Semper Reforma

It's a difficult thing for me to often create a balance within myself. When I was in Vegas, things got hard enough relationally that I began to literally just switch my emotions off.

That's weird, I know. It was weird but it was necessary at the time. I remember my wife asked me, during that period, what I wanted to do for fun. I couldn't tell her what I wanted because I couldn't summon a positive emotion. I couldn't think of enjoying something because I was so shut down. This was a dark period.

And on the other side of things, I have been known to be so excitable as to almost be manic. When I was a teenager I would jack myself up on caffeine and then go crazy with impulse. Yeah, I know, big drug addict me was addicted to coffee.

And all of that leads me to say this:

We serve a God who is emotional in a way that is more balanced and yet more passionate than we can imagine.

I say that because I hear people constantly hit me with this one, "How could a good God send people to hell?" And I thought about that one day and I began to use what I refer to as 'Incomplete Perspectivism' to try and answer it.

Incomplete Perspectivism is the idea that I know, for a certain fact, that my perspective is lacking, flawed and completely skewed and that the only way I can understand something about God is to remove my sense of perspective from the argument and come at it believing that God is bigger, higher and more than my limited senses can perceive.

I hope that makes sense. In other words, saying that God is emotional uses my limited concepts of emotion to describe it. Saying that God is good is again using a limited sense of what good is when the only true concept of goodness flows from what God is. My ideas of love are flawed, wrong and corrupt outside of God as the definition for what love is.

So saying, "A good God shouldn't condemn people to hell," what I am really saying is that my concepts of goodness, judgment and emotion are all perfect and that God is beneath me. I must realize that God is beyond my concepts in a way that the scripture only gives us the barest hint. Imagine a God who sees my sin and Adam's sin as equal and is grieved, equally, by them. Imagine a God who mourns for those He judges and condemns to hell in a way that we can't process mourning or grief. Our grief is corrupt, His is perfect. Imagine a God whose suffering is so extreme that He both submitted to the cross, willingly, and then crushed Himself under its weight.

This is a pretty philosophical post, but it's been on my heart. Anyway, hope you all had a Merry Christmas and are expecting a lovely New Year. 

Some of you out there have studied the bible. You know the story of Jonah. You know I've also mentioned it before in relation to what God is calling me to do.

But of late, I have been thinking of a particular element I share in common with Jonah and how this relates to where I am right now.

Jonah was called of God to take His word to the people of Nineveh to call for their repentance. This was a big deal culturally because if Israel's enmity with Nineveh and Nineveh's historic cruelty. But God called Jonah to take the message. So what does Jonah do? He gets on a boat and heads to Tarshish. Quite literally he got into a boat and said, "Take me to the part of the map where there are seamonsters." It was as far as you could go, west, by boat until you more or less went into wildly uncharted open ocean.

And this is very much the way it went for us. I believe God sent us back here for a very clear and obvious reason and I more or less just ignored Him because I was awesome. And since coming back, I have been trying to get a ticket for Tarshish. Literally, my heart's desire was at one time dead set on Seattle. That's as far from here as I can go while still staying in America. Seriously, I wanted to almost go to Canada to get as far as I could from Montgomery.

And now I see this. Now I see that I wanted to run as far as I could and that God has kept me here, in the belly of this whale - in this pit of the dead - until I relented to His will. His grace truly is irresistible. 

So now I see that I must go to Nineveh. I must and will.

We will, in the next two years or so, plant a church in Montgomery, AL.

I will be forming a church planting advisory board in the next six months and begin fundraising as soon as I can figure out when I need to. Not sure about that part yet. I'm also going to be raising a core team, relationally, over the next year. If you want to be a part of the vision God has put in my heart, please contact me either here or the numerous ways I know some of you.

And if you decide you'd like to support us financially, there will be a host of ways to do that in the next few months. Including a moving of this site to a new location with lots of goodies.

Anybody else see the movie Saving Private Ryan? Yeah, the one with all vintage gore and Tom Hanks and a stupid line that makes grown men cry - myself included - at the end. Okay, so remember the opening sequence?

Meninboxes

This is the scenario I feel I am in right now. I am in the back of a box. I am floating towards the beach. I can hear the machine guns in a distant rattattat and the whistle buzz of rounds as they fly past - the errant one pinging off the sides of the impenetrable metal box that is waiting to let me off into the water.

The smell of salt, smoke, gunpowder, gun oil, sweat and something acrid tinges the air. The men ahead of me are silent. No joking, no whistling past this graveyard. We're ready to die and we're ready to fight and we hope to at least fight and if we die, we die on our feet.

The doors aren't open yet. We're not there yet. We will be soon.

...

I listened to Pastor Mark teaching Spiritual Warfare for the second time the other evening. As he taught, he mentioned that getting a church started was often like leading a battle charge. That the opposition to it was fierce. I think of men like Jon McIntosh who will be starting a church in Memphis in September of 2010. I think of all my brothers in the A29 network that have started or will start. And I know much of their story is just that they've managed to push up the beach on which I have yet to land.

But now I know, at least in part, what this will look like. The doors to this box might swing open to my death - figuratively - or I might make it to the sand. I might make it up past the pillboxes. I don't know. But I know now where it stops. I know where the box will stop and what waits for me on the other side. I've got men out ahead, helping give cover so I can make it a little farther, so that maybe my box isn't turned into a floating mausoleum. I am both terrified and absolutely frenetic to begin my fight.

Pray for me, if you will, that the vision God is birthing in my heart he pairs with patience and humility. I cannot do this on my own and because of Jesus, I know I won't be alone. Pray also, and consider funding Jon McIntosh. God has put a vision in his heart that will be part of the same regional change that is beginning to explode around here. The same regional change that I will be a part of. We're in it together.

I am having a hard time writing anything with Matt Chandler's news today, but I wanted to put this down or up or whatever in spite of it.

So how are we? We're not good, but we need to get to work.

Imagine a poison that was peculiar in its effects, one you could not find an antidote for, that was not immediately but guaranteed to be fatal. Imagine that this poison worked its way through your system slowly, over time, and that you were powerless against its effects. It might kill you quickly - say ten years - or it might let you live what would be considered a long life.

I believe that our faith - when Jesus changes our hearts by His grace - introduces a kind of poison into our system. It's a blood transfusion, of sorts. His blood, His perfect immortal, eternal and ever pure blood is injected into our bloodstream. And the effects, some are sudden, some are completely subtle. As my brother Pastor Matt Chandler once said in a podcast, "Jesus will haunt you."

Mad World - Gary Jules

I am experiencing that, of late. I talk of little else these days. The Lord is my hope of resurrection, of life after death, but He is invading my life now in a way that is actually not all that comfortable. I spent this last weekend more or less vomiting church structure, planting strategy and the gospel all over a pastor friend of mine. Not sure when I will get invited back for how much I spewed.

It's everywhere. I feel like I've been poisoned. I watch TV and feel a guttural pang of disgust at portrayals of adultery or emasculated fathers or people denying the blood that now runs through my veins. It haunts me. So much greater than any ghost from Dickens' story, this Spirit calls me to Himself and is calling me to die.

Case in point: today I learn that Matt Chandler's tumor is malignant and immediately I realize a scenario in which his death will draw thousands to Christ. My prayer is for my brother to live until Jesus splits the mountain, but I also see the glory of God as bigger than Matt or his life. And I think he sees it the same way. I stand just as close to death - probably closer. And yet, Soli Deo Gloria. Matt may live - and let it be so - but Soli Deo Gloria.

He poisoned me with His blood and I am so thankful. Because His blood is killing me from the inside out. One day its work will be complete and until then, His blood beckons through my lips, "Come Lord Jesus."

So I seem to have something of a knack for writing things that most people wouldn't or I shouldn't. Either way, the results are usually a collective gasp from those I have grown up with and gone through life with. Lately, though, I am trying to be truly honest with myself and with others about the things that used to bring me much shame.

Today's post is all about the porn. Yes, porn, Google, please misdirect some people to this site for something altogether different. Hopefully it will help them.

I have taught my men's group about lust. I have helped numerous individual men with this subject. I have had a number of things to say on this topic, but I have never really given my testimony in the matter.

I've taken an informal poll of pastors, Christians and non-Christian men. My question:

When was the first time you saw a pornographic image?

The median age in response is 10. No one, not even one, can say they've never seen anything. This falls more or less with what the national statistics are for this.

I skew these results, though. The first time I was exposed to pornography I was three years old. I remember my father purchased it, a forty ounce beer at a convenience store in Prattville, Alabama. He rode home, put the Playboy on top of the fridge, and went outside to finish his beer. I was goaded on by some older kids to go get the porn. Being the fearless (read: stupid) kid of the group, I took a chair from the kitchen, pushed it to the fridge, climbed up and brought down the Playboy. I remember she was sitting in front of a blue satin backdrop holding a white feather boa and had the whitest bleach blonde hair I had ever seen. This was the first pornographic image I had ever seen and that was 26 years ago. I can still remember it.

Flash forward to being seven years old. Again, my father bought a Playboy and hid it in impenetrable fortress of under the couch. This one featured Jessica Hahn, the woman who helped bring down Jim Baker. From that point on, it wasn't so much if I was going to get at porn, but rather how short the gaps would be in between times.

I struggled through my teen years because I was freakishly clever at procuring this stuff but the religion I was raised under made me feel guilty for doing it. This didn't restrain the beast at all. Religion never does. Instead it created a pattern in me that continued for years. This pattern went like so:

Sin > Feel Bad > Beg Forgiveness > Hide the Evidence > Repeat

When I got married, I thought free access to sex would stop this. And I am sure most of my married guys out there are at least smiling at this point. No, all it did was make my cycle more intensive in both its need for stealth and its guilt factor.

Eventually, I got good enough at religion to force myself, purely white knuckled, to not actually look at porn. I had a number of loopholes and technicalities in avoiding what I considered an action that required you actually look at something. It was a bitter time because the creativity of my mind became a fever swamp of lust.

During this period of my life I was intensely frightened of cheating on my wife. I knew there was a really high chance of that but I never - thankfully - had much in the way of opportunities. God protected me from destroying my marriage on several occasions. I had been working hard to protect myself from my sin with religion... another sin. It's like burning your house down to avoid a mudslide.

And then something weird happened. Jesus saved me. I remember complaining to a friend about the inability to discipline my mind and keep it pure. I remember complaining about it a LOT. And then, Jesus saves me, and my mind began to change. Since my salvation, I can't say I have lived sinlessly, but I can honestly say that the comparison is stark. I am no longer ashamed to repent. I am no longer convinced of anything but Jesus' saving grace flowing through my life.

At the Ambition bootcamp in Louisville, Pastor Matt Adair got up for a breakout session to talk about partnerships or something like that. He then, about ten minutes in, says, "Well, we could try and answer questions about partnerships or talk about your porn problem." I was enthralled because you could feel the tension in the room shoot through the roof. And then for the next 20 minutes he talks to us about the fact that some of us - even some being assessed - likely had issues with porn.

This was so refreshing for me. Because it wasn't accusatory, it was just conversational. And it was refreshing for someone to speak about it in a way that really addressed the source and roots of it. I wish he'd just taught on that, frankly.

So now I see myself approaching a place where God is leading me to become a pastor. I don't know the time frame, I don't understand all the workings of it. But I know that he led me out of my perversion to this place. And for that, He will always get glory.

I was raised a pentecostal. For the sake of cutting off any argument, I will say that I am lumping charismatics and pentecostals into the same camp for this post. I do realize there is a difference in some places. In the south, the difference is thin enough to slide a single sheet of 9 pound onion skin paper between the two, but not two sheets of 9 pound of onion skin paper.

As I was growing up, you had two teams. You had the Rigid and Cold Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Church of Christs and on the other side of the field, the Passionate and Fervent Pentecostals, Charismatics, Church of God, Assembly of God, non-denoms, etc. These were the two teams. I can't recall a matter of theology ever being discussed as the difference between the two, growing up. And some of you may laugh at my two teams analogy, but I can't think back on it in any other way.

I was taught that you were born, prayed a prayer to receive Jesus and then sometime later got the Holy Spirit which enabled you to act like an absolute fool for no other reason than that everyone else acted similarly. The 'fruit' of the Spirit were speaking in tongues, prophecy (which could somehow encompass just about everything you could possibly imagine) and alternately falling to the ground when touched or being able to knock people down with a touch.

Your life in this was complete, really, when you were able to speak in tongues or hear from God. I mean, seriously, that was like the power of Grayskull transformation right there. The scripture surrounding these things was often clouded and spun in a way that would make any politician proud.

I believed, in all seriousness, that I could hear from God. Easily, readily and near constantly. Looking back on it now, with my own admission that I have only been truly saved since March of this year, I have wondered at this whole thing. How did I 'hear' from God? I mean, wouldn't that mean I was saved?

No. I do believe there were moments when I heard the voice of God. And I believe those were mostly in spite of my own issues. I believe sinning, unbelieving Pharisees like myself can and do hear God through the mists of their own bitter hatred. Do I have scriptures? Yes, as a matter of fact I do.

I believe God can speak to an unbeliever and does so to bring about salvation, at times, and judgment at others. He has had mercy on me. But, to refer back to my title, I have had to repent of what I view as a sick idolatry that surpasses theological debate concerning the nature of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It's what I refer to as Pentecostalism.

I believe there is a moment when the benefits of, saving power of and gifts of the Holy Spirit are exalted above the very person of the Holy Spirit and beyond the person of Jesus and the Father. It becomes a moment when all things bend towards the 'prophetic' or towards the 'spiritual'. It becomes a destructive mysticism that elevates people and their giftings above the gift we have in the whole Trinitarian God. And I don't call it dangerous for no reason.

I have seen the devastation of this hyper spirituality and the way it both fails and destroys people, families and whole churches. I have been a man who was so crippled because I could not 'hear' or 'discern' the will of God that God became a kind of puppetmaster to me instead of a loving, leading and guiding Father. This warps your ability to see God as He is and to love Jesus as your savior. It quickly becomes works righteousness and everything melts into this steaming pile of righteous activities that are as far from God as anything can be - miraculous or not.

...

I know this post has stretched on a while and I have to say that I have been most taken aback by this in light of the powerful testimony that Matt Chandler has shown me and to the whole world. And then I look at people like Gloria Copeland who seems to be convinced that if you have enough faith, you can just be healed of any and everything. I'm sorry, Gloria, but Matt has the faith to close the lion's mouth and the faith to be tortured for his savior and you do not.

I have people that are concerned for me because they were once convinced that I was saved and are now just as convinced that I am not. Which is sad both for me and for them. And I wish it weren't so. But I have left my pentecostal flavor of Pharisaism and I am looking to the bloody cross and screaming from its foot that it's not about religion. It's not.

I apologize for the rambling nature of this post. I just needed to vent a little and confess a little.

Some of you know, some of you do not, that I have sought to be a professional writer in the past. This includes attempting to publish a book and writing five. There are a number of things that I have worked towards in this pursuit and almost all of them have come up lacking. I blamed everything, for the most part, on the publishing world just not being ready for someone so awesome as myself.

I'm an ok writer. Not super great. Not horrible, I don't think. I'm just decent. But that's not enough to get published these days. Even being the best writer these days is not enough to get yourself published. But I realized something, yesterday, and it is beginning to humble me.

It is, in fact, beginning to scare me.

I have written four novels. Each novel is dark, at times lurid, and very much full of evil. Now, are they interesting to read? People have told me so. But I am realizing that what I used to write was a stark and horrific mirror of my own soul.

My first novel deals with a man caught between two worlds that are neither one home for him, despite his acumen in navigating them. My second novel was about a man manipulated by forces larger than himself to eventually leave the world he knew as home. My third novel was about a southern town where everyone was a monster including the heroes and the 'good' they did was tainted by years of covering up evil. My fourth book was about a man who had to bear the burden of doing God's will despite his own failing, weakness and evil.

The duality that appears in all of these storylines stands out to me now. I wrote every single one of these without a regenerated heart. And writing them all was like spilling some of my own tainted blood and using it for ink. The themes that emerge, the characters I painted myself into, all of it.

And so now I am realizing, in a way that scares me, that I don't really know if I can write again. My renewed heart is different now. My mind is very different. I can't engage the evil because I no longer feel an intimacy with it.

Does this mean I'm not going to be a writer? Does this mean I'm just not able to write without my 'drug'? And so now I am feeling stifled in it. It's like I was doing a self portrait by looking into a mirror and now the mirror's broken. So how do I see myself?

Pray for me, that I will find the will of God in this and that, if it be His will, I will be able to write again.

My alternate title was, "I have the fickle heart of a crackwhore."

So I realized something today, something crucial in this whole journey: I am attracted by shiny things.

Yes, like a proverbial rodent obsessed with meaningless trinkets and toys. And you might wonder, "What on earth does this have to do with church planting?" And I would reply, "Dang near everything."

I have been in a cycle, for the last six months, of waiting for some perfect opportunity to present itself to me. Some magical shining moment when everything would be clear, when everything would open up and I would know where I was supposed to go, what I was supposed to do and how I would look at the world in a new and different light.

I was so prepared - nay anxious! - for that blessed moment, that I became enamored with the door and not the One who would open it. And it was brought clearly to my attention today. In vivid, glaring detail, I was shown that I desperately want to be allied with what I perceive as 'cool' and, thereby, given acceptance by a crowd of people I quite literally idolize.

How wretched am I? I realized that I have hated my everything because I was convinced that something better was out ahead. And that conviction was plenty happy to steal the very essence of my present. It was happy to leave me gasping at the new, at the possible, at the future and all it required of me was a consistent inconsistency. It required that I commit to no one, to nothing. It required that I dream incessantly and never made a decision for what was staring me in the face.

I have sinned, greatly, friends. I have sinned in my procrastination, my idolatry, my exaltation of self. I have sinned against Jesus and against even those who have sought to help me through this time. So what am I going to do about it? At this point, I am going to seek out putting down roots. Right where I am. Right now. And I am going to put these roots into the ground not in the hopes of manipulating God into finally giving me what I want, but in the hopes that I can finally get on board with what He wants.

Pray for me, that I might seek Jesus and find Him while I lose myself.

In my last entry in this series, I explained how this article by Jon McIntosh owned me, disarmed me and thoroughly punched me in the throat. Figuratively speaking.

In this one, I will address another area, for me, that will encompass two of his other points:

Plant for a culture that is different than your setting. and Don’t preach the Bible.

I choose to include these in one, because for me they stem from the same overall issue within me. The whole article, really, could have been titled, "Gabe has serious issues with pride." That would have been just as honest but it would have narrowed the target demographic considerably.

I do, though. I have a very serious and somewhat debilitating problem with pride. I think, as I was accused of so often as a child, that I think I know everything. Why? Well, I am moderately intelligent. And there are some things I am intelligent in that few other people are as intelligent in. Wow. That sentence just dripped with pride didn't it? See, it comes out everywhere.

My pride, in church planting, would have declared that so long as I knew enough about leadership development, people skills, systems, structures, ideals, planning, websites, social networking, then...well, then I would be the next Osteen with an Affliction t-shirt looking mofo to come onto the church scene.

And I probably could have produced a church. It would have been so much about me, though, that eventually I would have started justifying my sins as release valves for all the stress and pressure I was under. And, I mean, I'm just human right? I mean, we all do stuff wrong. Nobody's perfect!

...

And yes, I would have planted a church based on me, not on Jesus' mission whatever people I came to. And it would have destroyed any people that happened to get caught in its wake.

Oh and the bible? Yeah, that would have been a reference for what we were doing. Hardly anything more than something that supported me, my points, my agenda. I would have used it as a shiny lacquer on the turds that would have been pinched out every Sunday morning before a crowd.

Is that obscene and crude and vile? Yes. It's meant to be. Such would have been my own works of self-righteousness. I can't explain to you how many churches I have been in where the pastor stood on stage or before the people in some regard, and worked his way through a self-help sermonar/sermonette only to, at the last five minutes, invite people to accept Jesus into their hearts. And in so doing somehow qualify that steaming pile as being the word of God.

Shame on me. Shame on my pride. And may God always humble me away from that. I'd rather never lead a church of thousands if I was teaching something that was not the word of God. I would much rather disciple five men and always be faithful to the word and to the teaching of Jesus.

 I may write more from Jon's phenomenal post, but for now, I am just feeling my way through the brokenness of it all.

So everybody and their dog recommended I read Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional by Jim Belcher.

So I did. And here is the result of that.

Deep Church is tremendously thoughtful. I would not say that Deep Church condemns the Emergent/Emerging side or the Traditional Side. I would say, among what I have read, it is the fairest and most forgiving. Jim went to great lengths to ensure that he did not vilify or condemn things in either camp without showing balance. In some areas I would say he was too forgiving. In his dealings with Doug Pagitt, in particular, I would have probably treated his heresy with much less grace than it seems Jim did.

But Jim wanted to be clear about it. He didn't want to make assumptions. If someone wanted to declare their belief, like Pagitt did, that something stood superior to the bible, then he went out of his way to make sure it wasn't him accusing them, but them confessing it.

The book troubled me in a number of ways. But before you wonder about me, let me clear up that the ways that the book troubled me were exclusively due to my own background and peculiarity of upbringing.

The first thing that bothered me was that he classified me as an Emergent.

How? Well, he said that Emergents fall into three categories, per Ed Stetzer: Relevantists, Reconstructionists and Revisionists. Relevantists are people like Mark Driscoll, who believe in contextualizing the church to meet the culture and engage it. I would say I fall squarely into this group. Reconstructionists are people that believe we must drastically change the structure of the church in order to make it more biblical, like the Barna/Viola crowd. Revisionists are those who don't hold tightly to any real doctrine or beliefs from the bible, like Pagitt/McLaren. So, yeah, I guess I am emergent.

He also classified the Traditional church as being both denominational and non-denominational and that what defines them as Traditional has less to do with their distinctives than with their adherence to, well, traditions. This is interesting because he places seeker style churches in this camp. I agree wholeheartedly with him.

I believe what he posits, his 'Third Way' is definitely possible. And I believe groups like Acts 29 are seeking that Third Way out. That you don't have to be a Traditional or Emergent church to be The Church. That you can receive from the Traditional and the Emergent the best things and you can lay aside the worst.

I will probably work through this book again. It's definitely a must read for anyone seeking to know more about the Emergent side of things and how to classify without necessarily judging and where and when to judge. It is a tremendous idea and perhaps even an ideal to strive towards. Can we have Deep Churches? I think we can. And I believe God is calling out people to seek out just that.