But I was thinking about this phrase the other day and it occurred to me that when you do know someone the opposite is true. In-other-words, the more I know about my husband the more I know him. My intellectual knowing of him feeds my (experiential?) knowing. In this case knowing about someone is inextricable from knowing them.

Knowing about God helps us to know him more.  We need to never stop knowing with our minds.  

Thinking about this has also now made me suspicious of the origional premise. If one kind of knowing leads to the other in one case then I’m pretty sure it must do so in all cases… 

Perhaps knowing about someone doesn’t make you any more likely to meet them but if you did meet them you’d certainly know them better than if you met them without knowing anything about them.  

…yes that’s right. 

wha?

The whole idea that the gospel is ‘Jesus is Lord’ as opposed to the “…existential plan of salvation, detached from the OT and the story of Israel…” has completely blown my mind over the past few years.  Since the penny dropped I feel like I’ve been walking around thinking ‘it’s so obvious, why didn’t I see this before?’.  ”Jesus is Lord” are the most beautiful words.

Anyway as time went on I began to really grab hold of this ‘Jesus is Lord’ message it began to shape my whole life more and more.  If Jesus is Lord then it is He who should dictate who I am and what I do.  Then I started to think that this is also true for other people.  That they should be living their lives as disciples of Jesus and when they weren’t happy with that I would say ‘well I don’t care how you feel…Jesus is LORD! so deal with it… you don’t have a choice.’ I began to use this good news that Jesus is Lord as a stick to beat people with and suddenly it stopped sounding so much like good news.

Then about a month ago, this thought occured to me ‘Jesus was Lord, knew he was Lord, said he was Lord and yet never used it to force people into following him.’ He never said ‘look, just shut up and do as I say ’cause i’m Lord’.  Jesus never seemed to use the fact that he is Lord to pull rank on people. At least as far as I can see.

So why?

This made me wonder if our constant desire to make sense of God, to understand him, have our thoughts contain him, is rooted in our refusal to worship him. If we understand him we dont have to worship him. Just a thought.

Enjoy…

The Church
(Appears on: She Must and Shall Go Free)

I have come with one purpose
To capture for Myself a bride
By My life she is lovely
And by My death she’s justified

I have always been her husband
Though many lovers she has known
So with water I will wash her
And by My word alone

So when you hear the sound of the water
You will know you’re not alone

‘Cause I haven’t come for only you
But for My people to pursue
And you cannot care for Me with no regard for her
If you love Me you will love the church

I have long pursued her
As a harlot and a whore
But she will feast upon Me
She will drink and thirst no more

So when you taste My flesh and My blood
You will know you’re not alone

There is none that can replace her
There are many who will try
And though some may be her Bridesmaids
They can never be My bride

“Derek on the song:

This is one of the last songs I wrote for the record…the reason I wrote it was because people were coming up to me (after shows) and saying, “Yeah, I’m right with you man…this whole church thing’s (not for me). I can’t stand the church…”, And I hated that. I hated the idea that people who seek to church bash would see me as their champion. Because I am not that. The reason that I have, after all these years, decided to put my energy into a solo project…is because of my love for the church. There’s none that can replace her. There’s none that can do the job of the church…so I wrote this song to hopefully communicate that.”
—Derek Webb, 10/4/02

When I first heard of the third category I quipped “what does that job involve?… telling 18-25 year olds that they’re adults and need to grow up?! ha ha” but no-one laughed…  and that’s not really what the job involves at all.

Apparently young adult workers are required in our denomination because 18-25′s is the ‘missing generation’.  People are appointed to help churches form 3-5 year strategies of how to target this specific age-group in order to ‘keep’ or ‘find’ people from this age group.   Now I realise that I have graduated from this age group a couple of years ago but I have a sense of suspicion and unease about this.  There are two reasons:

1) Why are we concerned with a missing ‘age-group’ in our denomination but never so concerned with a missing ‘social-class’ for example? That’s really a side-point though…

2) I suspect that the missing age-group has more to do with the fact that this generation (of which I am a part) have become consumers of church rather than active members of the body of Christ.  It is this that makes me most wary about a special focus on this particular age group.

I am constantly figuring out what it means for me to be a youth worker but lately i’ve been thinking that at least part of what it means to do my job well is to tell these 12-18 year olds (that’s the youth category you know?!;-) ) that they’re not who the world tells them they are.  That even though they’re young they have a story and are fully part of what God is doing in and through the Church.  I feel like part of what my job is is to tell them that they’re more like the adults in their congegration than they think.  My fear is that having a ‘young adults’ worker will do the opposite… not intentionally perhaps but surely by building our programes and strategies around the focus of ‘keeping’ these young people rather than loosing them to other congregations (which is true of most of this missing generation) then what we are doing is perpetuating the poisonous idea that church is something that we consume rather than commit ourselves too. We perpetuate their idea that they have a right to consume as well as perpetuate the idea to the older congregation that we have to be something that the young people want to consume or else we’re in trouble.

I do feel a little like telling this ‘missing generation’ to step up and be the church.  That church is not there to serve them or make them feel good or important but they are there to serve and commit to the church even when it’s full of people we dont particulary like, or agree with or even when the music is a bit weak, or the preacher doesn’t have a beard.  I want to tell my own generation that its not even about good stuff like great worshp or amazing teaching.  I am called to be committed to the body of christ as expressed in the local church because that’s what God chose to fulfill his mission.

Is this unfair?  is my desire to say, ‘just get on with it and grow up’ wrong?’ I dont know and i’d appreciate your thoughts.

I do know that i’m sick of people saying they’re not really part of a church because they tried it and it wasn’t really that good an experience and so they’ll just do life with God on their own.  …Well we cant.

…….
Since writing this blog a few hours ago the good man Kevin Hargaden posted this here . It makes my post much better…!

So we may still weep in the moments we wish we could be near that person, we may still weep at the reality of never seeing him again, we may still weep for his family and friends in their heartache… but we will not be sad for him, for he knows a life that I am jealous of.

Scripture says it better:

“For to me, to life is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labour for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, WHICH IS BETTER BY FAR; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body…”

For fear that I am starting to talk about medicine rather than justice, I am trying to make the point that when a Christian thinks of his role as to cure injustice rather than to love people who are suffering injustice we often miss the very people we are called to love.  Sometimes my care for the suffering people involves my fighting for social reform etc, but not always does my pursuit of social reform involve my real love of the suffering people (which is what God calls me to).  Infact I could be someone who fights for social reform and yet also be a person who has never looked a suffering person in the eye, or touched their hands.

We are called to care about the widow, the orphan, the oppressed.  We are called to care about these people as people.  We are called to love PEOPLE primarily, not to be ‘bob the builders’.

Confused babbling’s and rant over…

But here’s the thing, if I buy a pair of ‘Toms Shoes’ and I look down at my feet the only thing I can HONESTLY tell myself is “well done for spending 40-70 euro on a pair of shoes for yourself which you probably don’t need.”  By buying ‘Toms Shoes’ I have NOT GIVEN anything! I have merely CONSUMED yet again.

I don’t mean to say that it is a wrong idea for blake to provide a pair of shoes for everyone sold.  That is up to him.  But DON”T try and tell me that if I consume his product I can pat myself on the back for being generous.  Generous would be to buy a pair of ‘Toms Shoes’ and carry them to Afghanistan and put them on the feet of a child.

Blake was asked in the interview why he didn’t just take the capital he invested into the business in the first place and use it to make shoes for poor kids.  His answer was that by making a for-profit business out of it he has been able to provide thousands more children with shoes.  This was considered by him and seemingly by everyone around me listening to be a great point.  But as I listened I couldn’t help but ask the question ‘has God called us to be people who are generous and kind to the poor, or has he called us to be people who fix the problems (or what we percieve as their problems) of the poor’.  If we think it’s the latter we end up being satisfied with a strategy that allows people to try and combat poverty with consumerism.  Something is deeply wrong with this.

My favourite part of this story is that the children who receive these free shoes are probably related to if not themselves the makers of these shoes.  All ‘Toms Shoes’ are currently produced in Afghanistan and China (according to the website they are receiving a fair wage though).  We are using poverty to attempt to solve poverty.  We the Church need to understand that there is no excuse for such behaviour.

As I’ve ranted about before I’m predisposed to be suspicious of anything that feels like it has a hidden agenda or alterier motives and that therefore feels like manipulation.  This book address this exact issue.

Let me reduce his years of work to a few paragraphs:

Basically (following from people like Buber and Bonhoeffer) Root believes that ‘in their inner reality relationships are the concrete location of God’s presence in our midst’.  He feels like we have missed this and especially in the area of youth ministry have instead USED ‘relationships as a means to influence kids towards certain ends’.  He calls for us not to use relationships as tools for influence but rather to know them as the invitation to ‘share each other’s place’ and in so doing to witness to Christ among us.

We have this idea that incarnational ministry means to be relational in your ministry strategy.  You know, forming relationships with people in their own world (going where the kids go;-) ) believing that our relationship of care will give us a platform to speak into their lives.  When they reject our care refusing to be influenced by us or accept Jesus we get frustrated (and we feel like failures).

Root suggests (as Bonhoeffer taught ’cause that always gives it more weight) that “incarnation was not a model or example, but was the very power of God present in human form among us today…  there is no end to which the relationship should lead… the relationship is the end… it is the place where Christ is present, the place where s/he and I encounter Christ… What matters is to be human alongside others…which is only possible through Christ.”  Root says ‘there is no such thing as success or failure in this ministry.  There is only faithfulness, faithfulness to Christ, which calls me to be faithful to these adolescents’ very humanity.”

Root boldy claims that “youth ministry can be understood as a creation of evangelical protestantism in reaction to modernisation”.  I find this depressing.  Something else I find depressing is Roots observation that during that time a culture developed where the ‘bottom line was what determined how employees were treated’ this was carried over into all spheres and so whatever we felt the ‘bottom line’ to be in youth ministry determined how we approaced and treated our youth.

The culture became dominated by self chosen relationships and this provided the perfect context to sell the message of a Jesus who can be trusted as a personal and intimate friend.  Leaders of parachurch youth organisations such as young life capatilized on the desire for personal relationship and used their relationships with young people to draw them into relatioship with Jesus.  ”Rayburn (founder of YL) also discovered that by becoming friends with adolescents who held the gretest cool currency in the school, adolescents with less cool currency would follow them to rayburn’s events.”  ’To do this Rayburn had to accrue a currency of cool by incarnating himself within the distinct youth culture and receiving cool capital from the most popular students.”   Root points out that Rayburns theological justification for this was the incarnation of Jesus Christ.  He positioned the incarnation as ministerial justification rather than theological explanation.  Because of this persepctive, relational ministry to this day is infused with this understanding of the incarantaion as solely a pattern for ministry.”

ok i’m going to stop there for now

but here are my questions

1) what is our ‘bottom line’ as we relate to young people (or indeed any people) and does that shape how we approach them.  it that ok?

2) is Root right when he says that relationships are the end in itself?

3) when will we ever learn that people need us to be us and not ‘cool’.  And that if Jesus targeted the popular kids the bible would be a whole lot different.