Public discourse clearly belongs on the endangered species list.  We are losing the ability to have genuine, open dialogue about issues of any significance—and it seems to me that we Christians are hastening the slide of the species.

On this past study break, I took several thousand prayer cards from Chase Oakers with me.  For the first time, several of those cards were from undocumented people living in our area and who are part of our church.  One asked that I pray for them, that they feel so scared and misunderstood:  they want to work, be productive, and aren’t here to take anything.  As I prayed, I realized as a shepherd of the church, I needed to find out more about the immigration issues our country is facing.

That led me to a really great book, called Welcoming the Stranger, that discusses the issue from a biblical, political, and historical perspective.  Very well done.  After reading it, and realizing this is a complex issue that needs transformation on all sides, I mentioned it to a pastor friend from out-of-state who said, “Just don’t talk about it at Chase Oaks.”

When I asked why, my friend was just warning me.  Talking about a hot issue like immigration right now is like a death sentence.  People are far too hyped up on all sides of the issue to have an objective conversation.

I wanted to disagree with him, but he is right.  We are losing the ability to have real dialogue about this or any other significant issue.  At some point, people stopped listening to each other. We posture, position, and carefully nuance what we are saying.  Most just react to what they think the other side is saying, which typically is not what the other side is trying to say.

As believers, how we communicate is at least as important as what we communicate.  Finding biblical support for that statement is hardly difficult.  How cool would it be for Christ-followers to be known for a different kind of dialogue, one that is open, informed, intelligent, and fair.

I’m a newbie on this immigration issue, and I have nothing yet to offer.  The issue is complex.  But I have been a Christ-follower for awhile, and I hope that we can be salt and light in the way that we dialogue and debate about this or any other issue.

Of all the possible conditions of the wind and sea, among the most dreaded are the doldrums—when the winds are nowhere to be found. I’m on a sailing vacation now that we take with friends and family every few years, and today we encountered just such a day. I’m on anchor as I write, praying for the wind to freshen so that it won’t be such a stuffy evening.  The boat seems confused, slowly circling the anchor as if waiting for direction.  To have put the sails up earlier in the day would have been wasted effort. The doldrums make for dull days and stuffy nights on a sail boat. 

The same is true in the Christian journey without the fresh wind of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual doldrums perhaps describe most believers. In the book of Acts, Paul ran across some former followers of John the Baptist, and he asked them if they had the Spirit. They replied that they didn’t even know what he was talking about.

I wonder how many believers are living Spiritless lives—trapped in the doldrums of self- effort.

In light of that, I believe it is time for a fresh dose of the Spirit wind at Chase Oaks. When I return from study break and the New Zealand conference, we are starting a series on the Holy Spirit, how to set the sails of our lives to capture and live by His power.

My guess is that tomorrow the usually dependable trade winds will pick up once again, and that will be exciting. My prayer is that in this new series God will blow on us in a fresh and powerful way as we open our lives to Him. That will be infinitely more exciting.

I recently said goodbye to Chase Oaks for a few weeks as I enter into study break and vacation. I’m looking forward to both, but I am already looking forward to returning. I love our church, and I hate to miss out on what I know God will do during The Pursuit series that Drew is teaching and what God will do in and through the church in general. I know it is healthy for me to unplug, but right now I hate to do so!

I’ve had a love interest in the local church for a long time, and trust me, I know how messed up local churches can be. I’ve not always been engaged in healthy ones, and none of them even come close to perfection.  A couple of times in my life I was even disillusioned with the concept.

When I was a teenager, I was involved with a group of college and high school students who started a parachurch ministry focused on discipleship and evangelism. We were deeply committed to our own growth, toward each other, and toward outreach. At the same time, most of us were all involved in the same local church. As the ministry grew in numbers and intensity, we soon noticed how the church was not growing in numbers or intensity—and that the church seemed very content with that reality. People were coming to Christ and growing rapidly in the faith in our ministry, and not much of anything like that seemed to be happening in the church. It seemed to us that if the church closed its doors that day, that no one in the community would even know the difference.

As we looked around our city, we couldn’t find a church that seemed to defy the reality of our own. In our youthful idealism, we soon came to the conclusion that the church in America was asleep, and it was our job to wake it up—or else God would come in judgment.

We started writing a monthly paper called “The Tablets of Clay,” from Habakkuk 2:2, “Inscribe the warning on tablets of clay, so those who read it may run.” We also had a quarterly mailer called, “The Wailing,” the name of which should give you the drift. I was in charge of the mailing list, and we sent them out to the membership of all the evangelical churches in town. I also wrote several of those articles.

Over time, we became increasingly disillusioned with the local church and increasingly impressed with ourselves. And God was using the ministry. People were coming to Christ. We were all growing in the faith. Yet, our heart was growing away from the local church as our criticisms escalated. Many in our ministry pretty much left the church, while I and a number of others stayed engaged.

The Christmas of my junior year in high school found me in Breckenridge, Colorado, on a ski vacation with my family. One evening, I walked outside with my Bible and a flashlight to find a quiet place in the snow-filled woods to spend some time with God. I found a clearing where I could see the full moon and stars above the trees, and opened my Bible. During that month, I had been reading in Exodus, and I opened to the story of Moses coming down from the mountain, after receiving the law from God. In those 40 days of Moses’ absence, the people make a golden calf, a huge idol. God speaks to Moses before his trip down the mountain and says, “These people have already turned away from me. I am going to let my anger burn against them and destroy them, and start over with you. From you I will make a great nation.”

As I read God’s words, I thought, “What if God said, ‘What if I wipe out the church in America, that is nothing but asleep, and start over again with groups like yours all around the country.” I wouldn’t want anyone to die, but short of that, I would have said, “Go for it!”

But Moses doesn’t. He reminds God of his promises to Israel, of Israel’s special place in the divine plan. He intercedes for the people of God, and as a result, God turns aside his anger.

Then it hit me. I was fighting against what God was building. Jesus said, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” I realized I was tearing down what God’s spirit was working to build up. As messed up as churches can get, it was still the vehicle God had chosen.

I came back to a meeting of our organization, and announced that I could no longer be part of the group. I shared a little of the above paragraph, how it seemed to me that we were working against what God was building. The leader of the ministry opened the door and said that if I go I should go ahead and leave now—and he added that once that door closed behind me, it was closed forever. That was tough. He was the one God had used to spark spiritual fervor and devotion. But I walked out that door. A few years later, we did reconnect and work through all that, but that was no easy evening.

Since then, I’ve devoted my life to be part of building healthy, missional churches. For most of those years, I’ve had the privilege of being at Chase Oaks. And through working with the Center for Church-Based Training, I’ve had the opportunity to support and encourage hundreds of churches around the country and all over the world.

In all that, I have learned to love the local church. In all of our imperfection, God chooses to use us. The brokenness of the church is actually part of its beauty. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, God chooses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise. Even when I’ve been involved in churches that were really struggling, I could see the Spirit at work.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m committed to doing all I can to help churches be effective. The mission demands nothing less than that. When churches don’t work well, they can do lots of harm.

But when churches work well—not perfectly, but well—there is nothing so beautiful and powerful as God working through His body to fulfill His redemptive mission. That’s why I’m struggling with leaving. I’m going to be with God, to have more time to pray, to think, to prepare, to plan. These next few weeks are the most significant of the year.  I know that.  At the same time though, I’m a little jealous for those who get to stay.

I am just returning from a trip to Israel, and the trip went really well. Beyond all the incredible sites and experiences, we had a really great crew of people on the tour. People got along, served each other, and contributed to the whole group having great connections with God and history. It was so fun not only to travel but to do so with such great people.

I feel the same way now at Chase Oaks. For the few weeks before Israel, I had the privilege of meeting with all of our leaders in small groups to interact about this next phase of ministry at Chase Oaks. Those meetings, combined with other meetings and church services, kept me out every evening for those weeks.

People asked me if I was going on the trip totally exhausted. It was hard on my family, but the times themselves with leaders were invigorating. What an incredible group of leaders we have, which makes for a great trip!  Ministry should be godly, effective, and fun.  I’m coming back home with great anticipation of this next leg of the journey, thankful for so many who keep it that way.

The other day I was able to watch one of our ministry teams at Chase Oaks in action.  They performed their ministry so well, but what struck me most was not the ministry but was this group of “ministers,” people who represent the wide variety of people who are Chase Oaks. Knowing their stories, it was a beautiful picture of God’s redemptive mercy, of his power to transform lives.

In the group was a person I counseled some years ago, who had just tried to end her own life a couple of days before.  She was so despondent and hopeless at the time, yet she has met the God of Hope, and she was now radiant with joy.  A couple in the group divorced some years ago after an affair, but now they are back together as a married couple and doing better than ever. Another of the group is a recovering crystal meth addict, who was next to a recovering alcoholic…both of whom are doing life well by the grace of God.  Still another is a person I’ve known some time to be just a cantankerous person, but God is working on him.  He’s on a path toward increasing graciousness in his life.

I could go on with other examples, but what a cool mosaic, all these stories showing the power of God’s redemptive love.  Recently I was in California, at a church leader conference called Catalyst.  They showed a short movie about an artist who takes old x-ray films and paints on them. At one point, someone nervously looked at the films to see what was wrong, where the brokenness was.  She is now taking those pictures of brokenness and creating something really beautiful.  That’s a great picture of what God does in our lives. Over time, He chooses us in our brokenness and by His grace He paints this beautiful picture. For this artist, when she picks x-ray films, the more broken the better, and 1 Corinthians lets us know that God chooses the same way. He chooses the foolish, the broken, to display His glory.

This past week I spent some hours doing genealogical research trying to substantiate Indian ancestry, hoping my great, great granddad, a Cherokee Indian, had signed his names in the Dawes Rolls that would make our kids eligible for college scholarships at certain schools. The good news is that I did track him down. The bad news is the goober didn’t sign up. No scholarships for my kids who are 1/32nd Cherokee.

In the process of doing the research, what emerged was a picture of life for my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents very different than my own life story. People were poor by comparison. On my great grandparent’s farm, 34 people lived on the same piece of land. My grandparents raised kids through the depression.

My dad’s generation, the post-war baby-boomers, stepped into a world of opportunity and with a lot of hard work and global dynamics completely out of their control, formed the longest lasting bubble of economic growth and prosperity in our history. Within that bubble, every parent assumed that their children would have even more opportunities than they had. I grew up in that bubble. The problem with bubbles though is that they inevitably burst.

We are now the burst bubble generation, still waiting to see what life will be like over these next thirty years. Most of us are still in some early grief stage of the bubble years, whether shock, denial, or anger. Many of us still have a sense of entitlement and expectation that life will be a certain way, though it may be impossible for an economy to supply that. The bubble just got too inflated. Our expectations inflated even more.

So now, we are trying to make sense of it all. As a Christ-follower, we know that God is the one in complete control, and we look to him as our provider. Post-bubble life will be just fine, in fact in many ways it will be better than before. We can also rejoice that we live in a culture where many are about to leave the stages of denial, shock, and anger toward acceptance of the new. In that will be a huge search for grounding, for meaning, for possibility, for something bigger—in other words, a search for God.

I felt very honored recently to be invited to a small group of church, parachurch, and business leaders to have an open dialogue about the future—about what is ahead and how are we going to respond. Some of my favorite people were there, and it was a great experience. Yet, I was struck by how dim the future can look. The psychology of our era is a dim-future psyche, which was reflected by all of us who are leaders in Christianity seeking to be faithful to lead our organizations well.

I left feeling very disturbed, not by the future, but by my dim view of it. Jesus is after all very much in control, and he can’t lose. Not only that, while we can easily see a multitude of problems and challenges as we look at such things as economics, global developments, natural disasters, the environment and technology, why can’t we more easily see the myriad of opportunities?

The day was a kick in the pants for me to shift perspective. My hope is not in circumstances anyway (or shouldn’t be), and the Gospel is a powerful thing. We are called to be part of God’s redemptive, Kingdom work, which is always progressing.

So, my prayer is that I will shift from problem-mode to opportunity-mode from defense to offense. The truth is, the future is extremely bright. So, let’s go for it—living a Kingdom-focused life, with our hope in Him, and our preoccupation being his redemptive mission!

As Christ-followers, we are committed to compassion and justice, which means that in a world of ubiquitous need and rampant injustice we have plenty to keep us busy. That’s always been true, but the hyper-information era we live in means that our generation is more aware than any other Christian generation in history of what actually is happening.

Wonderfully, the emerging generations of Christ-followers are even more aware and actively engaged in the real issues in our communities and around the globe. That’s all good. As a pastor of a fairly activistic church though I do have a growing concern—the sustainability of this wave of engagement. Will this surge sustain itself or be a fading fad?

What I do know is that mere emotion won’t sustain itself. You can only respond emotionally to need a finite amount of times before you get emotionally flat, before you are spent. You can only sacrifice so much financially, expend so much of your time, upset so much of your lifestyle based on emotional appeal alone.

A few mornings ago I woke up early to meet Carlos, a child I mentor, at 7:00 am before school. Last year when we first started meeting together waking up a little earlier was exciting. Starting out, I could already imagine his high school graduation valedictorian speech where he says, “I was heading down a road to nowhere, until my mentor stepped in when I was in 5th grade, and then everything changed. Now I’m going to change the world!” Yet, now we are months into the relationship, and he is a cool kid—but real progress seems sluggishly slow. The original emotion has long sense faded, and even though I like our time together, getting up is much harder now than it was at the beginning.

Mere emotional motivation will die out, and compassion fatigue will set in—which is why the only way this wave will really sustain itself is with a much deeper motivation and connection. Motivated by a love for Christ, a commitment to his mission, and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we can sustain a lifetime of compassion. Without that deeper motivation, we’re looking at a fad.

Christ doesn’t only call us to activism. He also calls us to abiding. I’m convicted as a pastor that I can too easily talk about bearing fruit without giving equal emphasis to abiding as part of the vine, as Jesus said:

“No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine, and you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers…” John 15:4-6

If we remain, or stay connected to the vine, we will bear fruit. We will be activistic. Yet, trying to bear fruit without a sustaining connection to the vine is futile. Our activism will wither.

So, let’s stay connected. Let’s draw our life and momentum and love from his Spirit. Let’s give attention to a relationship with God that is real and vibrant and life-giving. That deeper union will sustain genuine compassion and guide our response to every new need we encounter. It will also keep compassion from being a fading fad.

I’ve been married for 20+ years now, and I am amazed every year that my wife is more and more beautiful every year. When we got married, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be more beautiful than she was at that moment, but she keeps upping the power of my imagination every year. She is indeed beautiful, and the object of my deep affection. Jesus describes the church that way, as his bride, the object of his affection. Through his redeeming love, he is also at work helping his bride live into her potential, to become more radiant, more loving, more beautiful over time. If you’ve been wounded by church in the past, then understanding that reality may be difficult. Yet, when you see the church really being the church, really working, there is just nothing more beautiful than the love and redemptive power of Christ expressed through the local church to change lives and change communities.

A few weeks ago I saw a glimpse of Jesus’ beautiful bride. I had the privilege of sitting in on a small meeting of global church leaders discussing Haiti, and one of those presenting was Wes Stafford, the President of Compassion International. He certainly told of the devastation in that country, but also how brightly the love of Christ is shining through his church out of those dark circumstances. He shared how local churches there on their own, from the very beginning, been pooling their food and water and other resources together to care for their neighbors. Even though they did not have enough themselves, they pooled everything they had together and began to share with those who were in dire need. He described how beautiful of a picture is the church in action in Haiti.

The truth is, relief organizations are greatly needed, but they cannot do what the indigenous local churches can do. Those churches are there, all the time, and they will not leave when the flurry of emotion goes away or another need arises in some other part of the world. They were there loving people before, and they will stay long after. That’s why Compassion chooses to do most of their aid through local churches in the areas they serve, which also matches the philosophy and commitment of Chase Oaks.

So, as you pray for Haiti, be sure to pray for the churches there. They are serving needs, loving people, and as a result many are coming to know Christ. But they are also hurting too. Their homes have crumbled, they are mourning the loss of family and friends, and they are trying to figure out how to live life in the aftermath, even as they focus on helping others. Pray that they will not grow weary in well-doing, and that God will continue to supply all they need.

Lately a question has haunted me: How did we as Jesus followers get so far away from the heart of the one we profess to follow? Recently I heard an evangelical Christian describe his experiences as a guest on John Stewart’s Daily Show. He was surprised to learn that day that this particular show is the #1 source of news for people under age 30. Scary! He was also surprised by the thousands of emails he received from young people all over the country.

On the show, he described Jesus’ commitment to the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable—and how anyone who claims to follow Jesus can only back up the claim by living the same way. The emails he received all basically said the same thing: I had no idea that you could be a Christian and care about the poor. What?!

We’ve come a long way, baby—but the wrong way! American church history shows the split decades ago between the social gospel embraced by liberal Christians and the personal relationship with Jesus gospel embraced by conservatives. The liberals were engaged with the social needs of the day, and the conservatives very busy helping individuals begin a relationship with God.

With Jesus of course there was no split between these two. In fact, he said of his own coming: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. The gospel that he brought was good news to the poor and the oppressed, which means that the gospel we profess is only the gospel when it begins to be good news to the poor and oppressed. As people begin a relationship with God through faith in Christ, they as his followers take on his heart for the vulnerable. This is why at the final judgment Jesus will ask, “What did you do for the least of these?” The sign of real belief will be how people respond to the least of these.

Somehow my circle of evangelical Christians missed this memo, but what I see happening is God changing that, stirring in his church. What a great thing that churches who care very much to share with others how they can have a relationship with God through faith in Christ are also translating that new relationship into care for those God cares for and so identifies with.

As Jesus followers, we have no choice but to follow his lead here. God calls us to use whatever influence and energy we have for the sake of the poor and the oppressed, to make the gospel good news for them in some unique way.

So as a church, we must care about the powerless, the poor, the marginalized, and the vulnerable. We do all we can in Jesus’ name to take up the cause of the impoverished around the world, the unborn, those trapped in human trafficking, and the many millions suffering with or orphaned by the AIDS crisis.

Recently I received some emails with people assuming I must be a political liberal for talking about such things. And again it makes me ask, “How did we get this far from our Savior?” We talk about such things because we are followers of Jesus, who at the end of it all will ask, “What did you do for the least of these?”