Category Archives: Books and Articles

Donald Miller writing in his newest book, Searching for God Knows What, (p 45 – 47) said some things that seemed to make a lot of sense.  It explains a lot of why I need God and his people.  It goes beyond the surface of my search for human love and acceptance to the mystery of those deep longings within me that are hard to express. He says:

You go walking along, thinking people are talking a language and exchanging ideas, but the whole time there is this deeper language people are really talking, and that language has nothing to do with ethics, fashion, or politics, but what it really has to do with is feeling important and valuable.  What if the economy we are really dealing in life, what if the language we are really speaking in life, what if what we really want in life is relational?…

Now this changes things quite a bit, because if the gospel of Jesus is just some formula I obey in order to get taken off the naughty list and put on a nice list, then it doesn’t meet the deep need of the human condition, it doesn’t interact with the great desire of my soul, and it has nothing to do with the hidden (or rather, obvious) language we are all speaking.

Having a relationship with Jesus now, is so far from being a formula thing.  It has nothing to do with following a form of behaviour, rules or living up to other peoples standards.  It is so much more complicated than a set of rules and yet, at the same time, so much simpler.  There is something built in to me that needs that acceptance and love that he offers.  I don’t have to earn that acceptance – I can’t. 

I cannot go back to anything less than an intimate relationship with Christ where I am secure in the fact that he loves me and he actually gets pleasure out of my little attempts to show him love in return.  So all my actions become attempts to love him back, to please him, to allow our relationship to develope.  This relationship can’t be limited to rules.  Rules are binding and hedge in.  They put limits on behaviour but also limit the possible expressions of love.  Rules create fear – fear of slipping up on some small neglected item that was on the rule list.  Perfect love casts out fear.  He has freed me.

So this deeper language of relationships can only be learned as the relationship with Christ frees us from having to meet the worlds standards of importance, fame and influence.  Christ also frees us from these same standards which creep into the instituation of the church where adherence to sets of rules may confer importance, admiration for pious behaviour and influence.  These are generally religious perks that Jesus warned us against seeking.

I followed a few links tonight from Bob Smietana over at God of Small Things to The Parish.  Came across a story about a church.  Maybe one could say the church as it ought to be, where it ought to be. 

 Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk,  An Expedition to the Pole,  p43  

    God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him.  God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars.  It is a life with God which demands these things.

     Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates.  You do not have to do these things; not at all.  God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot.  You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God.  They work on you, not on him.

     You do not have to sit outside in the dark.  If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary.  But the stars neither require nor demand it.

And from page 52,

      Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the absolute? …

      On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.   

I really should have saved this one for the cruise – I am finding this one mentally stimulating.  I admire the way an author like Dillard works with words, forming with them all forms of art, almost visual in the way it leaves it’s impression on me.  Sometimes I find I have to go back and re-read portions as if I was moving in closer to a painting to catch some detail or moving around a sculpture to see it from yet another angle.

Reading over at the Ooze – an article by Jeff Dyer.  Here’s an excerpt.  Read the whole article here. 

“Perhaps my abysmal, hurtful experiences of a lack of community have shaped my outlook, but I fully believe that formation of a community is an integral part of the Gospel. As Paul said, “We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well” (I Thes. 2:8). The Church needs that kind of aggressive community, led by transparent pastors willing to lead by sharing our very lives with others.”

Picked this off a site I visit every now and then.  It fits where I am right now.

A prayer from Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)

Sunday night I get together with a group of women reading The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. We are beginning again at the beginning since we started getting into it at the start of the “summer” and then had to drop it as we all scattered for vacation and such. 

We got into a discussion on the subject of grace and law. 

Grace is sort of a foreign subject to mothers and in this group we all are.  We set boundaries for our kids, to help them learn and to give them a more secure place to grow up – a place where they know their limits.  To help them learn the limits we dole out punishment if the lines are crossed.  Of course we do dole out grace too but we sure like it when our kids obey the rules.  Maybe that is one place where we learn and have ingrained in us this need for rules to obey – some easy measure to see if we are on the right track.

But God – he puts us into this place where there are no laws – no boundaries – freedom.  There are of course the consequences that result from our actions and there are constraints that are tied into the way we recognize and respond to his love.  But we humans like to set up systems of rules here too and substitute compliance with them for the harder task of listening and following Jesus’ spirit wherever he is leading.

I like this quote from the book I am currently reading – I Believe in the Holy Spirit by Michael Green.

“…we are not forgiven because we keep the law: but once we are forgiven we are called to keep it…

The law of God had demanded holiness, but could not enable it.  The law remained an external authority expressing God’s requirements, but providing no power to keep them.  The demand and the requirements still stand.  But through the Spirit, God has given us the ability to fulfil those requirements…  The Spirit of Jesus… provides a higher law than the law of sin and death.”

And how does this look for me?  Well probably a change in my plans for this weekend so I can spend time working on a relationship with my daughter and her friend.  Putting this relationship ahead of other things – good as they are in themselves.  And listening, listening, listening to what God is saying to me and following where he is taking me rather than just sticking to the rules and looking pretty good.

The Signature of Jesus by Brennan Manning

Talking about the church:

The experience of community is neither a luxury for the spiritually affluent nor a panacea for the lonely, bored, and idle.  It is, in fact, a necessity for every Christian.  It is my personal conviction that this is what Jesus and Paul meant when they spoke of the church small Christian communities praying and worshiping together, healing, forgiving, reconciling, supporting, challenging, and encouraging one another.  Scott peck says, There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace and ultimately no life without community.”

We need a group of people around us who support and understand us.  Even Jesus needed this.  He called them the Twelve,” the first Christian community.  We need perspective on the present, so we pray together; we need accountability; so we share our lives with each other; we need a vision of the future, so we dream together.” (The Signature of Jesus, Manning, Multnomah, 1996 p 80)

This is the sort of church I need.  I think the congregation I worship with is becoming like this.  We are beginning to “pray, worship, heal, forgive, support, challenge and encourage one another”.  We have a long way to go still.  And maybe some of the group will never get there.  But when something happens in our group, like what happened to me last Sunday, I think we are on the right track. 

Last Sunday we had a very unsophisticated, unchoreographed but meaningful prayer time.  Just in the middle of the worship service we were asked to place ourselves in groups of two or three and pray for the requests that had been voiced and for each other.  So we did or at least the small group that I was part of did.  (Some people are pretty uncomfortable doing this but I think that is because they are just not very comfortable praying period.)  And afterwards the person I prayed with, someone I would not have expected to reveal private family problems” to me shared some problems one of her daughters is having.  I think we are beginning to trust each other enough to let ourselves be more transparent to each other.  Only when we do this can we really be honest enough to voice our needs and to support each other as we should.

There is so much talk about the different forms that church can take house churches, churches that meet in unusual locations, emergent, liturgical (or not) but I think that the real essence of church is this gathering of the community in Christ’s name; fellowship together in the presence of the living God; helping each other live lives that demonstrate how much God loves us; the world recognizing that we have something going on that makes a difference

Seems to me that John was saying this when he wrote:  My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us–perfect love!”  1 John 4: 11, 12 (MSG)

No one has seen God but they should be able to look at his church and see some resemblance.

The form that it takes is going to change with each new generation and will need to.  From looking back at how God has interacted with humans throughout history, as recorded in the Bible and in Christian writings since, there has been a lot of change.  God remains the same no matter how our understanding of him changes.  He continues to reveal the great love he has for us.  I know he will remain relevant to the generations still to come even though they will be much different than we are.  If God couldn’t handle change, he wouldn’t have made us with minds that seek to discover and create.  He did make us in his image.

I have been reading a very practical book on Christian spirituality.  And I would recommend it to anyone who wants to grow in spiritual maturity.  For the most part it is a guide on returning to the basics of the Christian life in order to grow in personal spiritual health and life.

From On The Way by Gordon T. Smith, pp90 to 92 from his chapter on Vocation and Christian Service

“… this also means we affirm that work in the world is a vital expression and element of a Christian spirituality… ”

“And for the lay  person who is called to be a dentist or a banker, the actual work in the bank or the dentist office is good work, and we must not think that such people use their time better if they are also involved in teaching a Sunday School class, that they are more spiritual people if they are actively involved in their local church.  Indeed, it may well be the case that if a dentist neglects her practice while serving the church, she is not faithful to the work to which she is called…”

“…in this affirmation of work we also need to affirm and celebrate the work of those who make a house a home and in so doing raise children and spend their days responding to the needs of children.  The work of a homemaker is not second-class work to those who have a career in the world.  Indeed, Proverbs 31 celebrates equally the person who is a domestic as much as the one who is a merchant buying and selling in the marketplace.” 

“…we can see our work as a way in which we live under the kingdom reign of Christ and celebrate, through good times and difficult times, the reality that God is bringing His kingdom purposes into the world.  The whole of our lives is lived in light of His kingdom, and this means that we no longer view parts of our lives as more sacred than other parts, but that all that we are – including our work – is lived under the kingdom reign of Jesus Christ.”

Maybe I just liked the reference to the dentist.  Not really but it fits.  I found most helpful the fact that our work, whatever it is, is part of what God has called us to do on this earth and that it is as sacred as anything that we do.

Maggie Dawn’s site I followed a link to a site talking about the difference between the emergent church in the US and in the UK.  I found it to be a fascinating overview of how the church is operating in two different cultures.  I wonder if we in Canada are somewhere in between or if we are closer to the US church?

when there is so much in the news about war and it’s degrading effects on mankind, it brought hope to read an article by Bob Smiatana at his blog God of Small Things.  Applying God’s grace to our world, extending forgiveness will go a lot further than attempting to revenge our hurts.  I know we need to do this on a one to one basis.  I wonder what would happen or if it is even possible for countries to do this?