Purple Pastor

Excellent, Wayne

I had a coupla thoughts as I stood and talked to people at the end of  our Hope in a House of Blues series Sunday, and a stranger gave me the gift of encouragement.

A man told me he had attended the first and last weeks of HOB.  He drove three hours from near Blacksburg VA to come the first week, because he is a Mike Farris fan and learned of Mike's visit to Lake Forest through a concert website.  Then he told me, 'We drove three hours again to worship with you today, so I could bring my son and show him what excellence looks like in a church.  Thank you for the hard work, preparation, thought, and prayer that clearly goes into everything you do here at Lake Forest.  We were each edified by the worship and teaching this morning.  He has never seen this kind of attention to quality and care, and is tempted to give up on church.'  Tears sprang to my eyes and I did not know what to say, except 'you're welcome, and thank you for taking a moment to encourage me and our leadership- I will pass it along.' 

I'm just like you.  I'm hyper-aware of how far my personal and work life fall short of mine and others' aspirations for each.  Often.  So the occasional glimpse of something done well is a gift.  That is why God calls us to encourage one another - which stimulates us further to love and good deeds.

So I pondered the man from Virginia's comment as I went to say goodbye to our guest blues guitarist.  We hosted more national blues artists this year than ever for HOB.  Mike Farris and Larry Mccray are seriously the Shakira or Lil' Wayne of their genres (hmm, bet they've never suffered those comparisons before).  Both of these world-class blues rockers simply LOVED playing with Kyle, our band, and vocalists.  They were struck by the environment, and our worship tech supported them wholeheartedly and skillfully.   

Having just been complemented on our 'excellence,' I walked into the worship center and thanked God out loud for the excellence of our building, our worship, our leaders - symbolized by the worship team that day.  Kyle has led them to be so excellent at what they do,  that national talent enjoyed playing with them, even learned and joined in on our stuff.  And they were able to do their own music at the same level of excellence they expect in large concert venues with their full-time professional bands and techs. 

Here's why this matters so much to me.   For our blues-guest Larry last Sunday, as far as I could tell, all this meant that a person of high excellence in his profession, who had 'given up on church but not on God' actually darkened the door of a church because of the excellence in it that he related to.  And Larry had a good experience, maybe even a God-experience.  Perhaps you've had that experience when an unchurched friend attended worship with you.

In a church, excellence honors God and reaches people.  Traditional church, rock n roll church, polka church. Whatever your calling, do it with excellence.  If you're a hippie/gen x-y-z church that values extreme informality and intentional shabby-chic imperfections, then do THAT with excellence (hmmm, how would you know if you were excellently shabby?).  In each case, unchurched people of that subculture will be reached.  Do it poorly, half-way, 'just good enough,' and only the committed saints will give it the time of day.  Why God uses excellence this way, I'm not sure (it would over-lengthen this blog to speculate).  But its a fact that he does. 

^"And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."  Colossians 3:17    This is a verse we began citing in the early years of Lake Forest Church.  It meant to us that if we do 'whatever we do' at Lake Forest in the name of Jesus, as an expression of thanks to God, that would mean we would do our ministry aspiring toward excellence.  And holding one another accountable for that as leaders.

Oh come on.  If you know me at all, you know I'm not talking about perfection, not slick over-produced performance.  To protect against excellence leading into a performance mentality at Lake Forest, that means we always keep some sort of rawness or spontaneity in the mix, among other things.   It also means we don't measure excellence against others.  We measure it according to available resources, stage of life of our organization, and the unique vision and calling of, in our case, this particular church.  For instance, in our early days as a church in the skating rink, I remember Sundays when I was the full extent of our percussion and rhythm section.  Most of you would not have visited our church a second time back in those days, but we were attempting excellence with who we had at hand.  Mitch White still likes to call me 'bongo boy' on occasion.  I don't think he means it as a compliment.  Another example - many other churches would not call our shabby-chic concrete floors 'excellent.'  We call them 'most excellent.'

That's my take on the excellence principle and how it applies specifically to my life's work, and the work of the leadership team and all leaders of ministry at Lake Forest Church.  How does this apply to personal life?  Be careful, this principle could be twisted into one more reason to feel like a failure before God, and discount the sufficiency of Christ for you, since I can quickly make a list of all the things in my life that are not 'excellent.'  Instead, allow it to be a spur to know ever more clearly the few, very few, things you care about most and are decent at (raising kids, cutting a deal, generosity, protesting an injustice, etc.).  For the sake of glorifying God, and others being encouraged and even affected:  Keep kicking your own butt to do those very few things well, in this manner:

^"And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him."  Colossians 3:17 

Newspaper Interview

Yesterday the Charlotte Observer included an article on our church's 'Hope in a House of Blues' series.  It was in the Lake Norman neighbors section.  The writer did a nice job capturing what we are trying to do.  Here are her questions and my written answers in full.(if you're looking for the blogs I mentioned in church yesterday, they are the last two before this one - scroll down to 'God Never Speaks' 1&2)

1) How did the idea for Hope in a House of Blues come about?  ANSWER:  Our Sunday services are always organized as 4-6 week long 'series' covering a particular subject.  In a planning meeting Kyle Dillard, our worship arts pastor, simply blurted out, 'what if we experimented with four weeks of combining blues-music-as-worship, the blues in peoples’ lives, while you teach what the Bible says about suffering.’  Year after year, we never run out of material – the blues in this world and in our lives are so ever-present.

2) How does the series use art and music to connect spiritually with people?ANSWER:  We use this series to point out the fact that art and music are inherently spiritual activities, allowing us to express both the human spirit and our desire for God in ways different than prose or rational discourse. We aspire to be part of a fresh movement to recapture the vitality of the arts for the purpose of worship.  Blues Music simply does connect spiritually with people.  Our first guest artist, Mike Farris, stated that when he plays the blues based on the American slave worship experience, even naked pot-smoking hippies at the Bonaroo Festival get quiet, tearful, and deal with God in their soul.  This year’s visual art includes paintings in our lobby by residents of the Urban Ministry Men’s Shelter in Charlotte, as well as our Lake Forest visual artists evoking the look and feel of a destroyed city in our worship center.

3) How would you describe the experience of attending a Hope in a House of Blues concert? ANSWER: The experience is usually surprising first and foremost, because every year we fuse the music, visual arts, worship environment, and Bible teaching differently, hoping for something that is more like transformative spiritual performance art as opposed to typical church expectations.

4) Is there any preaching/teaching that goes along with the concerts? ANSWER:  Yes.  Every year I choose a book of the Bible that addresses the collision of human blues with the love of God.  This year, I am teaching the book of Lamentations, which is a set of five ancient Hebrew poems expressing anguish over the destruction of a city, a nation, and individual lives.

5) What do you hope people will experience/take from attending a Hope in a House of Blues event?    ANSWER:  I hope people will experience the presence of God in this fusion worship.  And I hope we will each learn new facets of God’s wisdom for handling the pain and suffering in our lives, as well as being agents of God’s hope to everyone we know who’s currently living in their own House of Blues.

6) How did last week's concert go?   ANSWER: Great.

7) Any other comments about Hope in a House of Blues?    ANSWER: We constantly experiment with a concept of ‘ancient/future worship’ at Lake Forest.  This series does so by combining ancient Biblical teaching, with modern rock and video ambient backgrounds, all held together by 50-200 year old blues and gospel music. It’s always a unique ancient/future blend.

God Never Speaks

God never speaks.  Not once.  In the Bible's Book of Lamentations. 

I believe that Lamentations is inspired by God as part of His multi-faceted and infallible Word to humanity, and to each human being, contained in the Old and New Testaments.  The Hebrew poet (likely Jeremiah) who wrote the five poems which make up this book has a primary purpose of articulating the anguish his fellow Jews are experiencing, because of the violent destruction of their country and their family lives in 587 BC. 

The poems are written to express the blues, the lament, the complaint of people who view themselves as the people of God, under the most horrific of circumstances.  For example, the two year siege prior to Babylon's victory over Jerusalem included such extreme hunger in the city that some resorted to cannibalism of the dead.  Now their entire way of life is gone.  Imagine Pearl Harbor or 9/11, except extended to the entire nation, with the result of no more functioning government, economy, worship, communication, nothing.  Devastation for an entire generation.

The poems are written to express these blues communally to one another (the poems were designed to be read aloud, together, in place of temple worship in the destroyed city by those who survived and live among the ruins).  They are also written to express their blues to God, skillfully through acrostic Hebrew poetry.  In the first four poems, each new stanza begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, thus communicating artfully that 'our blues will be spoken from A-Z, not leaving anything out, so don't try to stop us at the letter M or cut us off, it will all be covered!' and also 'our blues are not limitless, never-ending, symbolized by the finite nature of the aphabet.'  The poetic devices go much deeper, but you get the poet's main artistic idea by understanding the use of the alphabetic acrostic.

So after you read these five poems, you realize that the poet has powerfully, crassly, nakedly spoken of the nation's pain.  And though this book was inspired by God (through the person, experience, vantage point and personality of the prophet), and is found in what we refer to as the larger Word of God (the Bible):  God has not spoken a single word into these blues. 

When Job laments, God answers at the end of the book.  When the Psalmists sing their blues, usually the song writer includes a line or two of God's comfort, compassion, wisdom, or sovereignty to comfort the hearers.  Think of the restraint it took, therefore, for our Poet to refrain from including a similar word from God to comfort the mourners, if not a word to defend Himself from the bitter God-accusations found throughout the 5 poems!  Why is there no direct word from God in Lamentations? 

I think this intentional void is to tutor people of faith to honor and pay attention to human suffering and pain deeply enough that the sufferer can speak it all, every bit of it, over a long period of time. Without the fear of being dehumanized or shut up by a too-quick word of hope, or an abusive word of denial.  The Poet shows us that people need to lament their pain, from A-Z.  We must each give one another the gift of fully listening, not stopping at the letter M with an injection of 'but God can...' or anything else.  As image-bearers of God, and Holy Spirit-bearers as Christians, we may give the sufferer the gift of the sense of Divine attention when we live out the spirit of this poetry. 

As sufferers, we are granted dignity in our suffering through this extreme silent attention from God and wise friends.  We are shown through Lamentations that the path toward any future that's from God (which we can't even talk about yet, much less envision in our pain) will best travel unhurriedly through full and troubling recitation of our pain.  At first, our expression of our suffering may be guttural, ugly, teetering toward the profane toward God.  If we allow ourselves to be mentored by Lamentations, our expression of the blues over time will find more disciplined channels and media (Jeremiah used poetry to do this), which begins to communicate to my own soul there is both definition and end to my pain.  This leads to a glimmer of hope in the soul, that perhaps my life will again resume a pattern travelling in a defined direction. 

That's what I think.  In my next post, I'll quote my so-far favorite commentator on this point, who says "Even one word from God would take up too much space in the book of Lamentations."  Stay tuned, and I hope you'll read Lamentations on your own once before Sunday.

Blues Picture

What a great day of experimental Blues Worship we had yesterday.  Mike Farris proved to be, once again, a very special guest and friend of Lake Forest.  In fact, after the third service I sprinkled him with 'holy' bottled water and declared him a member.  Therefore we're accountable to pray and care for him over this next year.

Here's one of several excellent pics taken by one of our ministry partners: You can view more pics, and read Christopher Record's blog about Mike Farris' story here at http://blog.christopherrecord.com/

Preaching Lamentations

About 8 months ago, I decided to preach the book of Lamentations for this year's Hope in a House of Blues at Lake Forest Church.  Past blues-Bible-books we've covered in the series include Psalms of Lament, Job, and Ecclesiastes (next year I'm holding myself to preaching the blues out of the New Testament).  The idea is to sing our blues in worship, then God to meet us in our blues through his specific, targeted Word to people singin the blues.  There's plenty of material, both for singing our blues, and in Scripture.

So, last summer I went away to begin to prepare to preach Lamentations.  You should know that some of my sermon series are completely original (like Ordinary Jesus - I just read the four Gospels with a notepad beside me), some series are hardly original (Under the Influence leaned into a well-defined ministry strategy for partnering with parents, I made the teaching my own), and the vast majority of my series are an amalgamation of originality, commentaries, other sermons, books, ideas from our worship planning team, and random 80's tunes that come to me while I'm in mid-sermon.

As I began to look around for examples of sermon series on Lamentations, applying the book's themes for today, I discovered something that both troubled and energized me.  Nobody ever preaches the book of Lamentations!  Oh sure, most pastors preach a one-off sermon on chapter three ('his mercies are new every morning').  That's as easy as taking candy from a baby, as obvious as an MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice joke.  But the rest of this depressing, troubling little five chapter gem?  Nada. Okay, I found ONE extended sermon series that treats the entire book, but its by a preacher I so admire that if I listened to his whole series, I'd just preach his ideas.

Lamentations is rarely preached for a number of reasons: 1) it is very difficult to wade through theologically, 2) it is depressing and taxing emotionally, 3) it is an obscure book at the end of the Old Testament, 4) it is all poetry, all the time, 5) God is never personified as speaking in the poems, only people; the reasons go on and on. But another reason that is bit more obscure is this: there is no plot for Lamentations.  It does not have a beginning, climax, and conclusion in the traditional sense. Lamentations is not linear. It is a collection of 5 poems, written by the creative pen of one who sees tragic events and wants to put them onto paper lest he/she forget them. And if we neglect the literary elements of Lamentations, we are neglecting the literary form in

which God, in His sovereignty, has placed truth about Himself.

So that's what I got.  5 poems weeping, wailing, singing the blues toward God over a ruined city, which equals devastated lives.  I am a bit daunted at taking on a preaching task that is such uncovered territory (who am I to do such a thing, and/or am I an idiot pastor who just didn't read that memo in seminary, 'stay away from Lamentations - its the graveyard of pastors!').  But I'm excited also.  These Words of God are fresh for me. 

So if you don't mind, please pray for me as I prepare.  And read Lamentations 1 before you come to church next Sunday.  Most importantly - invite a friend who doesn't have a church home.  The blues are universal - in life and in the Bible.  I don't think even I can screw up that connection.

Fellow Christians: A pastor worships at three local churches

I had yesterday off from preaching.  So instead of sleeping in or enjoying Lake Forest in a more chill way, I decided to celebrate a new worship location with three local friends and partners.

I first went to 7:30am Mass at St. Mark's Roman Catholic Church.  Yeah you heard me right, 7:30 am.  There were a few hundred people there, who according to one member that warmly greeted me, 'enjoy the quietness of early silent mass.'  They have no music during this early mass - its simply the people of God affirming faith, praying, and receiving the body and blood of their saviour.  Some worshipped in jeans, even shorts, and one served communion in jeans (sometime I'll tell you the story of being upbraided by a traditionalist at our annual EPC conference last summer, for daring to serve communion in short sleeves!?! 'But dude' i replied, 'i thought ahead and packed slacks for this service - i tried hard to speak your language!').  My soul was moved to speak the same affirmation of faith with this group of Christians that we recently sang during communion at LFC:  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  The power of this simple, unardorned confession of faith, follwed by all reciting the Nicene Creed, moved me and stirred my confidence and hope that the Good News of Jesus Christ has been moving on this earth for 2,000 years, and is on the move today in so many more ways than I see every day.  The Kingdom of God is certainly near.  I experienced it in the service.  The sermon was direct, articulate, and artfully stated on the Christian committment to Respect Life.  I was edified and challenged to live my convictions as a Christian.  On my way out, I congratulated the pastor on their fabulous new sanctuary.  Monsignor Richard Bellows is a respected friend with whom I've worked to found HELP, a local justice network of congregations.

After a Greek omelette with lots of tabasco at the Acropolis, I next attended Church of the Good Shepherd (Anglican Mission in America) at exit 28.  I wanted to cheer on their second sunday meeting in the LKN YMCA that was our home for so many years.  This new group is playing out worship in the historic liturgy of Anglicans, in an experimentally relevant way to our LKN culture.  My heart filled and soared as we stated the same words of faith, the Nicene Creed, that I had just shared at St. Mark's.  I was oddly non-nostalgic about worshipping in the YMCA again after 3 years of not having walked back in that building.  Good Shepherd has created an inviting and worshipful atmosphere, with great worship ambience in the ol' worshipnasium.  The pastor does a great job of explaining the various elements of the liturgy as they come up, making them seem natural to the modern worshiper.  The thoughtful sermon was for me as much as anyone else present - 'We are sent by Jesus, just as He was sent by the Father, on the same mission - to seek and save those who are lost from knowing, experiencing, and giving out the love of God.  Jesus was not of this world.  He was doin' just fine in heaven!  He became an exile, uncomfortable, to enter this world on God's mission, for our sakes.  We must never grow comfortable as individuals or a church and think its about worshipping etc just for 'us.'" Made me want to shout 'preach it, preacha!'  I was able to visit a few minutes with pastor Kyle Wallace, my friend, to share my excitement over what they are doing to proclaim the good news of Jesus in our community, in their own way.

I then buzzed quickly down to exit 25, to witness the Grand Opening service of my friends at Journey Church's first ever building.  Their pastors, Will Oswald and Brian Early, have been supportive church planting buddies of mine for almost 8 years, meeting over sandwiches or chips or coffee multiple times, talking through what each of us was learning and challenges we faced during every phase of starting up churches.  I admire these men - their longevity and faithfulness in one community, the solidity of their leadership that's led to a healthy enough church to take this big step, especially the fact that people are coming to know Jesus by faith and growing in his grace at Journey Church.  Their opening service was moving, and their building is well done, reflecting the creativity and excellence that are a part of everything Journey Church does.  Again, the message was for me.  'Yes we are dedicating a building today.  But we are also dedicating ourselves to God.  Not for a building to be the end-all be-all, but to keep joining God's mission of reconciling the world to Himself.  And our church must do so in partnership with other church's (he prayed for Lake Forest), because we won't reach everyone oursevles.  And we must not think of the building as a stopping point, a resting place, or the definer of our future - God has more and greater plans for us in the future!'

My heart was full as I pulled away from the third worship service.  I wept at points during each service - because I love to worship with God's people, to hear God's Word in the gathered community of those who believe, to hear people say together through song, prayer or creed the fact that we have this Living Hope centered on the resurrection of Jesus:  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.  I could be at home in any of these churches and worship happily.  And I wished I also could have visited many other friends' churches that day as well.  But as I put in my U2 CD on the way home to finish my worship by exulting along to 'Magnificent,' I knew that my own tribal worship language is in fact the predominant one we speak at Lake Forest.

I'll close with this.  St. Mark's worship guidelines included a word of welcome to non-Catholics, as well as non-Christians.  In their greeting to me, it reads thus, and so is my prayer:

"For our fellow Christians:  We welcome our fellow Christians to this celebration of the Eucharist as our brothers and sisters.  We pray that our common baptism and the action of the Holy Spirit in this Eucharist will draw us closer to one another and begin to dispel the sad divisions which separate us.  We pray that these will lessen and finally disappear, in keeping with Christ's prayer for us 'that they may all be one' (John 17:21)."

Wise are the Parents

Wise are the parents who have built our 5th parenting strategy (from yesterday) into their lives, by 'widening the circle of  influence' in their childrens' lives  to include  Jason as the weekly small group leader of their boy during 11am service.  A caring, Jesus-following adult who will help the boys learn and apply truth in the context of community.  Believing God's Word for their children, that "whoever walks with the wise will grow wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm" (Proverbs 13:30).  Here's Jason's group meeting in one of our offices at 11am yesterday (man, my camera stinks).

Wise are other parents of children and teenagers, building the same 'wider circle'  by partnership with Christ-centered community through the church.  Jason and the other small group leaders I saw with children yesterday, as well as the youth leaders who got off the buses with our teens from the retreat yesterday afternoon - are my heroes of influence.  May God give them joy in this high calling each leader has accepted from Him.