We Should See Other Blogs

I’ve been ruminating on Sunday’s sermon for a few days now. It’s been bouncing here and there inside my skull, or my soul, or whatever you want to call it, gathering moss like any good stone.

It’s C.S. Lewis saying that Aslan is not safe, but he is good.

We love safety so much, don’t we? And there’s nothing wrong with that. I, for instance, feel incredibly safe with Laura’s love. I don’t feel like she’s going to blow up any minute and abandon me. I know what that’s like, and trust me, you don’t want a relationship (God forbid a marriage) that resembles more a landmine than a safe harbour.

You can find in God that incredible safety as well: no matter what you are going through in your life, if you’ve bought into his grace, if you’ve been granted that faith, you are above all safe. As Mrs Elliot used to say, Underneath are the everlasting arms. From our seemingly impossible disasters to actually impossible disasters, there is hope that will not leave you ashamed for having hoped. Or assurance. You may lose your lover, you may lose your health, you may lose your house, but you will not be ashamed of finding refuge in God. He is a strong tower. You are above all, safe.

But there’s safety and then there’s safety. God isn’t bound by your desire to be financially secure. When Joel mentioned how so much preaching is geared towards a better life now, I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Not to mention that Mr Osteen reminds me of a smarmy used car salesman and I would very much like to punch him in the face, with all Christian love.) Or maybe God does care that you have a better life now, but we’ve simply got the frame right and the picture all wrong. Maybe your better life now isn’t about being financially triumphant or well-loved. Maybe your better life now is about crossing a wilderness and getting to a promised land. The trip isn’t necessarily going to be cushioned. Maybe it will be. You don’t really get to know that.

Laura and I have been very tight for money since we’ve been married. We have one income and some debt from her schooling and from my life as a bachelor. One of the things we’ve been really convicted about, ever since Joel talked about giving, is separating a portion of my income and giving it to God. We do this in several ways, but primarily it’s giving to the church. We don’t have a lot to give, and common sense says that what we do give should be instead squirrelled away for a rainy economy. Yet it seems better to me to live outside of that small comfort and safety zone by obeying God with our giving than using it for ourselves. I’m not going to spin a sob story here: we live very well on what we’ve got, but there are a lot of things we have to forgo whilst living this way.

This is a small thing. There’s a couple from Imago Dei who essentially walked away from a comfortable life to work in the Himalayas with an unreached people group. Joel moved to Mississauga and started a great church. Paul was whipped and beaten and shipwrecked ultimately killed. These are not small things, and they are not safe things.

But they are good things, and things that will ultimately be blessed. Because in following God, sometime you end up dying on a cross. Look at what Jesus did: was his life at all safe? Yet here we are, millennia later, still looking at his legacy and seeing it change the world.

Today in church we had the news passed down to us that Freshwater Christian Church of Mississauga is going to be merging with Churchill Meadows Christian Church, also of Mississauga. I say “merging with” in lieu of the probably more apt phrase, “absorbed by”, considering that they’re the much larger church.

From a purely financial point of view, it makes a lot of sense (though this is not the only point of view from which it makes sense, I hasten to point out). Churchill Meadows is about five times or so the size of Freshwater, and has reached a point of fiscal maturity and sustainability, it would seem, so much so that they’ve been raising money for the last three years for and developing the plans for a building in which to meet. Freshwater — at least from what I saw today in the budget — has not reached a point of financial sustainability, such that the church is still gobbling up its initial setup fund. Solvent as far as I can tell only because of that fund. Freshwater gains financial stability in that they no longer have to worry about going into the red all the time. Churchill Meadows gains that extra 150 or so people that will frankly enable them to reach their building goal that much quicker. From a surface view of this all these seem to be the primary organisational benefits, without considering the obvious missional opportunities that a building and a less spread out staff entail.

I footnote that paragraph with my own experience of churches going broke: The Bridge, a wonderful place while it was still up and running, before it lost most of its congregation minus of course the core that started it. The Bridge was in the process of merging with 247 (if I recall the name correctly), when pastoral and leadership concerns put the kibosh on the whole deal, leading inevitably to The Bridge’s slow decline and finally its insolvency. When The Bridge finally closed down shop it left quite a few people with nowhere else to go, including some new converts who were very fresh to Christianity. It was, on the whole, a bad deal all around. Had The Bridge simply merged with 247 or some other like-minded church, I feel they would have been able to keep their ministry alive, give the people they sheltered a place to go, and especially provided the pastoral care for those new Christians. The Bridge closing its doors was, like I said, just a bad deal. I don’t fault anyone for this, but it was hasty, with the announcement coming a mere week before the organisation folded.

This merger is a little different, of course. We’re not closing down shop, Joel isn’t going anywhere, and we’re not about to disperse into the cold night never to see eachother again. It in fact prevents those things from happening. Which is a good thing in my view. The merger is also taking place with plenty of time in the interim: the churches are separate until October, when they’ll join at Freshwater’s current location. This gives us a lot of time to work out all those nasty little human problems that seem to occur whenever two organisations of any kind merge. For instance, I’m part of the worship team right now, playing keyboards every other week, and it occurs to me that Churchill Meadows also has a worship team. We’re really good (if I do say so myself; it’s not me, really, as much as Candace and Tim), but you have to expect that a church of 500 or so people has a better base from which to draw talented people. I raise this as an issue in particular because musicians, yes even Christian musicians, are generally a little more sensitive in the ego area than your average Joe off the street. When you try to merge two groups of people who both have separate synergies, you may end up finding that they don’t work as well together as they do apart. Or at least that the time it takes for two groups of musicians to get used to eachother can exceed your expectations. This might not even be a problem of course. I myself don’t have to play. I’ve gone to churches for a long time that didn’t need another pianist. Thankfully there’s a lot of time to work through this in people’s heads: I think the time-frame the leadership teams have chosen is a wise one. If there are any bruised egos, hopefully this will give them time to heal.

I’m writing this mostly to process it for myself. It’s going to be weird, seeing how every time I start attending a church something big changes. For instance, Living Waters got a new building and became an entirely different church almost overnight, it seemed. The Bridge shut down out of nowhere. Now Freshwater is merging, sort of losing its identity. This is fine; unless Jim (I think his name is) turns out to be some sort of heretic, or the church is just downright unfriendly and doesn’t have the missional heart I love so much about Freshwater, we’ll stick around. It’s not any further out of our way than Freshwater is. A different highway.

The losing identity does sort of bother me, though. I like Freshwater the way it is, relaxed, full of great people, and with absolutely amazing music. And when Churchill Meadows comes along, it does follow that the smaller church will lose its identity to the larger one. What that identity will end up being is left to the hands of God, I suppose. I guess I also have a certain amount of apprehension about what this new church will feel like: It’s so very hard to find a God-honouring, God-glorifying church that isn’t too backwards and isn’t too cool-whoring. When you do find such a place, seeing it being subsumed in another church that may or may not operate along the same lines is a bit like gambling, it would seem. I don’t know these people. I don’t know their modus operandi.

Now, those are just my feelings after hearing about it for the first time. I’m sure I’ll read this in a few weeks and months and wonder what the fuss was about. In the meantime, there are lots of good thing about this that I feel like I’ve accidentally de-emphasised.

Have a building is a great thing, or can be a great thing. I’ve know churches to build a nice, modern place to operate out of and then squander it trying to keep it safe and pristine and comfortable. If you have a building, use the sucker! And I have every confidence that Freshwater, with a building, a bunch of extra people, and a Joel with some time on his hands, will do great things with the building. Joel mentioned a few ideas he had, all of which sounded exactly like what a church is supposed to be doing in the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus, as he says. Give Joel a building, and I’m sure he can whip something up in a hurry. (By the way, Joel, if you ever read this, I’d suggest credit counseling for the community at large; debt is a whore who won’t wake up and leave.)

The new church, whatever its name is, will also have a greater opportunity to contribute on the modern mission field by planting another church to replace the one being lost to mergers and acquisitions. And this time, they have an opportunity to get rid of this half-assed toss-the-hatchling-out-of-the-nest trust fund approach that inevitably leads to fiscal, spiritual, and physical burnout. They — or we, I guess — have an opportunity to be a real mother church, to be there in terms of money and people power, so that those labouring in the word and in the community don’t have to constantly feel like a shyster shaking down the congregation for money, a juggler with too many balls in the air, and a prayer warrior with no time to pray. Can I suggest a radically under-churched area? Okay, how about at about Bloor and Dixie? There are tens of religions and thousands of people in that area alone, and the churches in the neighborhood are old and dying out with no new blood to replace the septuagenarian blood that has long ago grown thin. That’d be a great area, only 15 minutes away, that simply begs for a minor revival. Just an idea.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I’m liking what I see so far, and Laura and I will keep the two churches and their imminent merger in prayer. The way I see it, the human interactions are like gears, and prayer is like grease. Or something like that. It’s not a very good metaphor.

• Fruit Loops hurt. No matter how you eat them, they scuff up the inside of your mouth. I know, you can let them soak for a while, but who wants to eat soggy cereal?
• At Freshwater Church this Sunday — having braved an early winter storm to get there – we got to see Joel and Tim operating on no sleep. They’d just come back from Cleveland, driving all night through that early winter storm. Thankfully, Joel only had to say a few words, as he didn’t really say most of those words in an particular order. Instead, Jeff (I think? I could be wrong) lit the advent candle and did a sermon about Hope.
• A lot of people seem to think that lighting an advent candle is pretty hokey, but being the lover of tradition that I am, I like to see a church expressing a connection with the past. Partaking in an ancient tradition (Advent, not necessarily the lighting of candles) and singing the songs of that tradition remind me that I’m part of something that extends beyond me, beyond just the present, and into the past and future.
• My workplace is moving soon — not just me, the whole thing — meaning I’m going to be 10 minutes closer to home. Everyone else, on the other hand, is 10 minutes farther away, or more if you count the trickiness of the highways in that area. It also makes taking the bus quite feasible, actually, as it cuts almost a half hour off the bus ride, thanks to the trickiness of the bus routes in that area.
• When it comes to grammar I’m really not a prescriptivist. Grammar and language need to be free to evolve, and let’s face it, you can’t stop that evolution. No matter how hard they try, prescriptivists will always, always fail. If someone expects me to use a gender-specific pronoun when the subject’s gender is indeterminate, they’re crazy. If that person wants me not to end my sentences with prepositions, I have a place they can go to. You see what I mean?
• When John asked Jesus whether or not he was Messiah, Jesus sent a surprising message back. Surprising in what he didn’t say, I mean. John was obviously doubting Jesus, but Jesus had no condemnation for him. He didn’t list the number of Torah passages he had fulfilled. He didn’t send a letter with three well-argued points and a rousing conclusion meant to nicely wrap things up. He said, look at what I am doing: the blind can see, the lame can walk, the dead are being raised to life. This if, of course, not the only way Jesus used to bolster the faith of individuals, but is it so hard to believe it should be the same way with us today? Are we the true religion? Look at what we are doing: the poor are being fed, single mothers are being looked after, war-torn countries are being rebuilt, people are being shown the light of the gospel and being invited into the family. Am I wrong in thinking this might be what real religion looks like?

Attribution and License for the above photo.

This Sunday at Freshwater, Joel spoke about actions without meaning, religion without heart, that sort of thing.

I won’t be long here, but it made me think of the song, “The Heart of Worship”, which — love it or hate it — says something profound about the way I do anything, really. It begs ask, “What have I made worship into?” On one hand, this entertainment, a worship of preference, some sort of spectacle; or on the other, a rigid system, a theological construct, a bunch of made-up rules? Either way I can draw near to God with my lips and be ever so far away from him in my heart.

Or the way I treat God. Sometimes I feel like I put God into little containers and just open the containers of God Time whenever it seems appropriate. On Sunday I open a big one, and on week nights and before meals I open little ones, and sometimes during the I get out a medium sized one. But God is bigger than that, right? This is what Brother Lawrence means when he talks about the practice of the presence of God, I think, that God is everywhere and in every moment, and even though there are certain times that focus in on him, the rest of them belong to him as well. God gets all of my time. Yet throughout the day, I forget about him, abandon him, and kick him in the face. As the song goes, prone to wander, prone to leave the God I love.

How often am I exactly like the people in the Old Testament? The entire collection of books is like a macrocosm of my life. Obedience is better than sacrifice. I draw near to God with my lips, but am far from him in my heart.

I have a head stuffed full of theology. Yet there’s an essential disconnect there: theology doesn’t necessarily lead to a good life. It’s just knowledge, and knowledge gives you a big head. There needs to be something that connect the two, theology and practice.

I think that thing is relationship. How do I draw close to God in my heart? By having a relationship with him, a real thing that happens, not some pseudo-relationship that involves a lot of hand-waving and good-sounding words. But I’m so far from God: how do I draw so close? There needs to be something that connects us.

I think that thing is Jesus.

Jesus is what makes the heart and head and perfect God and imperfect man connect. He connects what I say to what I mean. He is bigger than my containers.