A New Scorecard, A New Scorekeeper ... part II

…for the backstory… A New Scorecard…part I

The trouble we had at our church was that for all the effort we put into reaching out to people our church didn’t really seem to be growing. At least as we could tell.

Our attendance was pretty much the same, or it would go up, hang out, then go down. The parking lot had a pretty consistent number of cars and the offering plate looked about the same from week to week. Business was booming in the preschool, it was expanding exponentially, and needed to turn people away. The Food pantry was doing good, which is sort of one of those things you don’t know what to call it. It’s good that we’re getting food to these people, but it’s NOT good that they need it. You know?

But one of our pastors began reading a book called “Missional Renaissance” and quickly brought it to the elder board and the senior pastor. Wasting no time, they all read it together. The man who wrote the book, Reggie McNeal seemed to be speaking right into our situation.

---

My wife shakes her head when I explain that I sometimes feel like I’m not adding to the family like I used to. She hates it if I make comments inferring that this is her’s or she bought that, or whatever. But the truth is, even though she’s right to be upset, it’s hard to redefine your value so radically after, well, earning my own money for so long.

---

We as a church realized that we were using a common system of scorekeeping. Problem was it wasn’t the kind that our Scorekeeper was likely using. Wanting to align ourselves to our Creator, we decided to trade in our old scorecard for a new one.

---

The value I add, or that any stay-at-home parent adds to a family is in legacy building. It’s in establishing and maintaining the kind of environment that you could only hope your child takes for granted: safety, shelter, Truth, and opportunity. The problem is how you touch lives as a parent is totally unquantifiable isn’t it? You see how they handle relationships or make decisions as they get older, maybe as they become parents themselves. But, for now, how do you mark that? Maybe in how my spouse seems to feel?

She frequently tells me how at ease she is, how comforting it is, how happy it makes her just to know that the kids are in their home, with each other, and being nurtured. Constantly. She says it frees her to do better at work. Ok. She hasn’t said that explicitly, but I believe that she would agree to it. If she doesn’t, I’ll just not tell you. Ok?

---

God longs for communion. He longs to heal. He desired so deeply to repair what you and I have broken that he himself became a man, putting himself in harms way as a baby, putting himself at the greatest inconvenience, having to deal with good tastes and bad tastes, good feelings and bad ones, sickness, homelessness, hunger, temptation and tiredness. When he called the apostles, when he gave his Holy Spirit, when he sent us out to the ends of the earth he simply extended the range of his mission. The Church is an institution for healing. It is an institution for the purposes of reclaiming the world. Not shedding herself of it.

---

The struggle in this is similar in nature to the struggle that I myself have been working through: How do you quantify something like that? It would be easy if we could just say that every person effectively “touched” by the church responded to God’s call and became himself a part of the church, giving his life back to God. But that doesn’t always happen. It doesn’t even usually happen.

Jesus performed miracles, performed healings, spoke truth into many ears that simply turned away. Jesus fed many people, who went home satisfied, but probably got hungry again. Well, so does the church.

Jesus was counted righteous.

Could it be that if the Church faithfully fulfills God’s mission to offer repair to what’s broken (free of charge), heal what is hurt (without expectation of a conversion), feed who is hungry (because they’re hungry), she too will be counted righteous?

---

I think the point that I’m laboring to make is that I’ve begun to understand the notion of success differently. God longs to save people. He longs to save their hearts, souls, minds and bodies---their entire beings to Himself, through the work of His resurrected Son. And that redeemed person is of inestimable value to God as an individual and unique creation.

But the path to that person’s salvation is strewn with the loving work of the Church. And that is also of inestimable value to God. All by itself. Because that is how he designed the entire world to function: acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with Him.

So success is no longer measured by cars in the parking lot, money in the plate, or butts in seats. Yeah, we still measure those things. It would be irresponsible not to know if the parking lot is adequate for our needs, if we are filling services to a consistent level, if we need to add services because we’re turning people away, etc.

We’re just not defining the value of our efforts by those things. We count families that come through our food pantry, families that are served in our medical clinic. People who are given the opportunity to experience the same love that God has shown us.

Hopefully they ask us why.

---

I don’t make any money. I help us save the money we do make. I’m trying not to focus in on that, or define my value by my profitability. Because money is only part of the equation. I fully expect to see my value spelled out in about 15 or 20 years. By then the “interest” should make the wait more than worth it.

A New Scorecard, a New Scorekeeper... (part I)

“Worthless,” Elvis muttered, “I may as well be a cow.”

Great story. If you haven’t had a chance, check it out. It’s about “Elvis” the Rooster. He learns the magic words from a grub stealing, homewrecker peacock. In the latest installment, when the sun rises despite a hoarse Elvis the rooster, his local neighborhood don, Little Willie (also a rooster, but he has feathers in a lot of coops) helps Elvis restore his broken sense of usefulness.

Last spring, my wife and I came to a difficult fork in the road. We were pregnant with our 3^rd child, a baby girl. I was working full-time, thankfully, and she was working 2 ½ days a week, as she had been since our first was born. We had determined to keep our kids out of a daycare system for as long as we could, for several reasons, only one of which was financial. We had been paying down debt, keeping expenses down and trying to be fiscally conservative, with the long term hope of having a great enough margin to have one of us home full time.

It was time to decide.

I go to a midsize church. I love it there, but it’s been as much a trial as a joy. I mean let’s face it- the church is filled with jacked up people. I include myself in that category of course- I would usually assume that, but I think in this instance it is wise to be sure to make that clear. We’ve had our share of problems, as any living church will- but I definitely call it a blessing. The people I worship with are genuine and sincere. Parents and sons and daughters, friends, mentors and students, each trying to see how Jesus has called them and what that means.

We’ve tried as a faith community to have an impact in our community. We strive to shine Jesus’ light, and bring life to the lost. Our mission statement used to be that we wanted to “Help people Find Jesus, Love Jesus, and Grow in Jesus.” Over the years that has been refreshed, clarified, and revisted many times. It still lies near the core of our value system. But the vagueness and ambiguity of the statement allowed us the freedom to try many paths, many ways, many, many programs. I won’t say that we failed. I won’t. God has worked through all of those programs, all of those efforts. I mean seriously, if God waited for us to get it right before giving His anointing, we’d all be very, very screwed.

One of the programs that has been instrumental to our existence and identity has been a Christian pre-school/daycare run with in our church. It has been an independent entity that we have subsidized, housed and nurtured. Another has been a food pantry. The food pantry, I have to say, I think really distilled our mission.

So, Elvis wakes up, and struts up to the top of the chicken coop. As he’s waiting for the first hint of dawn to cue his crow, he opens his mouth and sucks in a big bug. AACK! AACK! COUGH!

Just looking at the numbers, it was quite apparent that we weren’t going to be living on my income alone.

To keep ourselves to the point, I’ll summarize the obvious. Suga’ Momma was “worth” WAY more than me in the marketplace. Period. We prayed, I agonized, she waited, we decided. I was going to give up my job at a booming company during a recession economy, and she was going to work. Her company, and her boss breathed a HUGE sigh of relief when she told them. I heard somebody actually wet their pants. I won’t say who.

Since then, I’ve been at home. Eating bon-bons, watching soaps and sleeping in has been pretty good to me. I go through slippers like crazy, but more than make it up by only wearing a bathrobe most of the time. So no more expensive jeans for me.

Watching my two boys destroy the house from my rocker has been quite informative too. I didn’t realize how much life I was missing at work.

My biggest struggle, since leaving the “productive world” has been knowing how to appraise myself. What am I worth? I used to be worth about 600, 700 bucks a week. Now?

“I might as well be a cow,” Elvis muttered.
Elvis was on the one hand amazed, but also tremendously dismayed that the animals and people, the plants and sun began their day--- without him or his crow.

Time & Distance, Fame & Glory... (part II)

for T&D, F&G...(part I)

---

See, I’d started asking myself about motive. Did I want to write now to bring glory to God? Or was I in fact trying to sanctify megalomania?

But God is faithful and longs to communicate with His world. I’d been given an opportunity to go to a songwriter’s conference, and it was there, in the woods of the Blue mountains that God revealed two things to me. He showed me that I had misunderstood my place in the world—my perspective was too small in a sense.

Well, I was pretty frustrated. But I had to say that He was right. Again.

Too small a perspective? I came to see that I had underestimated the significance of the world I live in. What the heck does that mean? In a nutshell, I didn’t think the world around me, the world that I could actually reach out and touch, was important enough to matter to me.

Here’s what my problem is/was/will be. I am inundated with global reach. I have the internet and TV and news media, all proclaiming things happening around the globe. And as it relates to me, I see everywhere internet churches, global ministries, mega-super churches, some alive, some just … churching. But I can SEE the Holy Spirit doing amazing things, right in front of me. And my mistake is to believe that I am not being used by God unless He is sending my ministry out in the same way. In other words, blessing the church I go to, the church I serve with, the people I can actually pick up the phone and call, isn’t good enough, isn’t important enough, not to me, and not to God.

Except that’s totally bogus.

Jesus didn’t have the internet. Was He a failure? Paul didn’t have an online blog with a following all over the globe. Was He a failure? Neither did Martin Luther

The truth that God revealed to me as I kicked stones down the path on that Asheville mountain ridge was that He had me right where he wanted me, and that I spoke to exactly the right number of people that he needed me to. And that if that list was to grow, it would be because he caused it to be so. It would be because He wanted it that way. And that the only reason he would do so was because it would increase His glory.

Why do I love Paul Baloche? Because he seems like kind of a dork. And I kinda like those guys. Same goes for Mike Neale. Kinda dorky. Like the kinda guy I’d live with in a dormitory. But man do those guys know how to worship in front of God.

I said earlier that I had too small a perspective. Well, I’m sort of thinking that the smaller I get it, with my NEW understanding of it, the quicker I may begin feeling satisfied that I am doing everything I can do in service to the King.

Time & Distance, Fame & Glory... (part I)

Time and Distance, Fame & Glory… part I

Ok. So I’ve always had a bit of a preoccupation with being a rockstar. You could, if you wanted to push the boundaries of our relationship argue that it is more of an obsession. In my house, if something is indescribably beyond the most righteous and wonderful thing, it is “rockstar crazy.” When one of my boys is being exhuberant, joyful, and clever (ok, now, we’re talking about their behaviour pretty much ALL of the time), words like “charming” or “precocious” simply don’t cut it. Instead I prefer “rockstar.”

Getting the picture?

When I was nine years old, Mtv was rockin’ the boob-tube, and I was strictly forbidden from plucking that “fruit” from the proverbial “tv tree.” But as humans have proven before, the lure was too tantalizing. I saw that it looked good on the tree, was pleasing to the taste, and good for food. Mmmm. Adam Curry and the Top 20 video count-down. This is where I met ---- (wait for it) ---- Axl Rose.

Appetite for Destruction offended any reasonable person. “Welcome to the Jungle” was this heinous new sound, bred in L.A. and taking over the radio. Rage poured out of this little man with the leather pants. At first I didn’t know what to make of it. It made me uncomfortable. But I was drawn in, and soon I was running home from the bus stop to catch the last 3 videos of the count down. First it was the Jungle. Then it was “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and then it was … a LIVE video---- “Paradise City”. Oh man. That white leather suit --- the huge stadium, Slash just rockin’ his big hair and top hat. It defied belief. Could ANYthing be cooler?

My aunt and uncle took care of my grandmother in their home in La Habra, California. My dad had lived in SoCal for a considerable amount of time, first attending, and then working at UCLA. And his best friend lived in Anaheim, so we visted southern California relatively often. That means probably five times (?) before I was 12 years old.

Most trips down there included a visit to DisneyLand, where Jerry was a maintenance supervisor or something like that. I always remembered that Jerry broke a rib or a wrist building the Pirates of the Carribean. Somehow that made me proud. Anyway, I remember being in La Habra when I was 13 or 14. I don’t remember what age I was exactly, but I remember that it was the summer between my eighth and ninth grades---it was the summer between middle school (psh) and … HIGH school. I was headed for the big time.

I laid in bed that night, listening to my walkman. Tape player. Yeah. I always went to sleep with music playing. One time, I fell asleep to Nirvana’s Nevermind, only to wake up later, completely disoriented by the hidden track at the end of the cd.

Ok, anyways…

So I’m listening to (c’mon, guess) Appetite for Destruction, and I notice that there are two different guitar sounds? And they’re playing different things that even though they are different, appear to somehow go together! I marveled at my discovery, and being a prideful person, believed myself to be specially gifted to have such depth of aural insight. I thought to myself, “it’s destiny! Next year, I’ll be in high school, and I’ll finally be able to hook up with some other bad-asses and be in a real-live, balls-to-the-wall, MTV-here-we-come rock-n-roll band.”

Several years later, I had realized that regardless of whatever talent I did or didn’t have, I was just too lazy. I know people who want it. And they go, go, go for it. It’s annoying they’re so persistent. And they’re my friends!

But there was still that persistent itch. That nagging fantasy. It looked a little different now. Well, actually it looked a lot different. I’d gone through (and thankfully come out the other side) of my hair band phase. My grunge-y phase. I took a long walk with the singer-songwriter phase.

Then I ran out of things to say about myself and the sad shape of this world without getting redundant on the one hand, and ridiculously self-absorbed on the other. Plus, it didn’t seem authentic to me anymore. I mean, I was married, very happily, so no misery on the love front to whine about. I had a home, and full-time job that were pleasing to me. So no tour-bus adventures of drugs, unknown destinations, or all night parties in nameless venues. And I had been given, and grasped onto, a sense of spiritual destiny that removed the existential fears that were the fodder of so many artistic trends.

By now, all I felt compelled to write about was my walk on, off, and around the path of God’s call on me.

Well, there’s never any shortage of material on that topic. And it is something that any person breathing can relate to, know it or not, as God has indeed made a call and claim on all things created. (So…what does this have to do with rock-stars? OR “time and distance, glory and fame? Get to it).

Well, it’s my blog, so I don’t HAVE to get to it. I can drag it out until the internet melts. But I won’t. Otherwise, how could I Facebook? Or Tweet? BTW, I think it’s awesome that “facebook” can double as a noun and a verb…

Did you know that there are “Christian Rock stars”? Sure you did. BUT, did you know that there are even celebrities among the genre of Worship music?! You actually might know that, because “inspirational” music is the fastest growing market share in the music industry. Nope. Not rap. Not RnB. Not Rock. Not Coldplay, not Train, not Eazy-E, not Chris Brown.

Church music rock stars. Guess what? I’d baptized my lifelong ambition to be a career performing musician. And it felt like a calling from God, not simply some self-aggrandizing ambition.

And maybe it is…(a calling I mean). Who knows the mind and plans of God? In time, He will reveal these things. But for now I'm awake and running today. So what do I do?