Just in case you didn’t know, there you have it!

Piecing this together a bit, a few years ago on a holiday in the Cape, we came across a dolphin on the shore.  Me and several others tried to save it, but it died.  Keziah also recently watched a TV show with a monkey flying a spaceship and helping wildlife (I just re-read that sentence… that’s very weird in itself!).  Of course the last piece of this is the many times we tell the kids about Jesus.

This is a cute example of something I see in coaching relationships.  When I come to a time with one of the guys I’m coaching, there are usually five or six story lines at play.  Usually, if my coachees are bringing it to the table, it’s problematic for them.  It becomes a delicate art to sift through the various story lines and fine the one or two items that God is trying to teach them.  The beauty of coaching though is that God has already given them the lesson.  He has already painted the picture for them.  The beauty at the end is seeing them re-evaluate a seemingly conflicting set of story lines and see God at work in their midst.  They go back into their spheres of leadership seeing the awesomeness of monkeys, dolphins & Jesus… all working together to restore all things to Christ!

This post is about our teaching practices though.  I held/starting to loosen my grip on, this theory that a teaching should last no more than 23 minutes.  That is because the average length a sitcom lasts… 23 minutes.  Our society was engrained with this attention span, so if we wanted truth to sink in, we should consider getting creative at getting the message across in no more time than that.  That’s where the homily is BRILLIANT.  Ten minute truth that knocks you out of your seats!

Today, you know you’re connecting with an audience when your phone is buzzing off with RT (retweets) of things you just said.  So the challenge we’re up against is still (I think) a sitcom length sermon with catchy one liners that can be tweeted while you’re talking.  It’s the new form of note taking.  Professors, let your students do this and educate the world!

I’m finding that the more I hang out on a single core concept, and teach around that, my audience receives truth and shares it with their friends.  Twitter is making the local church a Universal experience.  I have friends who go to other churches that tweet those messages.  They have changed my life!  So next time you think the teenager to your right in church is being rude on their phone, perhaps you’re ACTUALLY sitting next to this generations version of Billy Graham!  #changetheworld

This year, I was asked to teach at our church, 3rdPlace.  As you can imagine, this kind of message is tricky.  There are many opinions on the subject.  So I decided to invite my friend John in to help me teach on it.  I figured a conversation among friends who are different in lots of ways (theologically, ethnically, nationally, etc…) would help paint a picture I thought would be helpful.

I’m not exactly sure how some of this creeps in, but there always seems to be a drive towards controlled uniformity.  Even our city, name changed from Pretoria to Tshwane, with the logo “we are all the same” has this false & perhaps even poisonous hope creeping into our psyche.   John said it beautifully.  “Our city says ‘We are all the same.  But that’s not true!  And that’s beautiful!”.

We’re not all the same, and I can attest to the many times I have crossed the denominational lines to befriend someone I would consider “off center” only to find that God is much bigger than I had anticipated!  John is one of those friends.  Not just in terms of his skin color, that’s really secondary to the way He’s helped me understand God.  I have come to realize a deep need for my own soul to be connected to a friend like Him.  He inspires me to see God from the other side of the table.  He’s grounded in the Word and He loves with a passion my background doesn’t understand…yet.

If we were all the same, we’d only see about 2% of God.  Uniformity is killing us, and we’ve bought a lie that says it is the same thing as unity.  We need others fully experiencing God so that we can more fully experience God.

After a heart attack and days of surviving in critical condition, our friend’s dad began to show signs of improvement. The Dr’s were shocked to find that a part of his heart that was severely damaged had healed, making it possible to move forward with bypass surgery.

Our community had been praying. We sent facebook messages and mailed a card with words of encouragement and prayers, showing our love and support for this family. It seemed that God was healing this man and showing his faithfulness and power!

I began to wonder if God might be drawing these friends into deeper relationship with him through this act of healing.

And then, less that 24 hours after the positive reports from the Dr’s, our friend’s daddy died at the age of 53.

I’m still confused. WHY would God allow this? I know the answers I’ve been told my whole life about God’s bigger plan and how sometimes God saves people from suffering by allowing them to die or how we live in a broken world and there are things that happen not by God’s doing but because of our human limitations etc…. but in my heart, I just don’t get it.

I don’t know that I’ll ever fully get it.

When we saw our friends yesterday morning we embraced and cried together. I don’t know why God allows suffering and sadness and loss but I do know that God is with us. I know that God weeps with us as we live in this broken world. I know God longs to restore all things.

Our friends thanked us for being there for them. All I can do is hope that they experience the tangible presence of God Emmanuel, God with us, through the body of Christ here expressed through NieuCommunities. And may we be faithful to love them as Jesus would.

They invited us to come visit their church sometime, and we finally found a free Sunday to join them.  It was an interesting experience.  In their church, the Church of Pretoria, there is no single pastor, or paid staff as such.  During the course of the week, they study a set series of text from scripture along with a very intense study program.  They spend the first hour of their service calling out hymns from their hymn books, and the last hour is dialoging through what they studied.  When I went in, I thought there was no way this would work with over 150 adults in one room.  But I was wrong, and it was beautiful.

I asked my friend afterwards how it could be that a church with no organized leadership could balance the opinion of so many cultures represented.  There were Afrikaaners, English, Xhosa, Zulu, Chinese, etc… At least seven cultures represented in that room and the way they loved and respected each other blew my mind.  I’ve been to a white church, a black church, and a Chinese church.  I’ve been to big churches and small churches, conservative and charismatic, but I’ve never seen such a mixture in one room grow so tightly before.  So I asked him again, “how does that happen”.

“Christ is the center.” He said.  “Christ taught us to love and respect one another, and so we do and we find peace and growth in that place.”

I’ll leave you with that.  Obviously that challenged a LOT of things in me, so I’ll let that linger with you and let it fester a bit as well.  Something to this simplicity of “love the Lord your God, and love others as you love yourself.”  I wonder how it got so complicated!

JP came to me before one of our weekly gatherings in our house.  He mentioned to me how much of what we discuss through NieuCommunities has been inspiring his work with Nova.  He has seen the parallels between our training concepts and real life in the different projects he directs.  That’s always good to hear, but I pushed a little further to find out “HOW”.

NieuCommunities tries to get after leaders to live in a rhythm of communion, community and mission.  Each part of that triad needs the other.  We learn to do those three things more and more as we learn to posture our lives in different ways (listening, submerging, inviting, contending, imagining & entrusting).  This year, so far, we have dialoged about three of those types of posturings.  In his context, he has found that when his project supervisors have practiced listening, it has more deeply empowered the people they are trying to serve.  Those people then take on more ownership and the projects are running more smoothly.

I can’t take any credit for the work that JP is doing, but I think it’s important to see that the relationship between us and JP is paying dividends beyond the context of our community and even further beyond JP’s own doing.  We are the body, and we each play a significant part in the equipping of the WHOLE Church.

From September through November of 2010, NieuCommunities invited a wide array of ministry personnel to a weekly event we called “the Possibilities Gathering”.  Though there were many other organizations present, I want to pull out two specific individuals who represented Oasis, a ministry in Cosmo City near Johannesburg.  As our friends journeyed with us through understanding our various tenets of leadership formation, they took our concepts and contextualized them in their region.  In April of this year, we went to visit our friends and see what they had come up with.

Oasis has taken the NieuCommunities DNA and translated it into their context.  Through ongoing coaching from us, they are able to reach a much wider audience than we have been able to up to this point.  How do they do that?  What can we learn from what is happening here?

The Oasis team was able to expand our materials further because we were addressing a need they had.  When we opened up the can for them, they were able to run so much further than we ever would have dreamed.  As they have been formulating this, NieuCommunities is learning more about our own processes.  The mutual inspiration that happens in a relationship like this is why I’ll always refuse to force our work in any context.  Their openness to work with us is making us stronger, and taking their ministry deeper.  THAT is the point.  NieuCommunities has specific things we are good at and the more we succumb ourselves to other organizations, the more we will learn about ourselves in the process.

Saturday night was our first Roller Derby experience. Anytime you go to a new sporting event you realize that you’re stepping into a sub-culture of people with its social dynamics, both fascinating and a little quirky. This was no exception.

About half way through the evening I left my coat in the bathroom. When I went back to get it, the coat was gone. I asked a sweet Hispanic woman who was sweeping the floors if she had seen a jean jacket that was left in one of the stalls. Without using words the woman motioned for me to follow her to the trash can. Apparently she had hidden my coat at the bottom of the trash bin, underneath the plastic bag.

She seemed a little embarrassed when she handed me my coat, almost as if to apologize. I’m not sure what she intended to do with the coat but I was grateful to get it back. As I turned to walk back to my seat, putting the coat back on to stay warm, a “sense” or a “feeling” came over me that I can’t explain except to say that its familiar….and its something I’ve learned to listen to as a way that God communicates with me….

A couple of nights ago I pulled out a childhood book of mine to read to Naomi. The book is called, “The Boy Who Gave His Lunch Away,” and its an adaptation of the story in the Gospels of the boy who gave his bread and his fish to Jesus and Jesus miraculously multiplies it to feed thousands. The author of the book imagines what this boy’s family life might have been like to prompt him to give his lunch away like this. He describes the boy’s father as generous man of faith who teaches his son saying, “we eat what we need and we give the rest away…”

As I walked away from this sweet woman who cleaned the bathrooms and swept the floor I sensed that the coat I was wearing wasn’t mine to keep.

I turned back around, found the woman and handed her my coat saying, “I’d like to give you this coat.” She could have refused it…. and in that case, I probably would have kept it, but…. the woman looked me in the eyes and said in broken english, “for me?” I responded, “Yes. I’d like you to have it.” And she took it with a big smile on her face.

As NieuCommunities we’re studying 1 & 2 Peter, looking at what it means to be a Holy People, reflecting a Holy God. 1 Peter 4: 10 & 11 in The Message it says, “Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all can get in on it; if words, let it be God’s words, if help, let it be God’s hearty help. That way, God’s Bright Presence will be evident in everything through Jesus, and HE will get all the credit as the mighty one in everything…”

Our acts of generosity are an expression of God’s bright presence for the world!

I tell this story not to brag on how great I am that I gave my coat away (a coat that I actually liked, by the way ). There are plenty of opportunities for me to give my things away in my own neighborhood everyday. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. I tell this because I think I tasted the holiness of Jesus in an encounter with one of God’s beloved children at a roller derby event. And her smile was beautiful.

Jesus lived a Holy life on earth. He loved and served in perfection. But he didn’t stop for everyone. He couldn’t! He was God but he was also human. Jesus heard the voice of his father and he obeyed, knowing who to love and serve when.

A central part of holiness is listening to the voice of the Father.
……..
So I listened…. this time. God spoke to me and I obeyed…and I got to reflect the generous heart of my Father in heaven. Perhaps the most notable posture of a holy people is simply to listen to the father, obey and receive the gift of God’s bright presence, both for us and for those around us. What an honor.

I was reminded of this again during a coaching session with a young black pastor from the inner city of Pretoria.  Early in our relationship, he said that he wanted to break the stereotype of black churches where the pastor was the center of the congregations’ world.  If they had a cough or a sneeze, the pastor must be called in.  I gently suggested that this was perhaps not only a black stereotype.  There are many who struggle in ministry because they take every single phone call.  There’s a complex disease amongst ministers and as this coaching session developed, I felt it necessary to offer a look into what came out of our time together.

Jesus is missing from our equation.

Something seems to be missing from our good intentions when we bring people to Christ.  Our hearts are generally good, I believe, as we tell them to call us if they have any questions or concerns as they embark on their new found faith.  And here in lies the beginning trappings we will come to regret.

At 11:00 in the evening, the phone rings and there’s been a fight with the spouse.  The pastor needs to come over.  From the beginning of their journey with Christ, we first told them to call on the name of US as opposed to the one we brought them to!  We generate our own chaos and we wonder how it gets to this point.

I’m by and large a practitioner.  I think leading people to Jesus is standing there with them as they learn to call on HIS name in the middle of the night.  Jesus doesn’t have a wife and kids to look after, but I do.  Jesus already sorted out the fallen nature of the world, and I’m clearly no Messiah.  Needless to say, one of the action steps from this coaching session was setting a reasonable time to shut off the phone.  The second one was a plan on how to help the congregation begin to learn what “Jesus as Lord” really means.  There will be many more sessions developing the heart & practice of this young pastor to break the GLOBAL stereotype of ministers.

My presence: a phenomena of my journey with Jesus is that I easily forget his presence.  It’s as if I’m one of the disciples looking at the clouds waiting for him to come back and forgetting that he IS back.  That’s profound!  Jesus is back and he is working things out now!

Will go with you: When Curtis read that line, I almost started crying.  I think too often I feel like Jesus is in my office and he just sends me out into the world to do his bidding.  But that’s not true.  Jesus goes with me everywhere I go.  That can be a haunting reality, but I find a great deal of hope in that.  Jesus sees when I’m being treated unfairly, when I’m being unhelpful, etc… and his presence can be a guide for me.  It’s a partnership, not a commanding employer sending me out.

Give you rest: As we go, we can get rest.  My whole life, I’ve been told to slow down, take it easy, enjoy life.  When I’m told that I really don’t understand it.  “When I run, I feel his pleasure.”  I’ve noticed that in my life, I embrace the extremes.  As I hit a wall, I sit on our bed and talk with Natalie at night and as I pray, I find rest.  When I feel the extreme joys, they’re so much more extreme.  I have to go, and I have to feel the extremes.  The learning curve I’m on now is how to remain a calming presence as I go through those, but the hope from this passage that I have found is I CAN go and experience rest as I’m running hard.  I’m not burning out, I’m experiencing extremes.  I want to squeeze the life out of life, and when I seem down, it’s okay, I’m learning to find rest in the midst of it.  Hitting walls is part of the joy of living… and the harder you hit that wall, the higher you bounce off.