no invested interest in you personally. Personally I find a trusted friend, who mutually opens up their life, as much more valuable. Though being trained never hurts. And granted there is something to be said for the stranger aspect too. Bartenders and taxi drivers, for example get lots of confessions from strangers needing a listening ear. However, in those situations, the "counselor" is more in a friendship role; driving around with you, or pouring you a drink. I wonder what would happen if we intentionally broke down the barriers between counselor and counselee by inviting both to live side by side in the same community. Now I am not necessarily saying that they would live under one roof. What I am saying though is that we get beyond the idea that there is a wall of separation between professional and patient. A couple of years ago I remember studying how counselors aren’t advised to create friendships with their counselees. My question was why. Healing happens in the context of community; where every one is looking out for the interest of everyone else. Isn’t it the job of the counselor to foster those types of relationships, that kind of community? Along the same lines, why is self disclosure by the “counselee” frowned upon. Can’t healing happen both ways? Don’t we live through experiences for the benefit of helping others through similar traumatic experiences? At least that is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:3 – 4

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

It is this community of healing that I wish to write about next semester. It is also this community of healing I wish to help create this next year as we inch closer to opening up the house.

Long over due update

It's been too long since I have written anything.  From trying to finish up my last year of school, to coming down with H1N1, to just plain life, I haven't devoted the time and energy I would have liked to keeping this going.  Some changes are beginning to take my life and thus this blog in a little different direction.  Upon graduating this up coming May, I am helping to open up an intentional community.  A lot has to happen obviously between now and then.  At the moment I am getting ideas from other intentional communities that have gone before.  I hope to learn from their experiences and even build relationships.  I will be passing along articles, sites, and whatever else I feel is worth giving a look at. 

As for my blog.  It may be in it's last days.  I am looking at starting a site exclusively for the house in the upcoming months.  I am also thinking of starting a few other personal blogs.  The focus of this site has been all over the place.    I want to be a bit more intentional and narrow in purpose.  More on that latter.

Right now, I want to pass along this link.  A wonderful article outlining a few communities around the country.  http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=1399 

More reading

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/03/in_the_beginning/

Color adds freedom

Been doing some research and reading as I pray through launching this community.  Words I read this summer come to mind.  I spent some time diving into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Life Together".  A deep and profound book dealing with his experiences living in an intentional community.  Here's a sample:

 “To learn not merely to tolerate, but to delight in, the freedom of the other is not the maximal requirement for the Christian.  It is a minimal description of our utter faith in God’s ways…It means the recognition, indeed our delight, that God did not make others as I would have made them.  God did not give them to me so that I could dominate and control them, but so that I might find the Creator by means of them…God does not want me to mold others into the image that’s seems good to me, that is, into my own image.  Instead, in their freedom from me God made other people in God’s own image.”    

I am deeply grateful for the diversity that God created in humanity.  It allows for color and beauty that would not be available if we were all from the same cookie cutter.  In terms of christianity, I am privileged to be opening a door into a new and exciting and vastly different way of being the church.  May I learn from those that have gone through this door before me. Here is an article I came across written in the Boston Globe back in 2008 dealing with this new form of being the church.   http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/02/03/the_unexpected_monks/?page=1
 

Growing through criticism

Some interesting reads.  I love the when healthy dialogue challenges and grows a group of people further along the road.

http://www.geezmagazine.org/issue15/changing-the-story-of-change
http://www.geezmagazine.org/issue16/responding-to-changing-the-story-of-change

http://www.geezmagazine.org/issue16/harmonizing-without-homogenizing

http://www.geezmagazine.org/issue16/engage-messed-up-world-get-messy

What are New Monastics?

"... I am going to substitute the acronym NMI, the new monastic individual. NMIs... make up the class of people that belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of "unmonied aristocracy," free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called "work."They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism.
from Morris Berman, "The Twilight of American Culture" pp. 135-6 ---

Doors, dreams, and desicions

Something I have been praying about for awhile is joining or starting an intentional community house.  I have always pictured it being in an urban setting.  God may have other ideas.  There is an opportunity before me to start a new monastic community.  There is a missionary family that still owns a home in Michigan.  With the ecconomy the way it is, it makes sense for them to hang on to it till it becomes a sellers market.  In the mean time they are wanting to bless it those that have need for it.  A two story, 4 bedroom house for less than $100.  I am praying about using this house and property to enter into the crazy world of communal living.  The catch, like I said is that it is about an hour outside of Lansing.  Not the typical place new monastic communities arise.  But God loves the country folk too.  I hope to be able to check out the property in the next few weeks as well as start visiting churches in the area.  I am greatly excited, as this could be a huge oportunity for God to move in some exciting ways.  I am trying not to let my excitment run away from the obvious pratical matters that have to be ironed out.  God lead me.  Bring people that have the same vision for this house as you do.