Charlie Wear’s Notes

I confess, I am a refugee from “normal” church. I haven’t attended regular church services for some time. I’m not against regular services, you understand, I just haven’t been able to connect for a number of years now. One of the main reasons for this is that I am easily bored. 

I’m not enamored of what I will call “packaged” preaching. You know, “Three Steps for a Better You,” “Finding your Ministry Purpose,” or “Getting Debt-Free through Stewardship.” I’m not saying that these sermons aren’t helpful to many. They just don’t do it for me.

In the early 80s I faithfully attended services at a church where the second the pastor began to preach I was overcome by incipient narcolepsy, at least that’s what I think it was. My wife was constantly poking me to wake me up, stop my snoring, and to wipe the drool off my chin. In the mid-90s I was an accidental pastor and saw the results of my own preaching! I could put ‘em to sleep with the best!

I don’t believe that preaching is dead, I just believe that “good” preaching is hard to find. This is why Monday was such a good day for me. Next-Wave editor, Scott Bane, is a church planting pastor in Indiana. He is not preaching on a regular basis yet, but over the last couple of weeks he was in South Africa preaching at a “camp” meeting. He sent me the links to his talks on Monday. And I listened to all of them in one day, as I traveled from here to there.

Wow! Now that is what I have been missing, powerful Biblical preaching that proclaims the truth about God. I think I may have been born again, again! Of course, what do I expect? When the Holy Spirit is communicating the heart of God through a person that is yielded to be a conduit to His voice, the preaching has the power to change lives. That’s the kind of preaching we need more of, that’s for sure.

If I want to keep my finger on the pulse of “trends to watch” in the emerging church, all I need to do is check in on Andrew Jones blog, or his twitter feed. He’s posted an insightful review of an Emerging Church panel discussion at the Christian Book Expo.

How does he keep up on all of this stuff whilst travelling through Europe with his family in a converted truck-RV? I wish I knew!

Andrew twitters about permaculture, and I have to go to wikipedia to get a definition:

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in the natural ecologies. It was first developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and their associates during the 1970s in a series of publications. The word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture, as well as permanent culture.

OooooooKaaaaay…but why is this important? What are the implications?

From the wikipedia article:

Modern permaculture is a system design tool. It is a way of:

• looking at a whole system or problem;
• observing how the parts relate;
• planning to mend sick systems by applying ideas learnt from long-term sustainable working systems;
• seeing connections between key parts.

¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:15-19 NIV)

So, the apostle Paul can’t do what he wants to do. Yikes! I love life, it’s living that I find hard from time to time. I remember John Wimber preaching on the fruits of the Spirit. He used to say something like this: “I remember when I was a boy growing up in Orange County (California). When it was springtime and the blossoms were on the trees you could walk through the groves and hear the trees groaning and moaning, trying to produce fruit.” After making this statement, delivered with a particularly straight face, he would then lean on the pulpit and put that big smile on his face, and just look at the congregation. Then, for those of us too dense to understand, he would explain that orange trees do not have to groan to produce fruit, it comes forth naturally and with no effort.

I think his point was you can’t be good by trying, straining, or whipping yourself with a wet noodle. It is only through the grace of God that we find salvation through Jesus. And boy, do I need grace. I guess the problem is that our DNA is bad. Paul calls it our sinful nature, our flesh. Apparently we need an injection of spiritual stem cells to turn our lives around.

I guess the hard lesson for me is this: no matter how much I moan or groan, I can’t live rightly through my own power. And then here is the rest of it: I can’t influence how much of Christ lives in me. At least that is how it feels. I can only throw my entire dependence on him. I guess this is a good weekend to think about these things and to fall at the cross, one more time, repent, and “become born again, again.”

Cooperative Friends of Jesus, Living Lives of Creative Goodness, For the Sake of Others, Through the Power of the Spirit — Todd Hunter from pps. 153-155 Christianity Beyond Belief by Todd Hunter

Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace…
Don’t Mondays just seem like this sometimes?

The Brewer Boys covering Big and Rich

From Missions Misunderstood:

Everyone’s traditional. Some of us just start new ones rather than following someone else’s. There are consequences to the tradition of pragmatism. You might be seeing “results” with the way you’re doing things but consider this:

• If people come to faith through confrontational, guilt-trip evangelism, they’re coming to a confrontational, guilt-trip faith.
• If your church’s myopic focus on Biblical knowledge makes it more lecture hall than place of worship, you’re likely going to get a bunch of armchair Reformation theologians and wanna-be ancient Greek scholars who are more concerned with being right than anything else.
• If you allow your church to get so large that it’s a challenge to really know everyone (anyone) else in that local body, (versus starting smaller, more local gatherings,) you are discipling your people into a less personal expression of Christianity and, therefore, a less personal view of Jesus. [Pragmatic argument:] Of course, relational church can happen in your megachurch (through small groups, cliques, informal social circles, etc.), but as you add programs and square-footage, it begins to happen in spite of how you do church, not because of how you do church.
• If your church is mired in legalism, it won’t last. Legalistic religious people eventually can’t keep up with their legalisms. To them, God is only pleased with an impossibly demanding cycle of performance. They usually end up abandoning their “faith” or isolating themselves for fear of secular contamination.
• If your church worships worship, your people might not learn to worship God. At the very least, they could be left unable to worship without a worship band and Mediashout® video backgrounds. Believers need to learn to worship, learn, serve, and share without the help of the professionals who make their livings by (intentionally or otherwise) perpetuating dependence.
• If your church sits in grandstands with the lights dimmed, staring at a jumbo-tron, don’t be surprised if they act like spectators.

Check out Ed Stetzer’s interview with Alan Hirsch, author of ReJesus.