How many days stock of grain does the world have left?

Political leaders follow – they don’t in fact lead.
They follow popular culture.
The question that pastors and church leaders have to ask is – who then is calling the shots; who is determining the prevailing values?

I’m finishing off a rather unusual read for me - A New Kind of Conservative by Joel C. Hunter -and Hunter speaks a little into this very issue.

(These days I’m reading more political books in my attempt to pull together reading material that we will suggest to people as the heat builds up in the US’s quest for its next President - books to help people think about politics with the mind, love and concerns of Christ.)

Hunter suggests that “whoever is putting forth the ‘big ideals,’ which come from the big ideas, are the thought leaders of the culture.”

This makes me rather anxious. I don’t know of too many pastors who live with the big ideas.

I don’t know many pastors who live in the realm of the big.

Most pastors I meet live in the realm of the local.
They are experts on all things local.
Every day they engage with myriads of stuff all relating to their staff, their congregations, their church, their community – but few live in the local with a good grasp of the big.

Yet, effective Kingdom leaders will live closely with the big.

Here’s a few of the big that I think pastors have to better live with:

Will Islam modernize?
Will China continue to expand?
Will geographic tribalism redraw the world map?
Will environmentalism and the changing climate determine most other issues?
Will gas or water be the most influential commodity?
Will the predicted population explosion to 9 billion by 2050 cause the food and energy crisis also predicted?
Will the church embrace the conceptual age?
Will AIDS ravage Asia the way it has Africa?

The questions could go on………
These are some of the dominant questions.

In coming months and years these big issues will become the currency of political discussion, debate and policy. But, church leaders need to engage with them before politicians get to them. Church leaders cannot be followers, we must be leaders.

Imagine if every church leader in the over 300,000 US churches spoke into the big questions – how much could we influence prevailing values which politicians follow after.

The church needs to begin to speak the language of the big not just the local.

But we speak the language of the big in the context of the local.
We redefine reality for people. We lift people out of their local world and help them see a bigger reality, a bigger world.

This is core to the Gospel. The Gospel is about the world.
The most memorized bible verse – 3:16 …..places the Gospel within the cosmos not simply the local or the individual.
Church leaders have shrunk not only the world, but the Gospel.
Too small a world – too small a Gospel.

May pastors become learners of the world.
May pastors be leaders who know the big questions.
May pastors be leaders who lead well in the local by helping people see the big.
May pastor influence the big by leading the big in the local.

Do you know that we only have 40 days of grain to feed the world left in stock!
Do you care?
Does it speak into how you lead?

Spiritual Formation and a Diet Pepsi

This year for Lent I decided to give up soda. The spiritual activity that prepares us to truly celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the excruciating sacrificial death of being crucified ….and I am giving up soda! WOW!

You don’t need to tell me, I myself, feel such a wimp!
Even worse, I’m really struggling. I’ve lost count of how many lunch times I’ve craved a cold Diet Pepsi. We’re only just past half way and if I didn’t think God could see me – I’d quit.

Today I was reading of an older Christian guy from the US who moved to Kenya. He went there not as a pastor or as a church leader but simply as a helper. He and his wife gave up everything they had here and moved to Kenya just to help, to do whatever is needed. Due to what’s happened in Kenya over the past few weeks they are living as displaced persons in a foreign country with nothing. Although they could have come back to the US they have chosen to stay and stay because of Jesus. And I’m struggling to not have a Diet Pepsi!
[Check out this blog-site to keep you involved with an amazing Msafara by Kenyan pastors http://msafara.wordpress.com/ as they lead the healing and reconciliation in Kenya.]

This kind of story to highlight my wimpiness could be retold a thousand times and more by huge heroes of the faith.

So here’s the odd thing. I feel a wimp for just giving up soda. I feel a total wimp for struggling to give it up. Yet, every lunch time when I deny the urge and drink water with my Subway I receive this incredible spiritual high! (I hope it’s not because at my core I’m Scottish, and an ex-Scottish banker and the buck I’ve saved at lunch time is really my reason for this spiritual high.)

How strange is spiritual formation?!
How strange is the discipline of denial? It seems too relative!
Compared to what my friends displaced in Kenya are doing and giving, my wimpish Lent denial seems utterly nothing.
Yet, for us both at nearly the opposite ends of the denial spectrum …we meet the same God, we receive the same spiritual strengthening.

I know this to be true because I know of extreme times in our lives when Carolyn and I have given up huge things – family, country, and career. And the amazing thing – in giving up my Diet Pepsi the victory I sense from that gives me a similar spiritual experience as when we gave up our jobs to follow Christ.

Weird!
Or is it more - wonderful!!!

How neat is our God?
He views the ordinary and the extraordinary as both means of grace to reveal himself to us.
God meets us equally in the small as well as the big!

This is the theology of grace.
Jesus once told a parable that astounds everybody. Some guys are hanging out waiting for work and early in the morning they’re hired. Later in the day some other guys get hired – like the middle of the afternoon. At the end of the day – those who worked from early morning to sundown and the guys who work only a few hours – all get the same pay!
[Check out Matthew 20]

Grace is not only how we receive God’s salvation, it’s also how we live in His salvation.

It’s the theology of the body …..the hidden or small parts are of equal value to the prominent big parts!

This is God.
I love this about God.
You can experience God washing your pots and pans …as much as having done a 40 day prayer and fasting exercise.
You can experience God in the high of an intense worship service …but also singing in the shower.
You can experience God in giving up everything to go and serve him in some foreign country …..and also by struggling to give up soda for Lent.

It’s as if God is inviting all to experience him – at all times, everywhere, in everyway!

Turns out that thorn in the flesh might be a good thing after all!

So I used to always think that when St Paul spoke of his “thorn in the flesh” that he was referring to something physical. Some illness he had, some problem he had that restricted him.
Of course commentators have had a field day trying to figure this one out – was it Paul’s way of speaking about his wife, or was it a sin he had that he couldn’t quit from – perhaps lust?
But as I sat and thought about this “thorn in the flesh” I was always coming up with something either tangible or something I could define. I was always analyzing this (and much of my theology) from the earth up.
But maybe Paul was thinking in the other direction.
Maybe this thorn in the flesh was not something of him – some sin, or weakness or even illness. Could the thorn in the flesh have been something of God that he couldn’t understand?
Was the thorn - his fleshly limitation to understanding what God was about?
Was the thorn in the flesh something that said more about God than about some weakness or shortcoming in Paul?
So I’ve gotten to thinking that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was Paul’s way of saying “I don’t understand what God is doing. I’m confused. And in this I don’t know, I can’t even claim to know what God is all doing.”
The amazing thing about this weakness is there is incredible strength!

But if I take this as a theological thought, it’s a theological thought that then begins to overflow into so much more of my life, my ministry, my calling.
This takes me back again to my last blog and the rethinking of vision versus values. This last ‘vision versus values’ blog has received the most responses back to me both on the blog and via calls and emails.
The strong vision way of leading takes us into a mindset that says – I know what God is doing and here is the vision to see that all happen here.
The second, value based leadership, embraces this ‘thorn in the flesh’ perplexion.
We don’t know what God is doing, or where God is taking us – but what we do know is something about who God is, what God is passionate about – values – and as long as we focus on raising up those values then we may not know where God is taking us but we know we won’t miss it.

And I think this is what we have to begin to think further on as leaders.
Too often out thinking is earth up.

Don Miller (of Blue Like Jazz and Searching For God Knows What notoriety) is about to release a book talking about the concept of story. Don Miller is going to hit here close to where I’m trying to hit.
We need to begin to think of our leadership more in terms of narrative and story rather than vision and goals.
God has invited us into a story. It’s a true story – in fact there is no truer story – but it is a story, a narrative. God never invited us into a strategic plan or some annual goals.

There are components of a good narrative - central character, plot, conflict …..and essential to a good story is it is never written linearly.
It’s not written predictably.
It’s not written that the reader knows where they are going!
The glue that holds it together is the characters.

Now to transliterate this into what I’m suggesting:
The characters in our story are the values that we know God holds and we need to hold. As long as we hold these values – not placed within some 5 year plan or some central strategic document – but held within the livingness of the story, constantly featuring in the story we are writing ……a great story will be written.

If postmodernity has settled.
If we are now in a new day of culture, thinking, engagement, it is held with new words.
Words such as story, but also words such as organic, organism, morph, texture, motion.
These are the new leadership words of the emerged cultured.
They are significantly different than the words of a decade ago – vision, purpose driven, goals, targets, strategic plan, mission statement.

So for a Senior Pastor our role is changing from always casting vision, hosting staff meetings talking about reaching our goals, hitting our targets or laying out our next mountain to take - to birthing of value, feeding, nurturing, tending, releasing - a different nuance to our leadership that we need to engage with.

Now here’s the really good thing about a good story.
In a good story there are always positive turns and negative turns.
In a vision driven style of leadership negative turns are disallowed.
But in story they are allowed.
In a vision driven church if you don’t make a goal or a hit a target or stick to the plan …..you’ve failed. But in a story whatever turn you take is still part of the story.

So my leadership is no longer going into my office, pulling out the master plan and making sure that I know exactly where we are on this plan.
It’s going into my office and taking the characters of the story – our values – and bringing them more alive in our story.

And here’s the best part – I go home at the end of the day not thinking about all the stuff that still needs to be done to reach this goal or that goal ….but I go home knowing that the values are living in the lives of each person who is part of our staff, our leadership, our church and the story is still being written even when I’ve put my pen down for that day!
Like true characters the values live …whereas a plan is only worked on.

There is a ‘thorn in the flesh’ like Paul that we as leaders must be content to live with.
Vision, goals and target leadership does not help that happen – values based leadership does.

Right-Brainers CARPE DIEM ...or at least dance a little!

So I was reading something today that disturbed me. It said “we have become a church of marketers, not artists.” Now this in itself is disturbing. There are lots we could blog about the church selling out and selling short….but also the need to do more to make sure the best/only message of hope and life in the world is heard! But let me leave that one for a later day.
The article then went on to say “And the artists, feeling distrusted, lacking support and resources, are leaving the church to find the freedom and ability to explore imagination and answer God’s call.”
Church leaders have to read those words and ask some questions.

The words come from Jeffrey Overstreet’s blog “Looking Closer” where he is discussing The Golden Compass debate. A very helpful critique of the brewing controversy – check it out at http://lookingcloser.wordpress.com under “The Golden Compass – Questions I’ve been asked, answers I’ve given.” Don’t take this one off the radar screen ‘cos episodes two and three are just around the corner.

Returning to his comments about church and artists.
A few weeks ago I showed in church a part of Michelangelo’s classic work The Last Judgment. Michelangelo was commissioned by the Pope to do this work as part of his masterpiece on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Despite being commissioned, the Pope did not fully trust the artist’s discernment so he put in place an editor of his work. The editor was the then Vatican Master of Ceremonies called Biagio. Biagio did not only dislike some of the painting Michelangelo did, he disliked Michelangelo. He would often try to edit what he had painted.
Well, in The Last Judgment, Michelangelo gains his revenge because in this work he depicts a man descending down to hell. He is naked, with a serpent wrapped around his body – eating part of his sensitive area! Here’s the punch line ….the face of the man in the painting is the face of Biagio!!!!! Biago’s image remains today in the Sistine Chapel in a way I’m sure he never would have wanted!

But let’s return to the point. Here is Jeffrey Overstreet blogging that artists are feeling distrusted and hence they are leaving the church. What’s new. The Pope distrusted Michelangelo and many of the other church art painters – they were edited.
But they never left the church.
So what’s changed.

One of the books someone recommended me was A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future @ Daniel Pink. I love it. But if right-brainers just get up and quit because the struggle is too hard?? …..come on artists and dreamers and designers and poets and writers and counselors and inventors and symphonic musicians and storytellers and some right-brain pastors/preachers/leaders - you’ll only rule the future if you stop walking away.

But there is something happening. Some of us who in this “left-brain ruled world” for years suppressed our right-brain tendencies and indulged in masses of left- brain fodder to survive, some of us are now allowing our natural right-brain inclinations to rise and rule! The brakes are off and we are allowing our right-brains to energize and evolutionize our worlds. This sometimes makes us misunderstood and scoffed at BUT…….

Is this just the postmodern versus modern debate in new language? I don’t think so. Although there might be some mileage in that one for somebody to open up. This is not saying that left-brain thinking is defunct or outdated or held with an agenda. This is saying left-brain is not enough.
This is saying to lead well you need to employ left and right brain thinking.

This maybe why the old vision and 5 year strategy thinking is redundant. [See the last blog!]

Pink’s thesis is that in this conceptual era - if we are not offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial transcendent desires of an abundant age – we will lose.

So ‘The Church’ knows and holds the most satisfying nonmaterial transcendent reality there is.
Hello – to be missionally effective all we need now is a bunch of right-brainers bringing all they’ve got to help deliver it!

Right-brainers - whether artists, poets, writers, inventors …..and hopefully pastors and preachers - don’t walk away. Rise up.

Maybe 'vision' isn't all its cracked up to be?

There's a text hanging in my office that is a powerful leadership text. It's Psalm 103:7 "He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel." I was a young leader when a wise and godly leader shared it with me - emphasizing the difference between Moses being told of God's ways and the people only being told of God's deeds. This is leadership, the wiser leader told me - knowing the ways of God.
Not long after that wisdom was shared with me ...... Christian leadership guru's emerged onto the scene and the word 'vision' became the driving word in leadership. 'Without it things will perish' was often preached. 'If you don't know where you're going you'll end up nowhere' came in a close second preach. Vision as a word and concept has held sway over much Christian leadership for the past decade and more.
But this blog wants to put a question mark over that leadership philosophy. Maybe 'vision' is not what it was/is all cracked up to ....and I've often cracked it up to be lot!

Vision is very much about where we are going. Its a linear word. It produces 5 year strategy papers, plans and 'how to' manuals. Vision is held out there and then everything lines up behind it.
But maybe therein lies a problem. More a clash. A clash of cultures. Our culture, our context is less and less a linear context. Much has been made of this in the tiring debate between modernity versus postmodernity; between systematic theology versus narrative theology; between meta-narratives versus paradigms ...but why has it not crossed over into the philosophy of leading?

Maybe I'm too much living in my paradigm, but the drive to vision - cast it, plan around it, staff for it, budget to it, is getting tired. it seems to be being moved to the back of the line. In its place is a moving to the center the concept of values.

Vision is about where we are going; values are about being.
Being is the new going.

Of course,values were always meant to be under-girding vision. But did they?

Maybe I'm too much of an existentialist (in the good sense). Were humans called to this linear, always moving forward existence? Or were humans called 'to be'. Does the emphasis on vision not drive us to miss today and miss what it is to be human? Is being human not about living in the present?

'Moses knowing the ways of God' ...is more about values than about vision - surely!

Here's how we're seeing it these days. If a church is all about values that reflect the heartbeat of God ......then acting on those values alone will lead you into the future more than wrapping a vision around it.

In the old vision way ...you got the value and then you cast a vision of what living with that value might look like in 5 years ....and here's the steps to make that happen.

In the new way ...you just live with the value and let God morph whatever God wants to morph!

Is this a subtle semantic adjustment - maybe ...but it feels more than subtle. It feels like its placing the right thing in the right place and not allowing it to be squeezed to a lesser place because of something more compelling, more organised, more strategized.

Its trying to be more about the ways ...rather than the deeds.

Maybe the church should be more sinful? Ouch!

I’m on the phone to a friend in Scotland and we are talking about church and faith. But the conversation is slightly different than you might have imagined. I’m making the case to him that his church needs to become more sinful!

Let me bring some context.
Many Christians live in two worlds. The world of the week – busy jobs, hard deals, tough bargaining, hectic hours, constantly pushing forwards.
Then on Sunday they go to church ……and they enter a completely different world than the world they have lived in for the past 5 or 6 days. Their church world speaks the language of the ‘saints’. They talk about being separate from the world; they talk about holy living; they sing songs that speak of purity, of living a victorious Christian life; songs about truth, love, commitment, loyalty.
In many ways their church language of faith is a very ‘high’ language.
People are urged to count the cost. Sermons on sacrifice, denying self are well preached. People are reminded that they will suffer rejection for the name and the cause of Christ.
To all this they, like me, would say ‘Amen’. The bar is set high.

But then for so many here’s what happens. Monday arrives and they return to their busy living …..and it bears no resemblance to the language they heard or used on the Sunday.

If you look closely many Christians seem to be two different people. A Sunday person and a very different Monday person.

This is not unfamiliar …in many ways it's the reality of most Christians whether in the UK or the US. We live double lives. We are the saint on Sunday and we are the sinner on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc. [Check out the problem with this on a preach I did on April 29,2007 Mastering the Art of Living “Be One” – download or listen at http://www.reedleyfbc.com/ click on Messages.]

Now this is where our conversation came in. As we talked about church and faith I suggested that while most people would say the problem is they’re too much of a sinner on Monday and they need to become more of the saint on Monday – I argued the opposite. I suggested that the solution is – they should be less of the saint on Sunday!!

Here’s an interesting thumbprint we’re noticing in our church. People come on Sundays – not trying to play the saint – but being vulnerable and authentic enough to admit they are the sinners.

How worshipful, how godly is it, when a group of people gather on a Sunday and pretend to be what in reality for most of their living they’re not? Is it not better to be honest in the presence of God than pretending!

Now you might say … “well Gilbert what about the Scriptures teaching on being holy, on being set apart, on sanctification.” I would say – absolutely – but is a part of being holy, of being sanctified is it really being dishonest on a Sunday!
What part of sanctification is about causing our people to pretend to be what they really are not?
Maybe if we are more honest on a Sunday, more authentic true and real …..our Mondays and Tuesdays would be less removed from our worship and we’d begin to move to something nearer what we should be.
Maybe if our Sundays were more sinful we’d be less sinful on Monday.

Did Jesus not teach that it’s the pure in heart who shall see God? Am I not more pure in heart when I’m most honest about my sin compared to Sundays when I pretend to be the saint I’m not. Maybe there’s more purity on Monday when I’m honest about who and what I am …and maybe then I’ll see God …..which cannot leave me unchanged!

I’m arguing that a movement in spiritual formation is not just the movement away from being sinner to saint; I’m arguing that some of our movement is from being the saint to being the sinner. I think God is more pleased and God’s Spirit can more do His work when sinners are honest, rather than when saints are dishonest!

So …how sinful is your church??

Take the church back - be a Glocal Leader!

So I was emailing a fellow glocal trekker by the name of Bob Roberts and I was asking him if he knew any Kenyan pastors in Nairobi that we could connect with as we prepare for another trek over to see our guys in the Huruma slum – daily heroes. Bob comes back to me telling me that this very Sunday a Nairobi pastor was at his church – Oscar Muriu. And then he tagged on words to his email “he’s the real deal – are you?”
So I emailed him back telling him that Oscar pastors’ Nairobi Chapel which has its roots in the Plymouth Brethren and those were my roots and therefore both Oscar and I were THE real deal – but what about Bob? [If you haven’t read Bob’s book Glocalization: How Followers of Jesus Engage a Flat World ….hello!!]
Roots are so important. Roots hold us. Roots take us down deep. Roots determine our strength and endurance.
That got me thinking about my roots. The Plymouth Brethren were a group of guys who in the early 19th century quit the Anglican Church and started a new movement – trying to do church the way the early church did it. Now I greatly admire them, but if you read the New Testament the early church was pretty messy – hence Paul’s multiple letters trying to fix things. I mean – who’d like to return to being like the Church in Corinth …aaargh!
But, one thing these ‘Brethren’ got very right was their missionary spirit. (They got other things right as well – I owe much to the hours and hours of bible teaching they poured into me.) But they got right their missionary adventure. Go to most of the reached nations in the globe and you’ll find people there who can trace their roots to the Brethren movement. Here’s an aside - the Catholic Church acted with genius when during the Reformation while the Protestants began to argue with them and amongst themselves they sent out the Jesuits to Latin America and evangelized that entire continent - the results live on today! So too the Brethren movement instead of joining in the debates about the established church they began to send all over the globe missionaries. But – they never forgot the local ….. read their history – orphanages in the UK, inner city hostels, and small churches built in the poorer housing estates with their doors open to help and serve. In some sense the Brethren were Glocal Christians …and that’s the roots that Bob, Oscar and myself are trying to put down within our local churches for this generation and coming generations.

So church leaders – how glocal are you?? Glocal leaders are the real deal. Glocal leaders are missional but missional beyond the way the emergent church guys or the way Robert Webber talked about missional (there’s another book really worth reading Ancient Future Faith @ Robert Webber – a theologian the Church deeply misses). Missional that is fully both-and. Both local and global. Both engaging with the sins of individuals and the sins of society. The key word is connect. This is not sending money to some mission’s organization to do the global while you do the local (or vice-versa) – this is people within the local church being connected both locally and globally, individually and communally to other people. Within the church there is a great movement for community living churches within urban ghettos. I love this movement and many of the people involved in it - they stir and inspire me. But with a flat world we get to be part of generation of leaders that don't only lead towards new forms of local churches in urban ghettos - wherever the ghetto might be - Cincinnati, Philadelphia, or Nairobi, or Paris, or Phnom Penh. Glocal Leaders are both-and leaders.

The early Plymouth Brethren guys wanted to take the church back to the New Testament time. Glocal Leaders are doing the same – taking the church back to seeing the world in all its size as on their doorstep. Reread how global and local the early church was - fascinating.

Be a Glocal Leader - and take the church back. Back is the new forwards. Think about it. The best new movements don't invent new things ....they rediscover what got lost. In the history of the church there was a point and time when we did glocal well, when we did holistic well, when we did missional well, when we did multicultural well. All today's new words and new movements the church in history at some time and place did - the best leaders take us back to go forward. I think that's what my Brethren upbringing is newly teaching me ..... but of course that's not new.