Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • The Beautiful Gate

    I’ve been meditating a bit on Acts 3:1-10, the story of the healing of the lame man at the Beautiful gate of the temple. Often we look at stories like this and just think it’s a nice story of miraculous healing. But I believe that miracles are intended to communicate a message, and when they are told in detail, there’s a very important message there indeed.

    I see this one in two parts. Now some folks are going to agree mostly with the first half of what I’m getting out of this passage, while others will agree with the second, but I think they go together.

    There’s something ironic about a lame man begging at the “beautiful” gate. The name of the gate suggests attraction and welcome, and yet here he is, brought every day to watch people go into the temple and beg something from them. The others can go into the blessing of worship, but he’s left outside. There were some who felt that those who were deformed should not enter the temple (Leviticus 21:17-18 applied to priests; Deuteronomy 23:1-7 applies other restrictions, including those against foreigners, all to be removed according to Isaiah 56), but it was a rule that was to pass with the Messianic age (Isaiah 56:1-8).

    So as Peter and John pass by, proclaiming Jesus as the anointed one of God, there was a message to give. It was time for this man to enter the temple–and he did.

    This passage led me to thinking about open doors. How many people are sitting at the gates of the church, waiting to be let in. I’m not just talking about the physical doors to your church, but the doors to your community, to the body of Christ in your neighborhood. Are there people waiting just outside, looking for someone to help them? Are the folks just walking by, occasionally throwing them a glance or a even a coin, and then going on in, leaving them outside?

    What are the barriers? Class? Race? (Yes, it’s still a factor.) Theology? Drug addiction? Cleanliness? Sexual orientation? Known sin that disgusts us? (All theology to the contrary there are clean sins and dirty sins. Clean sins are the ones I commit, dirty sins are the ones everyone else commits. Not really–but you get my drift!)

    My church, the United Methodist Church, currently has a slogan “Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors.” There are some relatively slick ads to go with it. That’s the basic idea here. Is the door open?

    But despite believing that we need open hearts, minds, and doors in the church, I’ve been uncomfortable with the campaign as it is. When I have a tickling of discomfort about something I agree with, perhaps I need to think a bit more. And reading Acts 3, led me to that point.

    Peter and John tell the man that they have no money, but they will give him what they do have. Now I don’t think this is a statement against giving people money. Money is good and helpful, used in the right way. If we have money, it’s right to use it charitably.

    But what Peter says is this: “What I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus of Nazereth, stand up and walk!” After that he enters the temple. He enters the temple healed.

    We do need to ask whether our hearts, minds, and doors are open. But we need to go on and ask what’s going to happen when someone goes through those doors. Is there healing offered? Is there going to be a proclamation of the gospel inside? Will lives be changed? Too frequently in the church today we get people through the door and then leave them just the same. That beautiful gate needs to be open, but it needs to be open to lead to discipleship.

    Now please don’t hear me saying that the church needs to be filled with a judgmental attitude. Jesus suggests (Luke 14:12-14) inviting those who need to be healed, but he wants them fed. It’s not a matter of bringing people in and condemning them. Rather we bring people in and together we seek healing from God.

    The question I’m thinking about today (and it’s early Sunday morning, before I leave for the church) is this: How is coming through our doors going to change someone’s life? I’m praying that we’ll find a good answer to that. I’d like people to find Someone in our church who can heal them.

  • Family Time

    Family time is a phrase that means many different things to each of us. The words recall memories and regrets.

    When I ask my children about family time, it shouldn’t be surprising that it is the time when their parents gave them undivided attention that they recall most vividly. Concerts, meets, and ball games are the events that my children were a part. Knowing that I was going to be there long before the event and then coming on time and showing it was a priority was what wrapped them into secure feelings and gave a boost to their confidence and ego.

    Meal times were also big to my children. Even meals that involved a ballgame or show on television were remembered if we did it together! I dip my head in shame as I admit that my parents were correct when they said that coming to the table together with no television or distraction and giving attention to each child and the stories of their day is part of the foundation of a healthy family. This is when important questions of “why” and the impact of world and local events were also discussed. Even spiritual questions were raised. It should be said here that it was a “conversation” not a lecture on my views but time to allow the children, especially in pre-teen to teen years, to express their view and begin to look at what went into their view.

    My children are grown now with children of their own. They live in cities halfway across the continent and across the continent. Meal times are often quiet without their activities and voices coming in overlapping waves! But family time is still important. Even with the number around the table being two, it is important to come together and spend time listening to each other.

    Soon we will be coming into Thanksgiving and Christmas. Families come together in masses. Maybe there will only be two at your table. Maybe there will be a “mix” at your table that is not connected by blood but by a spirit of friendship and respect. Whatever the number, let us come together and make the most of the family time that is given to us

  • Gender Roles as Essential

    Peter Kirk has written an excellent post about the essentials of the Christian faith. I’ll let you go to his blog for the many references he has used in his discussion, and the reason for this post at this moment.

    My reason for commenting on it is simply that Peter has highlighted a number of the reasons why I believe it is important for us to clearly identify what we hold as essentials of the faith and why. I think I made a fairly clear statement on the issue in my post, Unity, Diversity, and Confusion. In that post I suggested that when we have too few essentials we become confused and rudderless and when we have too many, we become rigid. I could also note that when those essentials are not well-defined and carefully chosen we can do unintended damage throughout the church.

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  • Maturity or Masculinity

    OK, here is a good post on men in the church. I have nothing to add to it. Men, let’s read it and put it into practice.

    Hat tip: Lingamish.

  • Denominational vs Non-Denominational

    My wife and I have had several discussions recently about apportionments in the United Methodist Church. For those of you who are not Methodist, apportionments are funds paid by the local church to their conference or other higher authority to support the work of the broader church. Many of these funds go to administrative functions that are just not very sexy. Others go to agencies whose mission (or lack of it) concerns us.

    But at the same time if one claims membership in an organization, then one ought to support that organization. For us personally, that means tithing. We don’t ask each time we put a check in the offering plate whether we would personally vote for every project to which the money goes. That’s the money we give to the local church, and the church as a whole is responsible at that point for how it is used. Similarly, since our congregation has a sign out from that shows the cross and flame, and reads “United Methodist Church,” we owe something to the organization to which that name and logo belong.

    Sky Lowe-McCracken (Hat Tip: Locusts and Honey MBWR #85) talks about this issue in his post The United Methodist Connection – Plus or Minus?. He weighs various points about the connection, which he says has been very good to him, as a pastor. But what about the laity?

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  • Inreach and Outreach

    My previous post, The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture, didn’t generate discussion here, but it was picked up by Locusts and Honey with a substantial quote, and some interesting discussion took place there.

    The discussion seemed to center a good deal around the specific issue of church sanctuaries. But what I would hope we would consider would be the balance between inreach and outreach both in our personal lives and in the lives of others. Church sanctuaries are beautiful. I do appreciate them. But I have to ask whether they represent the best use of resources to build the kingdom. I’m writing this on Sunday morning. Once I hit the “publish” button I’ll be headed to church, where I’ll meet with the pastor and pray with him before he goes out to preach three services for the day. I’ll attend one in a very nice old sanctuary, and I will be spiritually fed there. All of this will do me good, but is it the best Sunday morning possible in terms of building the kingdom?

    I don’t question the need for inreach. Church members must be motivated, trained, empowered, and released for ministry. That will take resources, in space, time, and money. My question, however, is just where we will find the balance. How much do we spend maintaining the machine, and how much do we spend using it? We can come to different answers on sanctuary design and value, but I think none of us can avoid asking just how well we are stewarding the resources God provides us in the church.

    What I’m really asking of my fellow Christians is that we honestly evaluate our resources and our use of them, not asking what we like, but rather asking what will do kingdom work in the best way.

  • The Most Wasted Piece of Architecture

    As I was driving with my wife yesterday, I made a comment that had been bugging me all day.

    “You know,” I said, “A church sanctuary is the most wasted piece of architecture you’ll see on the landscape.”

    Now my wife knows not to go wild when I say things like that. She didn’t ask me if I’d started to hate church, or if I was giving up on Christianity. Some of you may want to do so, but bear with me.

    What is the purpose of our church sanctuaries? What are they designed for? Well, they’re a place where we go to worship. Indeed, I really enjoy church services. I’m one of those folks who will look up a nearby church when I’m traveling and go out of my way to be in worship on Sunday morning. It’s not because I have to, or because someone’s watching me. I simply enjoy worship services. I especially enjoy visiting a church I know nothing about and watching what their service is like. It’s no great merit; it’s just fun! (OK, I’m weird.)

    But picture the standard church sanctuary, steeple, pews, pulpit, altar area, and so forth. The building, the room, and the furniture all serve for a couple of hours per week. Many of you will point out that you have other meetings in that sanctuary–committee meetings, youth meetings, classes, and so forth. But notice that the room isn’t really designed for those things, and you’re actually working around the architecture and interior design in order to use that space for that purpose. It’s true that there are many newer buildings, especially amongst small, non-denominational churches that are much more flexible, and much better designed for multiple uses. Even so, I would ask you to look at the schedule of use for your office building, the conference room at your place of work, and similar structures, and consider the cost involved and the amount of use.

    I don’t have statistics in hand, but in my experience, churches spending as little as 5% of their money on outreach regard themselves as “mission oriented.” Add to that evangelism and budgeting for charitable projects, and you’ll get the total spending for outreach. (Don’t forget the salaries of staff members who are assigned to such tasks.) Look at your own church budget. How much of your money goes to maintaining facilities and paying people to maintain the membership. How much of the spending goes to people in the club?

    I had the privelege of speaking at a church a couple of years ago where the pastor told me their goal was to get to 50% spending for missions/outreach by the time their congregation was 10 years old. I know at the time they were working on acquiring a facility to use to house people coming out of drug rehabilitation to help them transition to the “real” world. They supported the Pacesetters Bible School mission to support orphans in eastern Europe. That was a small new church.

    Very often “spiritual people” don’t want to get involved in budget issues in your church. But when you’re going out and inviting people to church and they don’t seem very interested, you might consider what the appearance of your church and your church budget is telling them about your priorities. The good news of the gospel is not that there’s a church in your neighborhood and you can attend worship. It’s rather that God loves you enough to reach out to you, and according to James chapter 2, we’re supposed to be on the same program. In general, however, our church budgets don’t support that notion. If spiritual people want to be heard, they’re going to have to get involved in the money process and force a change.

    Please don’t hear a liberal vs conservative message here. My problem is not whether you are preaching the gospel or practicing it. I do believe you should be doing both, and that it’s very scriptural to do both. My problem is with the amount of money spent on maintenance, on keeping the members of the club happy vs the amount spent on outreach.

    I think that God has placed sufficient resources in the churches of America’s Christians that we could make a serious dent in the various problems we moan about when we get together and meet. In United Methodist churches (I’m Methodist, I fulfill my membership covenant, I get to complain!), we complain about declining membership while our budgets show pretty clearly that our concern is not with bringing people in, or helping people in general. Our concern is with maintaining the ones inside. It’s not an accident, however, that the gospel commission starts with the word “Go!” (For those who like to nitpick me, yes, I will defend this statement from the Greek.)

    If our budgets, our buildings, our activities, and our lives reflected the gospel, then we wouldn’t have so much trouble getting people to listen. We have the power to turn the world upside down, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives (physical and spiritual), and to free the prisoners. Given what we have available, the state of our world is nothing short of scandalous.

  • Christian Carnival CXL

    Christian Carnival CXL has been posted at Lux Venit. There’s a good deal of good stuff to check out.

    Without prejudice to the whole list, I’d like to call special attention to the following:

    • Tight Theological Hatbands
      I’m not reformed in theology, but I have long thought one of the strengths of the reformed camp was in thinking about theology. I love to listen to them, but I often don’t like to dialogue with them, because they’re so sure of themselves. Well, here is a reformed Christian talking about dealing with disagreement, and he makes good points. Some people seem to think dialogue means giving up whatever you believe and assuming that all thoughts are equal, but I disagree. Good dialogue requires you to have a position, but you need the humility and confidence (yes, both together) to test that view in conversation with others. This one is an excellent post.
    • Madonna Commits Blasphemy (Yawn)
      OK, who might have guessed that Laura would have another outstanding entry? 🙂 This one supports what I call “off-switch censorship” aka “channel-changer censorship.” If you don’t like it, don’t watch. There’s some real garbage out there, and it doesn’t need any extra attention.
    • Diversities
      A Penitent Blogger talks about 1 Corinthians 12 and the diversity of gifts in the church. Personally I don’t think I can read 1 Corinthians 12 too often. It reminds us to be humble. It reminds us to celebrate the gifts of others. It reminds us to be under the one Spirit.

    Thanks to Leslie for a nice looking, easy to read carnival post.

  • The Prosperity Gospel

    And another exciting entry, more than a week old, from Ben Witherington, this time, ‘Just in Time’– ‘God Wants You Wealthy’, dealing with the “health and wealth gospel” or “prosperity gospel.”

    I’m very slow to condemn movements, but the prosperity gospel seems to be just about diametrically opposed to the spirit of Jesus Christ.

    Go, read, and enjoy, especially the TOP TEN REASONS WHY GOD DOESN”T WANT YOU WEALTHY.

  • Ben Witherington on the Pope’s Speech

    While I have reflected largely on the single item in the Pope’s speech and the Muslim reaction, Ben Witherington has posted an analysis of the larger content of the speech. He underlines some things that I would want to debate in the speech as well.

    A key item from my point of view here is that Christianity is also dealing with the relationship between faith and reason and the question of when, if ever, violence is justified. I don’t think the Pope lives completely in a glass house, but there are plenty of large glass windows in modern Catholic theology through which one might throw a stone or two. But the discussion should be good.

    For Muslims not to welcome such an opportunity tends to demonstrate the Pope’s point, at least in perception. Moderate Muslims should point out the common areas of reform, and suggest that both Islam and Christianity need to clean up their houses. That could spark a useful dialogue.