Sometimes We need A God with Skin On Him

 Don't drink, don't drug, go to meetings, help others, clean house, and trust God, now there's some dandy advice.

 Recovery from the bondage of addiction is painful to experience and excruciating to observe, and it matters little to the sufferer that much of the pain is self-inflicted, suffering is suffering no matter the cause. In our active addictions we set in motion events that will reach their inevitable conclusion whether we drink again or not. It is the sacred task of those of us who went through the painful early stages of recovery and broke into the sunlight of the spirit to encourage and urge the new person to stay the course, to assure them that their day in the sun is sure to come if only they stay free of alcohol and drugs.

Help is available......

Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Al-Anon Family Groups, and other groups too numerous to mention offer free, effective, and loving help for sufferers, from fellow sufferers who have found a way out. Sometimes we need a God with skin on Him, and prayer is often wasted unaccompanied by action. God bless and good luck. 

For more information go to these groups websites, find a meeting in your area and just go!! 

 

The Spiritual Buffet

I love buffets, not just for the sheer joy of "all you can eat", but because the selection is great. Feeling adventurous? You can sample as many different entrees as you care to. And no one tells you what you can eat,
just take what you want and leave the rest. And yet, I've never left a buffet and said, "That's the best meal I've ever had". It's usually "That was good, we'll have to go back soon".
I know a lot of folks who treat their spiritual life that way. "All great religions share the same wisdom and preach similar principles at their core," they say, "Why claim one way is better than another? Just take what you can use and leave the rest. As in God on a sampler platter. While I guess it's possible to attain a vague sort of  spiritual satisfaction that way, it's hardly fulfilling in the way complete commitment provides Christians. Christians know where they'll spend eternity, we have a well defined purpose for our temporal lives and the certainty of joy in the hereafter.
So I try not to take my faith buffet style, however pleasant that may sound I'm looking for certainty, not vague feelings of contentment.

Dreadful It Is To Fall Into The Hands Of The Living God.

Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined.....Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God.~Soren Kierkegaard

 When  I professed Christ as Lord I didn't know it but I was embracing a course of behavior so radical that the only relief possible was ignorance. Whatever you do don't invite Christ into your life and then make the mistake of reading the New Testament. It's there I find that salvation is not merely a get out of hell free card, that salvation implies action beyond my natural willingness to obey. The enormity of what Christ asks of me, to sell everything, give the money away, and follow Him (Mathew 19: 16-26), to drop everything at once and just go (Mark 1:18) is best dealt with in ignorance, so don't read the New Testament.

Better yet, read the New Testament.  Read it regularly, read about the rejects, losers, social climbers, Jesus deniers (The Apostles), the believer persecutors (Paul), and the tax collectors, prostitutes, and assorted lowlifes that the Lord turned into world changers and martyrs and take hope. I do. On my own resources I can't be obedient, and it was in the New Testament I found a wistful desire to become a branch that bears fruit for the vine that is our holy Lord (John 15), it was in the New Testament that I learned that men and women just like me, caught in the dreadful hands of the living God, found power of a sort they never imagined possible to accomplish things they never dreamed possible. So there's hope for me.

 

Don't Drink

If you're like me, if you can't stop on the way home for a beer with the guys and know with absolute certainty whether you'll eventually get home or get arrested, if you're desperately seeking ways to stop paying dire consequences for drinking, I have great news. The answer is so simple you'll wonder why you didn't think of it. Ready?
DON"T DRINK.
Now notice that the words Don't Drink are a complete sentence and are followed by a period. Put another way, it's not Don't drink as much, don't drink in the mornings, don't drink beer instead of whiskey, don't drink during the week. No, it's "Don't Drink." Ever. So there you have it, problem solved. Except that if you're like me you won't be able to just "Don't drink." Praying will prove useless, good intentions will fail you, and eventually you end up crushed and defeated by a merciless obsession to drink.
That's called powerless. Doctors agree that the only cure for alcoholism is complete abstinence. Yet the definition of an alcoholic is that he can't stop drinking, Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the fatal nature of the dilemma. So if you don't want to just crawl up on the couch with a bottle and drink yourself to death you're going to need help. A good place to start would be Alcoholics Anonymous an organization of hopeless drunks who have found a solution to this ancient form of insanity, a way that has worked for millions over the last 76 years.
So there you have it, my public service announcement of the day. Good luck.

Do We Really Need Another Church Here? Conclusion

In an area with over 400 churches, with every style of worship imaginable available, is it possible that what we lack is one more church? That we need to invest the time and resources to build one more church that will sit empty 6 days a week and underutilized on Sunday? That one more congregation will address the issue of a growing population of the unchurched in ways that the other 400 congregations couldn't figure out?
Which is not to say that we should do nothing, that we should just quietly accept the growth of the unchurched as inevitable, circle our wagons and wait for the rapture. If all we're doing is waiting, we are in disobedience, and that's not a place I want to be.
 And this is not a critique of the sorry state of the church in Lee County Florida either. Our area is home to wonderful churches, churches with a commitment to outreach and service, congregations doing Herculean amounts of work to carry the message of Christ's love to their neighbors. Maybe what has happened is that for a significant percentage of the population traditional channels of outreach don't work anymore. My experience tells me that there are thousands of people that believe that traditional churches are no longer relevant to their lives, so outreach programs designed to get those people inside the sanctuary are doomed to failure. They believe that churches are only about money, that religion sucks, that Christians are hypocrites, thugs, and child molesters,so inviting those folks to church is futile. Interestingly enough, those same people have a generally positive opinion of Christ, it's Christians they don't care for. They are church bashers not Jesus bashers and therein lies the opportunity.
I believe that traditional churches need to keep doing what they're doing, they fulfill a vital role in the spiritual life of their congregations and traditional ways of outreach still work for many. But the fact is that church attendance here is in decline in spite of their prodigious efforts and perhaps building another church in an area like Lee County is a waste of limited resources.

SO WHAT SHOULD WE DO? 

We need to create opportunities for these highly opinionated church bashers to gain exposure to Jesus without having to darken the doors of a sanctuary. What we don't need to do is to argue with them over areas that are irrelevant to their salvation. Church and religion sucks? No problem, pull up a chair and let's have a cup of coffee.
Missionaries pioneered the technique of misdirection, of going into countries where Christian witnessing is forbidden as businesspeople who then use their businesses as vehicles for witness, we should try that here. Satellite community centers where low cost or free services are offered to the community, coffee shops, reading rooms, anything that will get people through the door and into a non-threatening Christian atmosphere. 
So there you have it. Do we really need another church here? Probably not.

A Child of Chaos

Galatians 5:22,23 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 

Does it get any more boring than that? Seriously, self-control is fine in theory but where's the thrill, the excitement, the edgeiness in a life lived that way?  
It's been a couple of decades, but I still remember thinking that way. I remember living life on the edge, never knowing as I ordered my first drink whether I'd be going home or to jail at the end of the evening. Uncertainty was my normal, and while I never set out to get arrested it happened enough that it was never totally unanticipated. They say that what you do every day, day after day, is your normal. Uncertainty and chaos ruled my life for so many years during the insanity of my active alcoholism that when I finally, almost by accident, got sober I found it boring as hell.
One day early in my sobriety I asked an old-timer, "What do you do for fun around here? This is so boring." I smiled when he said, "John, You're not bored, you're calm." And he was right, for the first time in over twenty years I was not arrestible during a routine traffic stop, I might get a ticket but I wasn't going to jail. That underlying feeling of impending doom was gone. I wasn't a whole lot healthier mentally and spiritually, but my behavior and circumstances weren't dangerously chaotic  anymore.
It took time, but today I desire love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control  in full-measure, life on the edge does not call to me. The absence of self-manufactured chaos is my new normal, and I thank God for that. I do not know why the Lord snatched me from the barstool while others were left to die, I just try to show gratitude for the mercy extended. "Here I am Lord, send me."

Do We Really Need Another Church Here? Part 4

I came across an article in the Christian Post about the 10 warning signs of a congregation in trouble and it led me to revisit a series of posts I wrote about the role of new church formation in America. Church attendance has been in decline for decades now, from 1992 to 2003, average attendance at a typical church service dropped by 13% whereas the population of America had increased by 9% SEE MORE TRENDS HERE
I don't pretend to know exactly why this is, but I'm sure it has much to do with the growth of Universalism in that same time period. If there is no one path to heaven, if in fact there are many paths, and if you get there eventually regardless of your belief system or adherence to a moral code of conduct, why go to church when you could be relaxing at Starbucks with a latte and a newspaper? I find it revealing that what little growth is occurring in the midst of dreary decline is happening in evangelical denominations. Denominations that are unswerving in their adherence to Gospel teaching, and perhaps most important, their devotion to the Harvest.
Which brings me back to the 10 warning signs of a congregation in trouble. While I would imagine that the article is extremely useful in individual cases, it completely misses the point of what to do to halt the overall decline of Christianity here in America. I'm sure I'll take some flack here for oversimplification, but if the only growth in today's church is in denominations that preach the Gospel and are devoted to missions, perhaps if more churches did that they'd grow too.
And that, finally, brings me to the original topic. Do we really need another church here? This is relevant to my situation because my church, a Gospel teaching, missions oriented church, is considering  planting another church. There is no lack of seating in area churches, there are other Gospel churches in our area doing wonderful work for the Lord, this area has every kind of worship format known to man, and yet still....pews sit empty every Sunday at churches all across our county. I fear what has happened is quite simple, rightly or not, a significant number of people have decided that organized religion, traditional churches if you will, have no relevance in their lives. And building another sanctuary, even a gospel breathing sanctuary does not address this attitude. That does not mean these people are to be given up on, quite the contrary. They are church bashers, not Jesus bashers.
I'll try to summarize my thoughts in a later post, although if you read Parts 1-3 of this series you'll get a sense of where my head is on this matter.