Churches have identity crises too

I just met with the staff of an older, established mega-church. They are in a season of transition. The focus of the conversation was on strategy, but my gut kept telling me their issue was identity. Good people asking good questions, just not the most important questions.

Churches are like people. God made each of us unique and we all have a one of a kind calling and vocation. When individuals focus on what they should do with their lives without knowing who they are at their core they just wind up imitating other people. It's only when we really know who we are and own who we are that we can do what God made us to do with joy and freedom.

I run into more and more churches that are going through identity crises. In a fallen world where we get so disconnected from the One who can tell us who we are this should not be surprising. The worse thing a church can do when it is trying to figure out who it is, is to try and be emergent, missional, high-church or imitate the latest leader of some list in Outreach magazine.

So, how does a church know who God made them to be? Here are a few questions that are helpful:

What are the historic strengths of the leaders?
What is the burning passion of the leaders as they look to the future?
What about the mission and philosophy of ministry unifies the leaders? What dis-unifies them? Where is the win/win? Without unity it's game over.
What are the needs of the community around them?
How can they best contextualize their ministry to those they hope to reach and still be themselves?
How can they bless the most people possible? We find our church identity most readily when we give ourselves away for the Kingdom and give up trying to be the best or biggest church in town.

Let's pray for the day when most churches are clear on who God has made them to be for the season in which they find themselves. When that happens, God's beauty shines through.

Jesus Wants To Make You Sexier

I have been studying Jesus teaching on lust and marriage in the Sermon on the Mount this week. Here are a few things I have been pondering.

* Lust matters because it dehumanizes us and others. It turns people into things. The reaping sowing affect is that when you commodify others you commodify yourself. You become a thing.

* Lust has led to 12 billion dollar porn industry. 10 billion of that is hard porn. Most of the hard porn involves children.

* An FBI agent who seeks to break up child porn companies recently asked a friend of mine to pray with her. She watched a film that day of a four year old girl being raped by her father. Her mother filmed the rape. The little girl kept saying, "Mommy make him stop." This is the world lust creates.

* The Latin word for sex is secare. It means to "cut off." We feel sexually cut off. We feel most sexually satisfied when we are connected. This does not require intercourse. Some of the most sexual people I know are single and chaste. But they are super connected to God, themselves, people, the world, pain, suffering, beauty, joy.

* Jesus wants to make us more sexual not less. He wants us to be more comfortable with who we are, more connected. You could say he wants to make us sexy.

This is our topic this week at Restoration Community Church. For more information, check out Restorationcc.us. Hope to see you there.

You would'nt like me when I'm angry

If you have anger issues and feel like you can't seem to change, check out what Jesus says in Matthew 5:21-26. He goes straight to the core issues that anger management books miss by a mile. He tells us why our anger is worse than we think. It murders others in our heart. It diminishes them. You think people don't know when we judge and hate them - think again. They feel it. And the world is much worse off for it. That anger gets forwarded on to others and even the generations coming up behind us. Ouch.

Then Jesus links anger to worship. Yeah, we can't worship when we have a broken relationship. How can you love God when you hate someone else (1 John)? But it goes deeper. Our anger reveals what we worship. We all have these stories inside of us, largely unconscious, that fuel our anger and reveal what we really worship - control, power, admiration, respect, safety, perfection and the list goes on.

Jesus does a major Jiu-Jitsu move on us at the end of this passage. He encourages us to stay out of court, where anger really gets cranked up. More importantly he links anger to the topic of justice. He takes our anger that pulls us away from God and towards our idols and then he re-directs it towards justice, where it belongs. He wants our anger to engage us with the injustices of the world like; human trafficking, kids who are bullied, prejudice in all its forms, bad marriages, sexual abuse, and your neighbor who is spiritually missing out.