I want to be radically normal and radically abnormal

This is who Jesus was and this is who I want to be. Jesus was radically normal. A carpenter, a man of the people, working class, and someone who everyone around him seemed able to relate to. 


He was at home relationally with fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, the wealthy, the poor, the disadvantaged, the sick. Coming from Nazareth he was even more normal. He was obviously approachable as so many engaged conversation with him and he with others.


But He was also radically abnormal in this: when engaged in conversation he was always upfront about His Father. He went to the heart of things which is the heart in non-offensive but clear ways. He simply shared the good news which was the heart of who He was. 


I am no different than the people around me. I have challenges, a marriage with its complexities, relationships that are good and sometimes problematic, worry on occasion about finances, am overweight and trying to lose. I am radically normal.


But I also want to be radically abnormal - because I have something  that many I bump into don't have: Jesus. I want to be radically abnormal because I am willing to be upfront with those around me about the change Jesus has made in my life. 


If I am radically normal but never share Jesus, I am living in a cocoon of my faith. If I connect my normality with radical abnormality because I share my deeply held faith - then I am living like Jesus. And join Jesus in His Kingdom work.

We will not support you as a missionary because...

We need to think more carefully about some of the decisions and assumptions we make in missions including who we will or will not support and why. The truth is that many churches make some fairly irrational decisions in this regard, decisions which they would never apply to their own ministries.


Take for example support personnel who are not directly involved in evangelism or church planting but who support those who are on the front lines. There are many churches who will tell teachers, administrators, and other support personnel that they are not a priority because they are not doing direct "mission work."


Think about that! Without teachers mission families cannot live overseas. Without financial administrators, missionaries are distracted by all kinds of necessary financial oversight issues. Without people in communications the story of what is taking place on the field will not be told. Without IT personnel, technology becomes a barrier not a help. Without those who connect local churches with international opportunities in order to make the relationship helpful and healthy there is a net loss to both. Without specialized trainers to equip pastors, church planters and national missionaries there is not multiplication.


Any missionary will tell you that it takes a team to make their ministry possible. And, that when support personnel are absent, they are distracted in a major way from what they have been called to do. It is like assuming that a local church pastor will do all that needs to be done in administration and finance without help.


Another curious anomaly are churches who will not support someone who is a in leadership position, overseeing staff and personnel. Ironically, we would not consider not having leaders overseeing others in the local church or in business but somehow it makes sense in missions. 


It is these well trained leaders who develop new ministries, coach and mentor staff for greatest effectiveness, lead teams or leaders of teams and ensure that we are doing multiplication in missions rather than addition. As in any organization, the quality of leadership will determine the empowerment and effectiveness of staff so it is foolish to think leaders are somehow less important than other staff - but some missions committees have made that decision.


Think of your local church. How many people does it take to ensure that healthy ministry is taking place between pastors, support staff (full and part time) and volunteers? Why would it be any different in missions where the cross cultural work environment is far more complex than what we face in our own culture? 


What would your ministry look like if you only hired pastors and there were no support personnel (paid or volunteer?). Of course we would not and do not live that way here, so why would we apply a different thinking overseas where things are harder, take longer and are far more complicated than in our home culture?


Think about this: The mission I lead has almost 600 staff, hundreds of church partnerships in the United States, operates in over 75 countries and has around 100 national partners. It takes a significant, qualified and specialized staff including key support staff to do that well. It is a far more complex ministry than even a mega church in the United States. 


Please think carefully before your church makes policies or decisions that sound noble but would never work in our own culture let alone in a cross cultural situation.

Spiritual Transformation and God's Meta story

There is a missing element in the conversation regarding spiritual transformation in many evangelical circles. There is rightly a conversation taking place about the need to move from behavior modification where people modify behaviors to fit into their evangelical sub-culture (whatever it is) to true inner life transformation.

In the first case life change is at the behavioral level. In the second case it is from the inside out: Hearts that understand and live in grace, minds that seek to think like Jesus, lives that are brought in line with God’s priorities and relationships that reflect the love of Jesus. For too long the church has settled for behavior modification instead of inner transformation. This is a very important conversation.

There is, however, a second part of the transformation process that needs equal attention. It involves the purpose of transformation. Here is something to think about: when our focus on transformation is only personal and about us it is a selfish and incomplete transformation that diminishes God’s ultimate purpose for our lives.

Now I fully understand that heart transformation is the entrance into God’s kingdom and family and where we experience the forgiveness of sin and a new standing in God’s sight. This is the message of John 3:16. What this does not address is the purpose of that transformation: we are reconciled to God in Christ (giving us all the blessings of life in Jesus for eternity) in order to join God in His work of reconciliation in our world (2 Corinthians 5:11-21).

Many of God’s people do not understand God’s Meta story! Our involvement in His Meta story is what brings our lives its greatest meaning!

That Meta story started in the garden where God created the world as He meant it to be: a creation at peace with itself and men and women in perfect relationship with God. That perfection was ruined by sin bringing with it the dehumanization of those made in His image. Into our world came sin, separation from God, relational disconnect, disease, death, sorrow, selfishness, war, injustice, fear, and all the results of sin.

From the moment of the fall, however, God put into place a divine rescue operation (Genesis 3:15) which culminated in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the inauguration of His Kingdom. His intent was and is to bring redemption to a broken world, redeeming what was made bad with the culmination coming at His return.

That redemption starts with hearts that are transformed but He then calls His people to join Him in His work of bringing His Kingdom to earth (Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven – Matthew 6:10). 

This includes feeding the hungry, caring for the marginalized, bringing justice where there is injustice (Isaiah 55, Micah 6:8), caring for the orphan and widow and alien (Deuteronomy), bringing His Kingdom values to all the places we inhabit and the people we know (Sermon on the Mount) to name just a few examples. 

This is the outcome of our heart transformation: nothing less than the transformation of our communities, neighborhoods and workplaces as God uses us to bring His love, truth, values, practices and relationships to every corner of our lives.

Ephesians 2:8-10 sum this up very well. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

The regeneration of our hearts is a complete gift from God. But, don’t miss that we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works – joining God in bringing His love, truth, values, practices and relationships to every corner of our lives. This is no individual pietistic vision but a vision of God’s family intentionally impacting everything and everyone around them. It is the gospel touching everything. It is transformation of hearts that results in transformation of our communities as we live out the life of Jesus.

The Meta story is about God’s plan to redeem what sin destroyed. We are redeemed to join Him in that redemption story.

Leaders as reflective practicioners

Leadership has a built in dichotomy: In order to lead well one must reflect well. It is a dichotomy because when we think of leadership we think of action. Yet wise action comes out of a great deal of quiet reflection. To lead well, one must learn the discipline of reflecting well.

Reflection takes time - time away from activity in order to think, pray and plan. I am currently spending five weeks in Berlin doing just that, along with the opportunity to see what a coalition of the willing is doing to see 100 transformational fellowships arise in this city. My time here may well be the most important activity of my year because it gives me time to reflect. 

In many organizations I work with or relate to, time away to think is not seen as a high value because it is time "away from work." I disagree! It is the most important work we do because it allows us to lead from wisdom that comes from reflection. In activity, less is more if it is highly focused on the right things. Getting to the right things requires time to reflect carefully.

The term reflective practitioners puts this into context. Leaders are practitioners - they do things and lead people. But that leadership is best when it comes out of deep and careful reflection. Reflection is the work behind the work of leading. 

Remember two things. First, three key decisions in a year is far more powerful than 20 non key decisions. Getting to the game changing decisions requires significant time to think.

Second, the decisions of leaders impacts others so ensuring that those decisions are well thought out is critical. Non reflective leadership hurts people inadvertently. 

If you lead you are a practitioner. The question is whether you value the discipline of reflection. Reflective practitioners are better practitioners than non reflective practitioners. Which are you?

A wake up call for missions: The world is moving to the city

The largest migration in the history of the world is quietly taking place and it will become a tsunami shift of the world's population in the next forty years: the world is moving from the countryside to the city in massive numbers. This shift threatens to catch the missions world unprepared.


Consider these statistics from 2005 related to foreign born migration to the cities. The percentage of the foreign born population in Miami was 50.94%, Toronto, 44.99%, Los Angeles 36.24%, London 27.05%, Brussels 26.58%, Dubai 82%. And this does not count all the internal migration taking place within countries like China to the city. China is set to resettle 400 million people from the country side to the city in the next 30 years.


Look at the populations of these cities of the world:
1. Tokyo, Japan - 32,450,000 
2. Seóul, South Korea - 20,550,000 
3. Mexico City, Mexico - 20,450,000 
4. New York City, USA - 19,750,000 
5. Mumbai, India - 19,200,000 
6. Jakarta, Indonesia - 18,900,000 
7. Sáo Paulo, Brazil - 18,850,000 
8. Delhi, India - 18,680,000 
9. Õsaka/Kobe, Japan - 17,350,000 
10. Shanghai, China - 16,650,000

11. Manila, Philippines - 16,300,000
12. Los Angeles, USA - 15,250,000
13. Calcutta, India - 15,100,000
14. Moscow, Russian Fed. - 15,000,000
15. Cairo, Egypt - 14,450,000
16. Lagos, Nigeria - 13,488,000
17. Buenos Aires, Argentina - 13,170,000
18. London, United Kingdom - 12,875,000
19. Beijing, China - 12,500,000
20. Karachi, Pakistan - 11,800,000

21. Dhaka, Bangladesh - 10,979,000
22. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - 10,556,000
23. Tianjin, China - 10,239,000
24. Paris, France - 9,638,000
25. Istanbul, Turkey - 9,413,000
26. Lima, Peru - 7,443,000
27. Tehrãn, Iran - 7,380,000
28. Bangkok, Thailand - 7,221,000
29. Chicago, USA - 6,945,000
30. Bogotá, Colombia - 6,834,000

With some exceptions, traditional missions has flourished in rural mono cultural settings. In many ways it is easier and less expensive than tackling the growing major urban areas of our planet. It is also where the majority of the world's population lived until recent decades. Hard as this was, it pales in comparison to reading the multi-cultural complex urban centers of the future.


In addition, because the evangelical movements in the United States largely abandoned the cities of our nation for the suburbs and rural areas, there are very few personnel coming into mission organizations with experience of working in large, complex, highly populated, diverse urban areas.


What are the challenges faced for mission agencies in reaching these huge urban areas with the gospel? First, Gospel penetration will never happen without agencies and denominations working together in cooperation to reach the growing urban areas of our planet. Mission agencies and denominations have a poor track record of cooperating for the cause of the Gospel globally but until that happens we will not see significant Gospel penetration of the world's cities.


Coupled with this, many denominations in the United States (and globally) do not see the value in working with believers outside of their particular theological tribe. Our small kingdom hearts, compared to that of Jesus hold us back from seeing the synergies of working in cooperation with others who are Gospel centered and missional. For too many of us it is about the brand before the Bride. For Jesus it is about the Bride, not the brand.


Cities are complex. They are also the populations of influence. Their large immigrant communities are more open to the Gospel then when they lived in their traditional places with their traditional social systems. There is a higher level of education and often higher concentrations of evil. In addition, they are not mono cultural but multi cultural requiring multi-cultural teams and strategies. Unless we unlock the code of how the Gospel can penetrate these huge and growing population centers - and start today, we will again be playing catch up to a changing world. 


The Western church, indeed the global church and its mission agencies need to take up the challenge of cooperative efforts to penetrate these growing global cities with the gospel. The time to start is now!

Reading Scripture for the first time

It is amazing to me how much the “enlightenment” and the rise of “rational thinking” has impacted our reading of Scripture. What we call the enlightenment coming out of the dark ages had many advantages, allowing scientists, for instance to test their theories and come to grips with the real workings of our cosmos.

But it had other consequences as well. In a rational world, God does not break in and do the unexpected – yet any reading of the Bible shows that He indeed does. The rational world would believe that God operates according to a set of predictable rules. Yet how predictable is a God who comes to earth in the form of a baby, lives in squalid Nazareth and dies on a cross to pay for our sin of rebellion against Him? What sense does that make? It is so irrational that many refuse to believe. And a virgin birth on top of it!

Read Scripture to a child and they get it. They believe it. They devour it. They are mesmerized by the stories of an unpredictable God who is at once tame, fierce, predictable, unpredictable, doing the miraculous and surprising people at every turn. They have not yet been tainted by rational thinking that seeks to tame the untamable Aslan. 

Then listen to many messages from the “grown ups” including many pastors which turn the unpredictable into the predictable and find ways to deny the very power of God to break in and do what we don’t expect him to do. We tame God with our theology and make him fit our rationale box. Especially we tame the Holy Spirit because He is scary in his unpredictability so defining what He can and cannot do is paramount: especially if you want Him to fit your theological system.

God is not tamable. He is so far beyond our grasp and our understanding. If the edge of the known cosmos is 13 billion light-years away, he is infinitely further from that in our understanding of Him. What is amazing is that he still knows when a sparrow dies, Still intervenes in the lives of all who call Him Lord.

Still He surprises us daily with His grace. Demons are still cast out in His name, people healed miraculously in His name, lives changed dramatically in His name, the forces of evil in the universe pushed back in His name. Yet He acts according to His sovereign purposes and will surprising us with his timing and His wisdom which is beyond our understanding.

If we could reclaim the ability to read Scripture through the eyes of a child, unencumbered with our finely tuned theological systems (yes they have their place but they can also limit us) we might be surprised at the God we find. He would be more personal, more difficult to pin down, more powerful, more unpredictable in His intervention in human affairs and we would be more ready to see His surprises in our lives.

Some theologians will push back and say, "but we have 2,000 years of biblical interpretation since Jesus that needs to be kept in mind when we read the text." I agree that we have many insights from those who have gone before us. I also believe that we are often held hostage by the theological grids that we have been taught that keep us from seeing God in his full Glory. No theological system is perfect and many have significant deficiencies. What happened at taking Scripture at face value? 

Try reading the Bible as if you were reading it for the first time.  

Shallow CliffsNotes Christianity

As I survey the contemporary evangelical church today in the west I would often characterize it as shallow, lacking in substance, Christianity light and easy grace. In some cases, there is not much difference between a self help seminar (think Tony Robins) and what is shared in the name of God’s word from the pulpit – as if the Scriptures are primarily a self help manual that if followed will bring us prosperity and health. Certainly it should not get too personal or interfere with our lives.

Some will think this too critical and I don’t desire to be an angry modern day prophet who throws stones. And, I am sure based on past history that I will lose some Twitter followers over this blog. That being said, here are some of the things we don’t see among many western evangelicals that lead me to my conclusion.

One: suffering seems to be a lost subject and we are surprised when it surfaces in our lives. When it does it often causes Western believers to question the goodness of God and leads many to bitterness and doubt. Yet, Jesus made it abundantly clear that the way of the cross is the way of suffering. What does it mean when He says, “Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me (Luke 9:23).” A cross is, by definition the metaphor for suffering and Jesus says it is a daily occurrence for those who follow Him. The Apostle Paul talked with emotion about sharing in the fellowship of His sufferings.

Two: Western believers as a group are, (how do I say it?), stingy with God. The average evangelical gives something like two percent of their income back to Him. Now, in case you think I have gone legalistic here, bear with me a moment. It is not about legalism but about value. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16).

I believe that we have so cheaply sold what God did on our behalf, even though He gave His only son – to become sin for us so that we could know Him who knew no sin – and be justified through His righteousness and death on our behalf that our gratitude is shallow and our response is cheap. Second Corinthians 8 and 9 speak of giving as a direct response to His grace. If that is so our giving does not reflect much value toward His amazing grace but is often pocket change tossed into His hat on occasion. We simply don’t value His gift to us very much as evidenced by our response.

Three: American evangelicalism has very little to say about sin. OK, I don’t like the subject much either but Scripture has a lot to say about it in relation to a Holy God. The Scriptures talk about sin on 1365 occasions. But mostly this gets lost in the CliffsNotes version of Evangelicalism. After all you have to cut somewhere and this is most convenient place to do it.

Except, that without an understanding of my depravity I cannot understand God’s grace. Why did the woman in John 12:3 use all of her saving to pour pure nard on the feet of Jesus and then wipe them clean with her hair? She understood her sin and therefore the amazing grace that Jesus had blessed her with. Her desire to follow was directly connected with the grace she had been given and her acute awareness of her fallen condition. A sinless Christianity is a cheap parody of the true human condition – even those who know and follow Jesus. Paul described himself as the chief of sinners and that was toward the end of his life. It is what drove him to live in God’s grace on a daily basis.

Four: We are far more consumed with our, lives, careers, pleasures and interests than we are with joining God in His work in our world. Some of the blame here can be laid at the door of the church that has defined ministry as what happens inside its four walls with its programs. Thus, I minister when I bow to the church’s agenda and fill needed spots in their programs. But what ever happened to ministry being with the people I work with and live with or who hang out at the local tavern? Where was Jesus found most of the time?

That being said, in general, we are so consumed with our agendas that we lose sight of God’s agenda – which requires that we read His book, another lost art (I am heartened by the Eat This Book challenge that has thousands of believers reading through the Bible this year). When our life agenda takes precedence over God’s agenda we have reimaged God after our own image.

Five: American Evangelicals don’t truly believe that lost people are lost for eternity apart from a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We are more likely to share our latest weight loss plan than we are Jesus. Losing weight has its place, and I am vigorously pursuing that, but the Gospel is good news for time and eternity. If we do believe that lost people are truly lost apart from Jesus, we assume that it is the church’s responsibility to share the news not us.

When I tell my wife I love her but don’t demonstrate that love she knows my words are shallow and lack sincerity. When we tell God we love Him but don’t walk the walk of our talk we are guilty of shallow Christianity. What do you think when you consider the Western version of evangelicalism? There are wonderful exceptions of course but I fear that our version of Christianity is often far more cultural than it is Biblical.

Having written this, I am of course obliged to consider each of these five areas in light of my own life and practice: irritating but instructive. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll unsubscribe me from Twitter as well. I don’t like being uncomfortable any more than others.