We’ve been doing a series at our church under that title. I wasn’t sure that it was a great idea at Christmas time, not being exactly a warm fuzzy Hallmark channel kind of topic.

But last weekend we had Dallas Willard come to answer tough questions about faith, and we couldn’t find enough places to seat people. I heard more stories about people inviting skeptical friends and questioning relatives and seeking co-workers than I’ve heard in a long time. Apparently even though people may be disenchanted with the church, there is still enormous interest in whether or not God is out there.
We had people collect questions and send them in, and i’ll give you the top five barriers that keep people from believing in God:

5. If Christianity is true, it would produce better people.
4. A modern, thoughtful person cannot believe in miracles.
3. The Bible has been discredited as a reliable source of information.
2. Claiming to have religious/spiritual/moral truth is exclusionary and intolerant.
1. There is too much suffering in the world to believe in a good and powerful God.

If you want to see what Dallas had to say about these and other questions, click here. And, stay tuned for the next blog…

I talked not long ago to a man who spends his life working with churches on stewardship.  i asked him what the number one characteristic of generous churches is, and the rapidity of his answer startled me:  “They have generous senior pastors.”   He didn’t cite programs or teaching or systems.   Just a person.
It struck me how deeply this is true of the whole area of spiritual formation.   Sometimes a person will want to become a ’spiritual formation champion’ in a church.  They may know a fair amount about techniques like lectio devina, they may read good writers and be able to articulate substantial ideas.   But the biggest question remains:   When people look at this person, do they say ‘I want to be like him or her?’

When it comes to transformation, the single most helpful gift we offer is the life we lead ourselves.  If I’m leading the wrong life, if I’m becoming the wrong person, no amount of information or teaching skill can speak louder than the volume of my actual life.   The foundational question around transformation is always the ancient Biblical question (found in an obscure variant text):
Am I smoking what I’m selling?

When i first got married, I did not understand about the need for reserves.  (Actually there were lots of other things I didn’t understand, but there’s no time for that now.)  Then our car got injured, and our washing machine went on strike, and I learned.

When I first worked at a church, I did not understand about reserves.  We lived financially from week to week.  Then one week we did not have enough money to pay the staff, and I learned in a hurry.

But as important as financial reserves are, they pale next to our need for spiritual reserves.  Often in ministry I feel like Jesus (that’s a dangerous comparison!) when he was touched by a woman in a crowd ‘and felt the power go out of him.’   Ministry can be the most draining activity known to human beings, because it draws on the soul.  So i have to know what the signs are when my reserves are running low:  I got easily discouraged, I get preoccupied in my relationships, my motivation and energy drop, sin looks more tempting.

I need friends who speak to me about their observations of how my reserves are running.  A friend recently encouraged me to watch my own life for a while, and mark those activities that restore me.   For me its solitude, reading, conversations with very good friends, traveling with my wife, watching the ocean, and physical exertion.

How are your reserves?   What’s your plan to grow them?

Want to guess what the single best way to prevent divorce is?

I have been thinking lots about marriage and spiritual life lately. When my daughter got married recently i was able to fulfill a life-long dream. In movie weddings the clergyperson always says, “If anyone has any reason why this marriage should not take place let them speak now or forever hold their peace.” But I have never been to a real-life wedding where this gets said, So I decided to say it when my daughter got married. My brother-in-law Craig Harrison, who is actually a pastor in Escondido, stood up to object, claiming to be Laura’s parole officer. It was pretty much the highlight of the wedding, except for where the best man brought out the rings attached to two tiny kittens who would not stop mewing and had to be removed.

The single best way churches can help build strong marriages is to help people select the right person to marry. Neil Warren has noted, based on extensive research, that the choice of who you will marry will have a bigger impact on your marriage than all the work you do on it after you get married!

His book, Finding the Love of your Life, remains the single best resource I know for people thinking about marrrying. Some critical steps to help people think through:

–Get healthy before you get married
–Don’t get married too young
–Don’t get married too soon
–Every similarity is like money in the bank. (This is so true that even couples who differ more than 15 IQ points are more likely to get divorced than IQ-compatible couples!)

Neil’s book is a classic resource for teaching about marriage. I’ll preach its content every few years simply because people need to hear it so badly.

Meanwhile, if you’re getting ready to perform a wedding ceremony and you’re scrambling for homily ideas, you can listen into what Nancy and I did for Laura and Zack’s wedding…But the objection part you’ll have to write on your own.

There is a vehicle for spiritual growth that many people in your church have already voluntarily signed up for. In fact, most of them paid for it. It has the potential to produce more spiritual development than new members classes, spiritual gift classes, evangelism training classes, end times classes and small group involvement put together.

Its called marriage.

Too often churches avoid leveraging marriages as a tool for spiritual growth because we don’t think about it. But Gary Thomas has written a wonderful book called Sacred Marriage, which focuses precisely on the value of marriage as a ‘vale of soul-making.’ Marriage has the possibiltiy of helping people learn the fundamentals of spiritual life:
–how to encourage one another
–how to be in conflict
–how to serve
–how to love your enemy. (Martha Shedd once wrote a note to her husband: “Dear Charlie, I hate you. Love, Martha.”

If you want to learn more, get Gary’s book. Meantime, maybe we should spend less effort trying to get people to come to more classes, and more time teaching them how to use the great classes they’re already in.

I went to Krispy Kreme this morning. Partly because its good for my arteries. Keeps them on the offensive. But mostly because of my daughter.
When my children were young I often used to get them out of the house on Saturday mornings by taking them on a doughnut run. My wife never fully approved, but she valued the time and space and chance to be alone enough not to complain.
Their interest in donuts was starting to flag until ten years or so ago when Krispy Cremes came north. You get to watch them being made with 1940’s style technology; little lard boats floating down a river of molten grease. There’s something about being able to watch the donuts go from infantile lumps of fat to fully developed sugar-frosted lard-infested maturity that defies resistance. The miracle of development. To this day I get a little thrill when I see the neon lit up on the ‘Hot Donuts Now’ sign.
I went today with my daughter; we went because two Saturdays from today she will get all dressed up and we will stand up in a church and say some words and she will get a new last name and our house will be a little emptier, and we had to get in one last donut run before the big day.
There is something about food and ritual that creates the milestones which mark our passing through life.
When I take my daughter to the donut shop, somehow what matters in life and what does not becomes terribly clear. I am grateful for every moment I’ve spent with her. I’m filled with gratitude for getting to wear the title ‘dad.’
Maybe one of the best things those of us who lead churches or groups or families can do is to remind people to eat something with someone they love.
And remember to take the time to do it ourselves.
Time for a donut run.

I just got back from Nashville, and the Conference of the American Association of Christian Counselors. The first thing I noticed was that there must be more wanna-be musicians in Nashville than the rest of the country put together. They had live bands playing in restaurants at the airport. I’m not kidding.

A highlight for me was the chance to connect with so many long time friends who are interested in both psychology and spirituality. In a five minute span I ran into authors/psychologists Larry Crabb, Siang-Yiang Tan, Gary Moon, and Henry Cloud. I think they should form a practice and call it: Cloud, Moon, Tan and Crabb. Sounds like a day at the beach. Or a Christian radio program.

Plus, AACC is one of my favorite groups in the world to speak to. Its a whole audience captivated by questions of life change and faith and God and human development–the most important questions in the world. From their response to the need for ‘hand-crafted discipleship’, I think Monvee is going to be a remarkable resource for this group.

Amazingly enough, there were something like seven thousand people there. All came because they are invested in learning about how human beings grow, change, hurt and heal. While the debate about health care goes on, one consensus is clear: the hunger for healing is growing. There is almost no limit to what a church might become if it is known in its community as a place where people with real problems can be honest, and find belonging, and begin to heal. There is no telling what God might do through a leader who is open about her wounds. The hunger for churches may go up and down, but the hunger for the life that churches are supposed to offer is unceasing.

Part 2In a revealing book called Re-constructing Honor in Roman Philippi, Joseph Hellerman notes that Rome society was primarily devoted to the pursuit of what they called honor–climbing through levels of status.  People at the top devoted their lives to what was called the Honorum Cursus–the race for honors.  The pursuit of offices and titles dominated their lives.  Even people at the lowest rungs–slaves–imated the elites in this way.   People were seated at feasts and public events based on class;  toga’s could only be worn by those who were citizens, who were also allowed to vote and have due process at law.  Rome was, he says, the most status conscious culture in the Ancient Mediterranean, and no city was more obsessed with status than Philippi.
Which brings us back to Paul, and how to grip the imagination of a community.
Paul knew that he would be launching a new kind of community in Philippi, where slaves and the elite were to live as brothers.   This would violate all their training and customs.

When he was arrested, Paul could have appealed to his citizenship for a get out of jail free card.   But he knew that many believers in Philippi would be slaves and freedman, and they would not have that card.  they would suffer for their faith.
How could he let slaves know they were treasured?  How could he show the elite sacrificial love.
So when Paul was arrested, he did not consider his Roman citizenship something to be used for his advantage.  He humbled himself, making himself like a slave,so that  a new kind of community could be born.   He was ‘re-defining honor;’ by  following One who did not consider equality with God something to be used for his own advantage, but became obediant to death on a cross–the fate of a dishonored slave.   Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place, forever re-constructing what exaltation and humility mean.
It is when someone actually follows Jesus, in a personal and costly way, that whole cultures get changed.   And the people who follow Jesus in this way don’t do so to make a name for themselves; they do it because in following Jesus they follow the deepest truth about how life really is.

What does following look like where you live?

Imagine you want to do something great for God. Imagine that you want to impact an entire city. Or nation. Or continent. Where would you start?

Change on that scale never happens simply because someone is developing a new technology or improved programs.
Transformation always begins with a thoroughly changed life. I asked a stewardship consultant once what is the common denominator in generous churches. His immediate answer was that they have generous senior pastors.
A changed group starts with a changed individual.
It happened with the Apostle Paul. He was summoned to the Roman colony of Philippi in a vision from God. It was the first time the gospel of Jesus traveled to the continent that would become known as Europe. The most dramatic incident that gripped the life of the city was not something Paul planned ahead of time. It flowed out of his response to a horribly difficult situation, and was shaped by the way in which he followed Jesus. It was a story that was remarkably congruent with his message, and when it spread it helped to create an alternative culture to the way of the Roman Empire. And it is loaded with messages for us in shining a light on what happens when a leader shuns status and success for the sake of love.

I’ll tell you in the next blog. But I’ll leave this one with a hint. When Paul preached at Philippi, he got arrested, beaten with rods, savagely flogged, placed in an inner cell, and put in stocks. He was miraculously delivered, When the authorities tried to get him to leave, he refused, letting them know he was a Roman citizen, which alarmed them greatly.

Here’s the question: Why did Paul wait until after he was arrested, humiliated, beaten, and had come close to death before he revealed that he was a Roman citizen, when he could have told the authorities in the first place and stayed free?

I had dinner last week with a friend who’s lost twenty pounds and kept it off, and he was telling me about what has helped him change. He read an author who helped him understand what’s good for you and what tastes really good but can hurt you in excess. (In the latter category, sadly, is pretty much any food that ends in ‘o’: nacho, burrito, frito, dorito, taco, mayo, potato, oreo…) But this is the comment that stuck with me: the best diet in the world doesn’t help if you won’t eat it.

It has to be something you can like. It has to be something you’ll actually eat.

Then I was talking with a publisher about both Monvee and The Me I want to Be, and he was asking me what has changed in my thinking since I first started writing about spiritual formation. I think at the core is this thought: the most slickly-organized well-researched way of arranging your life around spiritual practices won’t help if you don’t actually live it. It is a strange truth that in Jesus’ day the people who got in trouble with him the most were people who worked the hardest at their spiritual lives.

Change requires the right vision, and then actual effective methods for change. But these methods will have to involve ways of life that you will actually want to do.

Where this is no vision but lots of methods, there is legalism.

Where there is vision but no understanding of method, there is frustration.

Where there is neither vision nor method, there is apathy.

But where the vision is strong,

and method is actually effective and workable,

then transformation can happen.

‘Taste and see the Lord is good,” the psalmist said.