Categotry Archives: moments of truth

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Finding Out Who I Really Am

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Categories: moments of truth

In pondering my own journey over the past 10-15 years now, I’m coming to a moment of truth. This isn’t merely a journey of re-thinking faith, or church, or theology. Lots of people do that several times through the course of their lives, and it doesn’t entail the monumental shake-up (or shake-down) that occurred in my own life. No, this has to be something more, and I think I know what it is.

This is a journey of finding out who I really am.

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The Messiness

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Categories: Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth

I certainly wish I could say that I’ve got my life all figured out now that I’ve removed myself from institutional Christianity. I wish I could tell you it all makes a lot more sense “out here,” or that I have a grasp on what church, ministry, or my own life ought to look like.

It simply isn’t true, however. Less structure means more mess. And for a recovering control freak like me, it throws me for a loop more often than I’d like to admit.

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What Happened on the Last Day

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Categories: How I am, moments of truth

So…I’m back, blogging on a Sunday. The new worship leader is in place at my friends’ congregation, so I’m officially relieved of duty, so to speak. I’m looking forward to resuming some sense of discussion here, at least weekly. (Sunday mornings are my “blogging” time.) 🙂

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Questions of Authority

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Categories: General, Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth, Tags: , , ,

Sorry for not posting in a little while…I sort of missed my weekly slot last weekend because I filled in as worship leader at the church community where I used to lead, so the current worship leader could go off to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and see Mumford and Sons play while it was snowing in June in the mountains and see the clouds part to reveal the snow-covered mountains just as they finished playing.

Lucky stiff. Anyhow.

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Coming as Babies

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Categories: changing mindsets, food for thought, Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth

I’ve been spending a bit of time the past couple of days thinking about mission, and what it means–what it looks like–to be missional. Particularly, I’ve been asking God, basically, “What next?” We’ve been getting settled in this new place for a year and a half, and I still have this desire to do some sort of missional work in the creative community–but I’ve been soul searching about the right approach, what the next steps are (if any). I’ve been trying to find words to verbalize things felt deep in the soul, where people could maybe understand them. And frankly, I’ve felt a little lost–not in the sense of losing faith, but in the sense of trying to think about mission outside the boundaries of traditional church, when all I’ve done previously has happened within those boundaries.
Just this morning, I think something really has registered with me that’s going to deeply inform our direction in the days ahead. It’s not a new concept, but it’s like it “clicked” with me–like someone switched on a light. An “a-ha” moment.
Okay, you get the idea. 🙂
One thing I’ve been trying to do is get back to the basics of mission, particularly the mission of Christ. If Jesus set an example for us to follow–and I believe He did–then we can learn the correct approach to mission by looking at what He did as well as what He taught.
So how did Jesus approach His mission? He became one of us.
Jesus did not come to earth in a blaze of glory, riding on a white horse, His deity apparent all over the place. (That would be the SECOND coming, and that hasn’t happened at press time.) Instead, as the Bible indicates, He laid down His heavenly glory and took the form of a man. A regular human being, just like us. We call this the “incarnation.” The incarnational approach to mission has already been talked about a lot in missional circles, and like I said, I’m familiar with it and seek to embrace it.
But there’s more. You see, Jesus came as a man–but not as a grown man. He didn’t launch His mission as the self-proclaimed expert of all things spiritual. He came into this world the same way we all do–as a baby. A helpless, vulnerable, non-potty-trained baby. He didn’t come with all the answers–that came later. Jesus came to us needy. He came to us needing to be fed, changed, nurtured, loved, trained–all that stuff that kids need in order to grow.
Talk about humbling oneself.
My family and I have been immersing ourselves in the local creative community pretty much since we got here, because we understood the necessity of becoming part of the existing community. What I hadn’t really seen before now–but God did, and has already been orchestrating–is that we are coming as babies. We’re not coming with the answers; we’re coming with needs.
I probably see this playing out most right now with The Wild One. She has totally laid down her personal aspirations for “ministry” probably more than I have–she has been able to totally empty herself. The artistic circle she found herself in saw her not as a pastor or spiritual expert, but as someone who is hungry to learn art–who has always wanted to do it, but never had the chance or the resources, and who has great potential. As a result, they’ve totally taken her under their wing and begun to teach her to paint–and she’s making great progress. And because this group loves the arts in general, and because they are already so open, they’ve adopted the rest of our family right along with her. We’re not on the giving end–not right now. We’re the needy ones. We’re the babies.
I can now see this setting up the same way with the music scene. I’ve developed a rapport with this music community by covering the local scene as a freelance writer, and I’ve made a lot of friends. But the truth is, while I do know a few things about how to encourage young artists, in order to do what I really want to do in music–I’m going to have to become the baby. I’m going to have to ask people half my age how to go about booking shows, who to talk to about getting publishing deals, and so on. I may have to collaborate with others in order to polish my songwriting skills and aim them in a new direction. I’m not really the expert here–I’m the needy one.
I’m beginning to see that at least in our case, to be truly incarnational in our approach requires us to become as infants in this community–not just to be one of them, but to grow up as one of them. And with this fresh understanding of things, I actually have a new perspective on the past 10 years of our lives.
There’s a place in the Bible where it talks about Jesus emptying Himself in order to come to earth as a man. Jesus stripped Himself of His heavenly glory in order to embark on this mission. I don’t know how that felt for Him–but I do know some of what it feels like to be stripped. The entire time we lived in Tulsa, we were being stripped. We obviously weren’t being stripped of heavenly glory or deity (we never had those things). But we were being stripped of our pastoral or clerical prestige, so to speak. We were also being stripped of mindsets, of wrong assumptions, of wrong motives, and pretty much of everything we thought “ministry” was. By the time we got here to Denver, we were almost completely deconstructed and undone. Starting over–as babies.
It sure looks like God has been setting us up.
This whole theme about becoming as a child has deep ramifications, not just in mission, but in other ways as well. Didn’t Jesus repeatedly say that we need to come to the Father as little children? This post could get really long rambling about that–so I’ll save that for another time. But this understanding has really caused a lot of the fog to clear for me. It’s showing me that it’s okay, even necessary, to step into this mission not as the expert, but as the student. It’s showing me that it’s okay, even necessary, to embrace small beginnings. I think God has a long-term plan here, and apparently we’ve been within that plan for awhile now.
On a personal level, I think I’ve struggled for a long time with my deconstruction. Although I’ve definitely been thankful for the sense of freedom (and wouldn’t ever want to go back into bondage), I also have felt such a sense of loss because at the very least I had a strong sense of direction, and when things dismantled, I felt there was nothing to replace what I’d had. I think I’m finally going to be okay with that now. I think I can fully embrace this time and place, knowing that the previous stripping was necessary in order to step into this mission in the right way.
Jesus came to us as a baby, and He changed the world. I believe that if I embrace the same idea, enter this mission as a baby, and have patience with the process, I can at least make a positive difference.
Which is pretty much all I wanted in the first place.

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What’s More Important

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Categories: church, Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth


I think that at the heart of my journey out of institutional forms of church is a true desire to focus on what really matters–the heart and soul of my faith, the things that really make this engine run, so to speak. I think this desire has really set my course for many years. And as I gradually became less and less focused on the institutions surrounding Christianity, and more focused on the heart of faith, I began to see just how many times and in how many ways I’d majored on the minors–focused so much energy and placed so much importance on things that really weren’t all that important in the greater scheme of things.

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Experience Is a Teacher: An Email Dialog with a Reader

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Categories: changing mindsets, church, moments of truth

A few days ago, I received an email from someone checking out some of my older blog posts, and I felt our email conversation might benefit others. I am a few years down the road on my journey from when I started processing all this stuff, but as I wrote this brother back, I almost felt like it was a synopsis of the last couple of years of blogging. With his permission, I’m reposting the conversation, withholding the name for privacy’s sake.

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Embracing the Changes

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Categories: creativity, How I am, missional, moments of truth

So you’ve probably noticed that over the past few weeks, the number of my posts here has been dwindling considerably. I generally try to get over here at least three times a week, but lately I’ve been fortunate to post once a week. A couple of weeks ago, I simply asked a couple of questions, and the comment section ended up providing enough content to do us all for a month! 🙂

But there is a reason for the reduced posting. I’ve been working on some things on this end, and now it’s time to let you know what I’ve been up to.

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Delaying Destiny

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Categories: moments of truth

I was just kidding about that last post. I wrote this one right after, just saved it for posting later, for the humor effect. 🙂

I wasn’t kidding about being a procrastinator, though. Although I’d have to say that like most of us, I’m a bit selective in what I procrastinate on. And while sometimes that’s just normal human stuff, sometimes the things we put off can tell on us. What we are avoiding can tell us what’s going on in our souls.

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What’s Coming…

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Categories: How I am, Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth, You need to read this

I’ve processed a lot of stuff here in the past couple of years, as I’ve transitioned out of institutional church into “something else” that I don’t know what to call it yet. This transition has been full of surprises; if someone had made me bet my life on predicting the stuff that has happened, I’d be dead now.

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