Dear Latvia Prayer Team,
Labdien! (which means, "Good Day"). We arrived safely with all our luggage intact. We were greeted immediately by the Lloyd family who took us to our hotel in Old Town Riga. We spent the evening with the Lloyds for a time of fellowship and orientation.
On Sunday, our day began at Vilandes Baptist Church with fellowship followed by adult sunday school which was well attended. Nicole shared a message on identity in Christ and Leslie shared a testimony; missionaries from Brazil talked with Nicole in Spanish about the lesson. At the church service that followed, Virginia and Lori gave their testimony, which was translated in Latvian by our interpreter; several people came up to them afterward and said how much the testimonies had meant to them.
It turned out that four girls and two boys who Kathy had spent time with on previous mission trips at the orphanage traveled to the church to meet us. Nicole, Kathy, and Leslie had an impromptu Sunday School with the girls. The whole group spent the rest of the day with all of the orphans and three young translators. We went to a museum that chronicles the history of all the occupations of Latvia (giving us great insight into the Latvian culture). We then took the whole gang to dinner at Lidos and had a wonderful dinner, followed by presenting the girls with individual photo albums of the previous visits and handmade jewelry beaded by Lori's mom, a former IMB missionary. Please pray for the orphans, as many are searching for God's reality in their lives. Pray for some consistent discipleship for these orphans.
The evening ended with a conversation that Teresa and Lori had with a man from Norway who professed to be an agnostic. They planted a seed which concluded with Teresa's asking him about why he was an agnostic and suggesting that he consider reading the book The Case for Christ. Please pray specifically for this businessman who is searching for answers.
For tomorrow, please pray for Nicole's Grace Life presentation to the Agape Latvia staff and for her parenting seminar that evening. Pray that many non-Christians from the neighborhood will attend the parenting seminar and that many lives would be changed. Pray also for the other team members who will be leading the children's activities which include games, crafts, and evangelism.
More to come. Thank you for your prayers!
To God's Glory,The Latvia Mission Team
The political rise of evangelical Christian groups is hardly a secret to most Americans after the 2004 election, but Phillips brings together an enormous range of information from scholars and journalists and presents a remarkably comprehensive and chilling picture of the goals and achievements of the religious right.Br-r-r! It’s a nice ghost story. But after Kirkpatrick's piece this past Sunday, how will the Left give each other goosebumps on Halloween?
I found myself wondering how abortion will be viewed by museum curators, teachers, historians and moralists 200 years from now.
As the slavery exhibition shows, something that one generation accepts readily enough is often seen as abhorrent by its descendants – so abhorrent, in fact, that people find it almost impossible to understand how it could have been countenanced in a supposedly civilized society.
How could people not see that Africans should not be bought and sold for the convenience of our trade or our domestic life? We reserve particular scorn for those who sought to justify slavery on moral grounds. We look at the moral blindness of the past, and tut-tut, rather complacently.
It is not hard to imagine how a future Museum of London exhibition about abortion could go. It could buy up a 20th-century hospital building as its space, and take visitors round, showing them how, in one ward, staff were trying to save the lives of premature babies while, in the next, they were killing them.
Come, ye sinners, poor and needy,__________________________________
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love and pow’r.Refrain:Come, ye thirsty, come, and welcome,
I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
Oh, there are ten thousand charms.
God’s free bounty glorify;
True belief and true repentance,
Every grace that brings you nigh.
Come, ye weary, heavy-laden,
Lost and ruined by the fall;
If you tarry till you’re better,
You will never come at all.
View Him prostrate in the garden;
On the ground your Maker lies;
On the bloody tree behold Him;
Sinner, will this not suffice?
Lo! th’ incarnate God ascended,
Pleads the merit of His blood:
Venture on Him, venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.
TrustWe’ve already looked at the first two struggles in previous editions of LeaderLines. So, what about our culture’s struggle with truth?
Tolerance
Truth
Brokenness
Aloneness
What we find is that people who are not on a search for ‘what’s true’ are still on a search for ‘what’s life-giving.’ We challenge people to live ‘as if’ God and his words were true and to see if it doesn’t produce in their lives something better than they have right now. . . . This is not to say we believe truth is only pragmatic. It just means that God’s truth is pragmatic, and we can’t fail to explain how faith works practically, because this is partially how emerging generations approach finding truth.Rational truth. It’s a myth that people in our culture no longer have an interest in linear thinking and propositional presentations. In fact, Burke has found that people appreciate a well-structured apologetic, such as how Jesus fulfilled the many Old Testament prophecies. As we communicate truth to our community, we can’t depend on these rational defenses of the faith alone, but that doesn’t mean we can’t depend on them at all.
Recently, J.K. Rowling announced to the world that one of her characters, the heroic mentor of Harry Potter, Dumbledore, was gay.Reynolds says this objection doesn't have anything to do with his Christian views of homosexuality:
Nonsense. There is no evidence of it in the books and the books (at this point) are all that matter. I have always thought the books deeply Christian not because Rowling told me so (which she recently confirmed), but because the text is full of Christian images and ideas. She had a chance to give Dumbledore a boyfriend, but she muffed it. I refuse to denigrate friendship by reading every close one as sexual . . . and she gave us nothing else.
No offense to an excellent author, but Dumbledore no longer belongs only to Rowling. He also belongs to her readers who have been given a series of books in which Rowling was free to say what she wanted to say. She wrote about Christianity openly by Book Seven, but if Dumbledore was gay, she decided to hide it. She hid it so well that there is no evidence of it.
At this point it is too late for Rowling to change the text. She cannot decide to kill Harry now . . . or announce that Harry is actually a vampire, a member of the Tory party, or antidisestablishmentarian. She wrote what she wrote and now it belongs to us.
Lest one think that I say this only because homosexuality bothers me, then let me compare it to another situation. Suppose that Rowling now claimed that Dumbledore and Minerva McGonagall had a passionate relationship. Since there is no reason in the text to know this is true, or to find it relevant to the story arc as we have it, Rowling’s opinions of the headmaster’s heterosexual affairs matter very little in terms of understanding the books as they are. There is as much evidence of this (after all) as of Dumbledore’s homosexuality.Likewise, John Cloud at Time isn't at all happy with this revelation. To him, a gay man, the fact that Rowling failed to make Dumbledore's sexual orientation sufficiently clear in the book means that he is not a sufficiently acceptable role model:
When J.K. Rowling announced at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbdledore—her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda—was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. Dumbledore himself never saw fit to come out of the closet before dying in book six. And I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: You are not quite the role model I'd hoped for as a gay man.Rebecca Traister at Salon laments that this Dumbledore "revelation" by the author after the books have been completed is just one more sign of how Rowling has become too "chatty" about her book's characters. Traister says she's leaving nuance behind and eliminating any room for readers to imagine for themselves the backstory (and future developments).
. . .
Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words—"I'm gay"—to help define a central character's emotional identity? We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful and inappropriate to mention among his colleagues and students. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.
For you, there'll be no more crying,__________________________________
For you, the sun will be shining,
And I feel that when I'm with you,
It's alright, I know it's right
To you, I'll give the world
To you, I'll never be cold
cause I feel that when I'm with you,
It's alright, I know it's right.
And the songbirds are singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before.
And I wish you all the love in the world,
But most of all, I wish it from myself.
And the songbirds keep singing,
Like they know the score,
And I love you, I love you, I love you,
Like never before, like never before.
TrustWe looked at the struggle with trust last week. This week, let’s look at another cultural struggle: tolerance—and our community’s perception that we lack it. The only way to successfully address this issue as Christian leaders is to welcome people as they are and lead them to where they need to be. We expect others to do that with areas of rebellion that we’re still struggling with as Christian leaders, so we need to extend that dual effort to others: acceptance “as is,” and yet encouragement to press toward life as it is meant to be.
Tolerance
Truth
Brokenness
Aloneness
During the first two years of Gateway’s existence, I consistently was asked two questions by spiritual seekers more than any other questions: “What do you think of other religions?” And “How do you feel about gay people?” I’ve discovered the real question they are asking is: “Are you one of the narrow-minded, bigoted, hate-filled, intolerant types of Christians I’ve heard about?” What they really want to know is whether we promote love or hatred. The connection may not seem obvious, but it is critical to understand if you want to communicate effectively.Sadly, while our community insists on tolerance, we all need so much more than that. “Our culture diets on the candy of tolerance,” Burke observes, “but what it really craves is the meat of grace. . . . Tolerance alone cannot accommodate both justice and mercy -- it can only look the other way.”
The uniqueness of Christianity boils down to this one word: Grace. . . . But if you interview people on the street, few, if any, associate Christianity or church with anything closely resembling grace. What they feel is law: zero tolerance, judgment, and condemnation. Why doesn’t the church utilize its greatest asset?The reality is that God is a tolerant God. Paul asks in Romans 2:4, “Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?” But God does so much more than patiently put up with our failures: he extends grace to forgive them. “If we are to re-present God through the church,” Burke reminds us, “we must exhibit far more than tolerance. We too must show grace.”
1:00 pm Session 1 (John Burke)"Doing Ministry With and For Messy People"Sign up here.
2:00 pm Break. Refreshments in garage. Building open for "Exploring"
2:15 pm Ministry Roundtables (staff)"Come as you are..."Preacing3:15 pm Break. Refreshments in garage. Building open for "exploring"
Worship/Programming
Small Groups
Discipleship
Community Involvement
Children/Youth
3:30 pm Q & A with John & Staff
4:30 p.m Dismiss
Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).… Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.Or again, a short sentence from him jotted on a photo of him standing on a roof and looking over an Iraq city: "We carry a new world in our hearts."
One thing I have learned about myself since I've been out here is that everything I professed to you about what I want for the world and what I am willing to do to achieve it was true. …As Hitchens says, "If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark . . . it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one."
My desire to "save the world" is really just an extension of trying to make a world fit for you.
As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.Hear, hear.
All your twisted thoughts free flow_________________________________________________
To everlasting memories
Show soul
Kiss the stars with me
And dread the wait for
Stupid calls returning us to life
We say to those who are in love
It can't be true 'cause we're too young
I know that's true because
so long I was
So in love with you
So I thought
A year goes by
And I can't talk about it
On my knees
Dim lighted room
Thoughts free flow try to consume
Myself in this
I'm not faithless
Just paranoid of getting lost or that I might lose
Ignorance is bliss cherish it
Pretty neighborhoods
You learn to much to hold
Believe it not
And fight the tears
With pretty smiles and lies
About the times
A year goes by
And I can't talk about it
The times weren't right
And I couldn't talk about it
Chorus Romance says goodnight
Close your eyes and I'll close mine
Remember you, remember me
Hurt the first, the last, between
Chorus Romance says goodnight
Close your eyes and I'll close mine
Remember you, remember me
Hurt the first, the last, between
And I'm praying that we will see
Something there in between
Then and there that exceeds all we can dream
So we can talk about it
[guitar solo]
Chorus Romance says goodnight
Close your eyes and I'll close mine
Remember you, remember me
Hurt the first, the last, between
Chorus Romance says goodnight
Close your eyes and I'll close mine
Remember you, remember me
Hurt the first, the last, healing
And I'm praying that we will see
Something there in between
Then and there that exceeds all we can dream
And all these twisted thoughts I see
Jesus there in between
And all these twisted thoughts I see
Jesus there in between
Trust,Let’s look at the issue of trust in this week’s LeaderLines. Many adults, especially those in their 30s and early 40s, struggle with the issue of trust because of deep childhood disappointments in those they depended on.
Tolerance,
Truth,
Brokenness, and
Aloneness
In my experience, adults affected by these trends will not necessarily connect them with their struggles to trust today. Just as children and adult alcoholics never knew there always-drunk father had a problem, in the same way, what we grow up with becomes ‘normal’ for us. The resulting wounds of distrust fester, however, and they affect our ability to trust others and God.So, how to we as leaders help people trust again? We give people room to explore, and we live a life of authentic humility.
Because of all the baggage and lack of trust in our post-Christian world, people need to be engaged in dialogue. . . . If they listen to the message in church, they want to process it. They need to question it and wrestle with it.Of course, this means trusting God’s Spirit to lead and guide you as you interact with people. We need to boldly challenge people with the gospel and its implications, but always respecting and loving all people as the Father does, despite their response.
It requires letting go of the need to fix, change, or control others’ beliefs or actions. It requires trusting that God’s Spirit can work behind the scenes in people’s hearts as we create a culture where they are free to question, doubt, and explore faith at their own pace. This shifts the burden to change people back where it belongs -- with God alone.Once we relieve ourselves of the thought that we have to “fix” people, we’re free to simply share our story, ask our questions of their stories, gently raise things for them to consider, and watch for how God is moving them to a greater trust in him.
When you create a culture to deal with these painful issues of trust openly, with sincerity and honesty, you begin to see two things. First, you will hear more and more stories of wounds like this that once remained hidden and festering. But you’ll also hear increasing numbers of stories of God’s healing work as people are brought into the light.We’re seeing more and more of that at Hillcrest. That’s good news, because it means that we’re rebuilding trust in a culture where trust has been so deeply damaged.
"You made me think about this girlfriend I had in senior year," he recalls. "She was a Methodist preacher's kid. She wasn't that into me, truthfully, although we were together for a semester. "I'm not sure what he means when he says of his college crush: "She helped me more than anyone else as far as setting off in my own direction." Did he mean she was the one who encouraged his doubts, or was she trying to challenge the doubts he was raising?
When I tell him I am the son of a preacher, too, he smiles and nods.
"Well," he continues, "she was tough, man, although really cool. She had an older brother who was killed in a four-by-four accident, which was not uncommon out there." He refers to a four-wheel drive crash. "She was a hardcore realist. She called me on so much bull—about any romantic ideas that I had grown up with about life. It was my first year in college."
Brad studied journalism at the University of Missouri at Columbia, hoping for a career as an art director in advertising.
"She helped me more than anyone else as far as setting off in my own direction," he explains. "It was my first year in college and I was pushing back against the religion thing. In my eyes it was a mechanism of guilt , this engrained system, used to keep the flock in servitude." Brad was raised a conservative Southern Baptist. "Guilt is the thing I find most evil about it. It's the thing I rail against the most. She helped me in defining what I believed.
"Religion works," he goes on. "I know there's comfort there, a crash pad. It's something to explain the world and tell you there is something bigger than you, and it is going to be alright in the end. It works because it's comforting. I grew up believing in it, and it worked for me in whatever my little personal high school crisis was, but it didn't last for me. I didn't understand this idea of a God who says, 'You have to acknowledge me. You have to say that I'm the best, and then I'll give you eternal happiness. If you won't, then you don't get it!' It seemed to be about ego. I can't see God operating from ego, so it made no sense to me.
Pray. Ask God to do his marvelous work in our midst!I look forward to what God is going to do through “ordinary you”! See you this week!
Take the shuttle. Expect our parking lot to be crowded. Let our families with small children and our older adults have the church parking lot. Drop you family off at the front door of the church and park at Anderson High School. We’ll be running two buses.
Meet your Sunday School class or Common Ground group at 9:30am. You will be released by 10:15am to make your way to the Worship Center.
Let your kids follow their Sunday normal routine. Our Children’s Ministry leadership will operate their normal Sunday morning schedule.
Worship in one combined service at 10:30am. Our praise band from the first service and our choir and orchestra from the second service are combining for a great worship experience. Remember: the service begins at 10:30 this Sunday, not 10:45!
Sit near the front. Save the back seats for late arrivals.
Attend the lunch only if you’re connecting people to our church. The lunch we’re serving after the worship service is an outreach event, not a fellowship event. That means it’s only for: (1) our guests, (2) members who have signed up to be hosts, and (3) members who have let us know they are bringing guests. If you’re planning to bring a guest, call the church office at 345-3771 so we can plan the lunch count.
Ask your Sunday School teacher or Common Ground host what your Bible study group will do to reach our guests. Our Connection Campaign doesn’t end this Sunday: it begins! After October 14, be ready to do your part in reaching the 400 households who’ve expressed interest in Hillcrest.
________________________________________If to distant lands I scatter
If I sail to farthest seas
Would you find and firm and gather
'Til I only dwell in Thee
If I flee from greenest pastures
Would you leave to look for me
Forfeit glory to come after
'Til I only dwell in Thee
Instrumental
If my heart has one ambition
If my soul one goal to seek
This my solitary vision
'Til I only dwell in Thee
A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Mass., asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically bottled up their feelings during a marital spat.Notice the results of the study: a woman who feels loved, even during an argument, has a lower risk of heart disease. For men, however, disagreements didn't impact heart health unless the arguments were perceived as a battle for control (i.e., respect).
In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk.
The tendency to bottle up feelings during a fight is known as self-silencing. For men, it may simply be a calculated but harmless decision to keep the peace. But when women stay quiet, it takes a surprising physical toll.
. . .
For women, whether a husband’s arguing style was warm or hostile had the biggest effect on her heart health. Dr. Smith notes that in a fight about money, for instance, one man said, “Did you pass elementary school math?” But another said, “Bless you, you are not so good with the checkbook, but you’re good at other things.” In both exchanges, the husband was criticizing his wife’s money management skills, but the second comment was infused with a level of warmth. In the study, a warm style of arguing by either spouse lowered the wife’s risk of heart disease.
But arguing style affected men and women differently. The level of warmth or hostility had no effect on a man’s heart health. For a man, heart risk increased if disagreements with his wife involved a battle for control.
Trust,Across the next five weeks in LeaderLines, I will introduce you to these five struggles and how we as Christian leaders can respond to them. Let’s do our part to reverse these sour stats about Christian churches.
Tolerance,
Truth,
Brokenness, and
Aloneness
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — At a recent conference-like "gathering" of emergent church leaders, various factions sparred over competing visions for the future of the movement. Leaders on one side called for "deepening and continuously beautiful efforts toward emotionally true self-divulgence and confession." Other leaders countered with a call for "a theological re-purposing of our objective and subjective missionality within a framework of God-love." Because few in attendance actually understood what either side meant, both ideas were tabled.
The sides did agree that emergent leaders should continue to take every opportunity to make casual, cool cultural references to popular television shows, movies and Internet phenomena to introduce quasi-intellectual spiritual points about the state of the American church.
They also pledged to maintain their reputation for being "more spiritually honest than the millions of people who attend institutionalized churches every week and blindly go along with the programs, sermons and mindset that make American Christianity the colossal failure it is today."
After toasting themselves with various hyper-cool micro-brews, the audience adjourned to begin 7- and 8-hour theological bull sessions in their hotel rooms and local bars.
Conference organizers say they will meet again to do the same thing next year.
Statistically speaking, my bout with Evangelicalism was probably unremarkable. For white Americans with my socioeconomic background (middle to upper-middle class), it's an experience commonly linked to one's teens and moved beyond before one reaches 20. These kids around me at Creation—a lot of them were like that. How many even knew who Darwin was? They'd learn. At least once a year since college, I'll be getting to know someone, and it comes out that we have in common a high school "Jesus phase." That's always an excellent laugh. Except a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.Sullivan would like to say he's past this phase now. Except for one thing:
Bless those who've been brainwashed by cults and sent off for deprogramming. That makes it simple: You put it behind you. But this group was no cult. They persuaded; they never pressured, much less threatened. Nor did they punish. A guy I brought into the group—we called him Goog—is still a close friend. He leads meetings now and spends part of each year doing pro bono dental work in Cambodia. He's never asked me when I'm coming back. (webpage)
My problem is not that I dream I'm in hell or that Mole is at the window. It isn't that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn't even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It's that I love Jesus Christ.I talk with guys like Sullivan a lot. A few of my conversations about faith have been with those who had no prior background in Bible study or church attendance, but most have been with people who, like Sullivan, had some exposure earlier in life and passed out of that phase--or so they thought. They are haunted by Jesus, and, in Sullivan's words, they have "doubts about one's doubts."
"The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose." I can barely write that. He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read The Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read The Logia of Yeshua, by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There's your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what's fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. "Let anyone who has power renounce it," he said. "Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be." That's how He talked, to those who knew Him.
Why should He vex me? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can't I just be a good Enlightenment child and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?
Because once you've known Him as God, it's hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won't slacken.
And one has doubts about one's doubts. (webpage)
