| Todd's profileReconcileRestorePhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
ReconcileRestoreBuilding Community through Constructive Dialogue |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
November 20 Worship Teaching, November 21, 2009 The Year of Living Liturgically
Blurb from faucet:
What would happen if you changed your interaction with God from one that started with you approaching him to one that started with him approaching you? What if he started the conversation?
What if the pastor didn't decide what scriptures he wanted to use in his sermon and instead let the scriptures pick him? What if your personal quiet time with God started with prayer and scripture that was already determined for you rather than you deciding what to read and pray?
It sounds dangerous. It feels constricting. It seems uncontrollable.
Canton Adventist is preparing to enter the beginning of the Christian Liturgical Year on November 28 with the first week of Advent. This Saturday, Todd Leonard introduces the concept of the Christian Year and how it will affect the church's worship gatherings and how it could impact your daily spiritual journey for the next twelve months.
This could be a powerful year of growth in your relationship with God, yourself and others. The best learning always happens when you release yourself from controlling the process and turning the control over to the Master Teacher.
I'll post a summary of my teaching in the next couple days. But feel free to comment in the meantime. Looking forward to continued dialogue... Worship Teaching, November 14, 2009 the water tower project
Last Saturday, Canton Adventist launched the first phase of its SPLASH 2010 vision, entitled, the water tower project. The water tower motif speaks to how Canton Adventist views itself. A water tower's purpose is not to store water. Water towers are erected to make sure that no matter who much water is in the city's reservoir there will always be a steady supply of water flowing in the pipeline in order to serve every faucet in the city.
Canton Adventist does not believe that our purpose is to get as many people into the church--i.e., attending worship, giving money and conforming to a belief system. We believe that we are called to pool people together who have God's spirit at work in their lives in order to flow out in quality and effective ways to serve our city with goodness, grace, mercy and love. Jesus used the term "living water" to describe how God flows into people's lives through his spirit. And he says that when the spirit flows in, we each become springs of water that pump out God's goodness to others.
As Canton Adventist looks to improve its effectiveness in bringing love to others, we want to increase our flow by having more spirit-filled people join our cause. We need people who are ready to commit their presence at worship, in OurSpace groups and with the community ministries we are launching in January. We need people who are ready to put their money behind their belief in the mission. And we need people who are willing to share their talents and passions in ministry.
This is a golden opportunity and the perfect time if you are in a transitional moment regarding the faith community in which you want to be a part. This may be a difficult time and a challenge if you are comfortable where you are at. But whether it is convenient or not, if you sense that maybe God wants you flowing yourself into the Canton Adventist water works, let Todd know you're ready to gush through the pipeline in 2010: todd@reconcilerestore.net, 404-202-3146 November 06 If a Four-Year Old Can, You Can TooNovember 01 Worship Teaching, October 31, 2009Living Each Day Like It's Halloween
Teaching Summary from October 31
 My relationship with Halloween has been evolving over the years, just like everything else is evolving in my life. I loved dressing up as a cowboy, fireman or policeman and going door-to-door to get candy as a kid. Somewhere in my college or young adult years, I came under conviction that Halloween should be a holiday that good Christians avoided due to its glorification of the dark side and playful interaction with occult practices. I've noticed that Christians of certain persuasions have attempted to "redeem" the Halloween season by trying to scare the "hell" out of people by hosting "Judgment Houses" at their churches where they lead people through an end-time version of a haunted house where they see the lost being sent to everlasting punishment.
But if you know me at all and are aware of my warped mind, it probably won't surprise you that now I'm convinced that our world would be a better place if we started living every day as if it was Halloween. Before you find a priest to do an exorcism on your computer, give me a chance to explain.
Halloween's roots are traced to a harvest festival practiced in the Celtic tradition. The Celts believed that there was boundary between mortal humans and immortal spirits. But at this time of year, they believed the boundary became so thin that the spirits could enter into the domain of humans. This, therefore, became a day of high anticipation and great dread. Anticipation--because people believed that their ancestors would come and visit their homes; so they prepared their home for their arrival. Dread--because evil spirits could also come to them; so they put skulls on window sills and dressed up and put on scary masks to make the evil spirits believe that the humans, too, were evil spirits and would leave them alone.
So this holiday is rooted in this sense of the supernatural visiting the natural; of ultimate good and ultimate evil breaking into everyday life. For the celebrants, it was a day to be highly aware that there were forces out there beyond their grasp, beyond their understanding and beyond their control. Obviously, it is a good thing for people to move beyond pagan superstition into a more rational, scientific approach to life. But by doing so, one can throw the baby out with the bath water. Because even though your dead cousins aren't going to show up at your house and ghosts, ghouls and zombies aren't going to try to steal your soul, there are forces out there of which one should be aware. See, today, we live in a society where we prefer to not have to think about ultimate realities and things beyond our control. We like to think that we can manage things ourselves. We also don't like to think about good and evil being realities in our world, or if we do, we only like to think of them in relation to us--we're good, other people and other situations are evil. We'd rather rationalize what we do or don't do based upon our circumstances at the time without assigning a moral equivalency to our action or inaction. But what could change if we returned to an understanding and appreciation that there are things beyond our control? What if we understood that there was a greater cosmic reality than just what happens in our little sphere of life? What if we began to see things, even things in our own lives, as good or evil?
If God is real and we understand him as real, some things would change. If evil, and its personification, the devil, is real, we might begin to realize that there is something trying to destroy us.
First, what would change if people understood that the Spirit of God was all around them, among them and within them? When Paul visited Athens, he said to the philosophers, "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17.28, NIV). Jesus said, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, `Here it is,' or `There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17.20, 21, NIV). The powerful truth that Jesus revealed to the world was that God was not someone separate, apart or distant. He was close, very close. Not just pagans, but even Jewish religion had a misinformed or ignorant understanding of God. They saw God's presence on earth limited to the inner "box" of the temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus died on the cross, the earth shook and the curtain that separated the inner box from the rest of the temple was torn apart, speaking to the truth that God was not and never was contained by that box. He was everywhere, with everyone and at work in everyone. God is not a being that we must try to convince to enter our lives--he's already here. And he is full of love, grace and mercy. He has adopted us as his sons and daughters. He is as present in our lives as the air we breathe. This knowledge can and will change our lives. Check out 1 John 4.13-18, NIV:
Knowing that we live in God and he in us is a stabilizing and empowering force for our lives. We rely on his love. We're freed by his love. And notice, there is no fear of judgment when we know we live in his love. Fear is driven out by love. Therefore, an awareness of good and evil means we don't have to fear whether we'll be good enough or if our "house is in order" to be accepted by God. And, we don't have to fear what evil may try to do to us because good triumphs over evil. In fact, we are encouraged by Paul in Ephesians 6.10-18:
In light of the goodness and love of God, we need to confront the evils that mess up our lives, mess up relationships with others and mess up our communities. We need to be willing to look at our passion-less marriages and the lack of passion (not our spouse) as evil and gear up to overthrow that evil and restore health and romance into our relationship. We need to call our casual neglect of our kids what it is--evil--and march into that evil and engage our children again. We need to call living on credit a most dastardly practice, worthy of our greatest loathing, and wage war on our debt. In our communities, where there is poverty, it is a call to arms. Where there is prejudice and separation, it is a mandate for militant, loving action. Where there are addictions, it is time to storm the prison and free people from their captivity. Evil must be vanquished. To stay mindful of God's true presence among us and to stay alert to driving evil out, we need the support of each other. Two choice pieces of counsel:
The most communal day in my neighborhood is Halloween night when everybody's outside either taking their kids around the neighborhood or setting up hot chocolate, popcorn and cookie tables in their driveways to attract the families to their homes. If you want to get to know people in our neighborhood, you better be out and about on Halloween. What if we lived our lives in the recognition that we become more aware of the supernatural, both good and evil, when we face life together? We would help each other stay firmly anchored in the knowledge that we are immersed in the loving Spirit of God and we would help each other stay motivated, and, at times, team up to overthrow evil and replace it with good. Community is a must for staying in the awareness of God's presence and for maintaining courage for the battles to come.
Happy Halloween! October 27 Soul PancakeDwight Schrute Makes Soul Pancakes
Along with Curb Your Enthusiasm, the NBC sitcom The Office, is required viewing in my weekly TV schedule. Rainn Wilson's character, Dwight Schrute, is a key reason why I love the show. So when I saw Nightline interview him on Monday night, I stopped to watch. Probably most of you who read this are already acquainted with his brainchild for a website, Soul Pancake, launched in the spring, but it was my first introduction to it (I'm usually at the tail end of picking up on cyber trends). What I loved right off the bat is his introductory video to the site:
Wilson identifies himself with the Baha'i faith which believes in all great religious teachers as being part of God' revelation of himself. While I am devout in my belief that Jesus is a superior revelation to all other teachers, I do honor Wilson for his mission to "de-lamify" religion by providing a safe space for constructive dialogue and debate. I, too, am desperate to build communities of faith where people can feel safe to think, to wrestle, to embrace the pursuit of the unknown, and to not get tied down to their relgious default answers. I think people are anxiously looking to grow in their experience of God. This comes by embracing questions, rather than answers, as gateways to growth.
This is also why I am a huge fan and pro bono marketer of Samir Selmanovic's new book It's Really All About God.
 In this book, Samir talks about his own personal spiritual journey and how he now lives his life in response to what he has experienced of God. The subtitle to his book, Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian, speaks to how he believes he has grown in his understanding of God by listening to other voices outside of his personal (Christian) faith tradition. He believes there is a great need for people of diverse backgrounds to come together and not shrink back from their differing beliefs, but to rather fully engage in listening to each other and learning from each other's most passionate beliefs.
Can we be more devoted to each other and our growth in God rather than being devoted to winning arguments?
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Send a private message
Subscribe to RSS feed
Tell a friend
Add to My MSN
Add to your network
Sign up for alerts|
|
