My colliding thoughts come from the following:

• Luke 24:13-32
• A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren
• Making Room by Christine Pohl
• Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi
• Herd by Mark Earls

If I begin with the story Luke recounts of the resurrected Jesus walking to Emmaus with two disciples, it’s like watching two people caught up reading through the same chapter in the middle of a long book.  Their particular chapter reads like this: This Jesus was a powerful prophet and we hoped he would liberate Israel, but he’s dead and our hopes have evaporated.  We don’t even know where his body is.

It’s interesting what happens next.  Jesus tells them a bigger story.  He doesn’t say, Hey, look it’s me; I’m alive.  For some reason, they can’t recognise him, and this allows a stranger to tell them a story that goes way back to Moses (which might mean the content of the book of Genesis), through the prophets about what God is doing in human history.

This way of filtering things so that everything was about Israel, made me think about how so many churches can filter this story about Jesus through what the medieval and modern churches have told us, and we need to get the full story in too, but it’s sticky stuff and difficult to free ourselves from.  Perhaps every generation within every era needs to go through the same experience: Then he started at the beginning, with the Books of Moses, and went on through all the prophets, pointing out everything in the Scriptures that referred to him (Luke 24:27, The Message).

I’d send the students out to exegete movies and art galleries, concerts and sports events, video game parlours and campgrounds, synagogues and mosques.  We’d come back from these adventures and talk about what we’d seen, what’s going on, what it means to be a Christian in our world. (Neo)

Imagine this to be a picture of church (just add worship and prayers and food).

(By the way, as God’s image is impressed on humans, plural, I see the community as being the starting point to which we return, and out of which emerges our uniqueness.)

Here, with the disciples, the message is revealed as a journey, a conversation, and a meal.  Will there every be something we might call postmodern systematic theology?  Or will the message be found in our life together?:

the focus of our words should be the creation of communities that embody our goodness – in dance, in cooking (remember the Passover?), in crafts …, in forms of community, in mission endeavour, in music, in painting and sculpture, in architecture and landscape design, in friendship, in solidarity with the poor and forgotten (Neo)

We need to see what we know in a new way.  Perhaps we could see this to be the thing Jesus was helping the two disciples with.  And out of this came a greater story to live, that moves us beyond our understanding of “church” that keep us trapped and struggling with our uniqueness and our connections and this thing called life that we are meant to live with Jesus at our centre.

What do you think?

I am putting together some thoughts for a message I have to give on Sunday.  Here is what I am working with:

• Luke 12:49-53 as the gospel passage for the day
• Virtue Reborn by Tom Wright
• So Beautiful by Len Sweet
• 8 by Steven Covey
• A New Kind of Christian by Brian McLaren
• The Gospel According to Starbucks by Len Sweet
• Surfing the Edge of Chaos by Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja
• Colonies of Heaven by Ian Bradley
• My Prayer Journal from last year
• Our Posthuman Future by Francis Fukuyama

Apologies then for the train of thought that follows.

Jesus’ words are not the easiest ones to hear: “I’ve come to start a fire on this earth – how I wish it were blazing right now.”

If we didn’t quite catch his drift, then Jesus adds, “I’ve come to change everything, turn everything rightside up.”

I guess we’ll have come across people and churches and teachings that are darnright unattractive and unpleasant and even weird, but this is Jesus speaking.

Have we misunderstood the stories, the teaching, the healings and think that Jesus was going to “make everything good,” or is that everything nice?  How can a message that is so attractive and so full of goodness and inclusive love provoke, disrupt, and confront?  Even if, as suggested by Brian McLaren in ‘A New Kind of Christian,’ Jesus was scandalously risky with his language, it does not explain the kind of affect Jesus envisages.

Later in his gospel, Luke describes how Herod and his soldiers ridicule and mock Jesus, how the religious leaders allow their guards to beat him, and later they vehemently accused him, and the crowds called again and again for his crucifixion.  How can something, someone, so good bring such a response out of those at the centre of religion and government, as well as ordinary people?

But when I think about the beginnings of Methodism (the message is for a Methodist church), trying to be a movement in the Church of England, as living out the message in working communities and prisons, what is truly the beautiful life was seen as a scandalous enthusiasm, bringing both violent verbal and physical attacks on them.

What Brian McLaren, Ian Bradley, and Tom Wright are each getting at in their books is goodness, or the beautiful life.  Is it the living of this beautiful life that will bring division rather than peace?  It is about becomning ont this side of death what we will be on the other side, or as Wright puts it, the early believers were urging one another to develop the character which anticipated God’s new world (VR).  Jesus was not about updating the religion and its rules, he was about transforming lives.  Rules help us to control things, but this way means that true life in Jesus is uncontrollable.  To choose Christianity is to choose the controllable, to choose Jesus is to choose the uncontrollable.

It is not about imitating Jesus – Len Sweet asks: how can we mimic a wifeless, homeless, childless, possession less Jesus in our social and economic lives? (SB) – it is far more threatening than this, it is about implanting Jesus in our lives and seeing what grows.  Could this be what was so fiery?

Jesus is the controversy at the centre of this beautiful life, he comes to bring change deep inside the human so we might live differently.

Isn’t it then easier to go to church, to become a member, to give something, to work at something, but this transformation stuff is too much because it demands to grow inside us.  But this is exactly where the primitive Christians found themselves as they explored and wrote about being in Christ and Christ being in them: something beautiful and dynamic and threatening is unleashed: Incarnational energies are what makes the restless intelligence of the Christian tradition so eager to embrace the new, so open to change the old, so free to be creative n the engagement with the world.  An incarnational faith is what guarantees generativity, the possibility of every culture to know things about God that had never been known before (Len Sweet – SB).

Brian McLaren offers these words about the impact of Jesus and his followers, through his character Neo: I think what Jesus was about, and really what all the apostles were about in their best moments … was a global, public movement or revolution to bring holistic reconciliation, a reconnection with God, with others, with ourselves, with our environment.  True religion, revolutionary religion.  That’s what got them in such trouble (ANKOC).

This is about doing new things because we are becoming new people.  At the centre of the Jesus’ fire there is a baptism to be gone through, there is a greater way to be embraced: “not my will, but yours, be done.”

Is this why people fight against the beautiful?

If we see it, Jesus wrestled in Gethsemane with what was necessary to make this beautiful life available to us.

Francis Fukuyama warns that there is scarcely a judgement of “good” or “bad” that has been produced by a human being that has not been accompanied by a strong emotion, whether of desire, longing, aversion, disgust, anger, guilt, or joy (OPF).  If we think we are above such things then we have become the only purely objective person in the world.  And when it is a person (a radical lifespan), rather than a proposition we are responding to, then perhaps we ought to expect such feelings to be even more heightened.

Jesus is making something available to us, it is so inextricably linked with who he is, and to know it requires that we embrace the firestorm.

Karl Barth described the first church as being Jesus in the company of two bad people, only one of whom became good and this is the story of the gospel (SB).

What do you think?

I am now over half way through my year of experiment (that being to be more aware of God through my day, and somehow through this to become more like Jesus in his humanity).  One of the things I have had to note is how I’ve added new frustrations over my flaws to the ones I was already aware of.

But I am more set than ever on this way that is cityofdreams: now new hopes rise within me for what a community of faith can be.

I am also wanting to be a better husband and father – it’s also my thirtieth wedding anniversary this year.  Add to this my desire for Christ to be the centre and central figure for all of this.  I borrow some words from Leonard Sweet and frank Viola for this:

This glorious One, Jesus the Christ, is our Pursuit, our Passion, and our Pleasure. (Jesus Manifesto)

I am increasingly less enamoured with position – my title-with-role within a denominational institution.  I am more and more wanting to find the “Jesus Way” with others, wherever they are.

As I was talking with Jesus about these things, I was reading the passage in Luke’s gospel where jesus and disciples are walking through the temple area, and the disciples are wowed by what they see.  Jesus lets them know that this amazing structure will become nothing more than rubble towers.  He goes on to warn them that when these things happen, his friends will be hunted, arrested, and tried (even through the betrayal of family and friends), but asks them to make a decision not to worry and to trust in him and in the words he will send to them.

Now most of us will not be facing the destruction of Jerusalem or the cities and towns where we find ourselves, but we can be people, at this time in history, who decide to trust Jesus and the words and wisdome he will provide: Staying with it, that’s what is required!  Stay with it to the end.  You won’t be sorry, you’ll be saved (The Message).

Times are changing.  The old religious orders and structures are struggling in the West.  Some voices say that all will be well.  Others claim that we can change, adapt, survive.  Some think they have to get out.  Then there are some who are thinking that something new is coming – I am one of these.

I have begun to read Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian (the first of three books written in a story style to explore what might be happening – yes, I’m reading the first one last!),  In his introduction McLaren writes how an old paradigm becomes cramped and feels more like a prison than freedom.  I think many of us know what this feels like, but it reminds me of a comment from Alex McManus about how humans close down God’s hopes and dreams for the world (imagine a closing down of a funnel).  Throughout human history God has sent prophetic people to open up these hopes and dreams once more (imagine the opening up of a funnel): Jesus Christ is the ultimate prophetic llife and voice.  I believe the crampedness we are feeling is the final stages of systems that have (often unwittingly) closed down the plans and purposes of God.  We are therefore at a time when there is going to be a stretching open once more opening up God’s ways.

It will take a new focus on Jesus Christ to be a part of this, but when McLaren warns the wrath of the old is likely to be unleashed on those who dare propose an alternative, he perhaps is describing something of what Jesus is warning the disciples about in the passage I mentioned earlier.  So, here again, we need to hear these words: Staying with it – that’s what is required.  Stay with it to the end.

It is not the new way that is to be stayed with until the end, but the true way, we just have to find new ways of being true.

It is about finding new ways of moving forward.  In the last few days I have been introduced to a new word: complexipacity: the capacity to deal with the complex, because complex is open-ended (as apposed to complicated, which tends to be close-ended).  The true way lived out in new ways will require much from us.  (By the way, conversations around something like this is why it really good to be a part of The International Mentoring Network).

I was intrigued when the same evening I found myself in a conversation about future expressions of communities of faith that was about complexity, about how people of faith make the journey out fo their buildings and structures to live with the people they are wanting to connect with in their world.  This is part of it – the realisation and movement and development of skills, but it’s also about who turns up.  It is about who we are becoming – not only to make this journey, but through this journey.

You might think the word is contrived, but it will take new language as well as new ways, at least to creat dissonance with those who think they know what we mean – McLaren warns of the expected vocabularies of pastors working like fingers, massaging the weary souls of earnest people.  (Just recently I heard of a pastor beign crisicised for quoting from books someone in the congregation hadn’t read – this person preferred preachers who quoted from books they had read.)

Part of our complexipacity will be our willingness to find and connect with people who are looking, like ourselves, for another way, though something as radical as I am thinking about will not be for everyone – and I think that’s okay.  What isn’t optional is the Jesus way – just like in the early church lots of different looking believers were joined by their primal statement “Jesus is Lord” so will many in different communities of faith tomorrow.  I happened to come across the unexpected pastor Richard Branson, who shares about Virgin (which is made up of many companies): If we’d kept everyone in the same building, I don’t think we would have generated the ideas that led to our success (Business Stripped Bare) – he is talking about something of complexipacity.

I think that part of my reading McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian is because I am still trying to figure out how to move forward.  I am always learning, and I am being changed, as Richard Rohr shares about the initiation rites of young males around the world he’s been researching for his book Adam’s Return, It worked.  It connected him with the heroic and energetic to send him into the future, but it also connected him with the ancient and traditional to ground him in reality.  And Jesus leads his disciples through this encounter with death so they might live: Stand firm and you will win life.

There must be those things that die for us to be able to move into the true but new, but we will be left with the true.

Let the adventure continue – we have lost sight that every generation must face the true and live it new.

What do you think?

Without adventure civilisation is in full decay. (Alfred North Whitehead)

It’s now late July and I am aware that I have not written as much about this year of experiment as I had hoped to.  This is more technical than personal – the problems with overcoming the glitches in you being able to post comments to the blog have meant that I have not posted so much.  Anyway, let me tell you what is happening at the moment.

I have just begun to read Ian Bradley’s ‘Colonies of Heaven’ (looking at the Celtic church in Britian and Ireland) alongside Len Sweet and Frank Viola’s ‘Jesus Manifesto’.  I do this because I am so concerned that Jesus Christ be more the central relationship of my life and to explore new forms of communitas (what I would describe as communities with purpose).

(How I want all of this reading to produce more than it does – and this first of all in me.)

I know there are many more who are asking the most searching questions about these things, but I wonder if there are things that get in the way.  I wonder if what we are searching for, as we are impacted by the original story of Jesus, is possible without giving up something that has become central to the lives of many Christians.  How true is what Sweet and Viola provocatively suggest?:

The world likes Jesus; they just don’t like the church.  But increasingly, the church likes the church, yet is doesn’t like Jesus. (Jesus Manifesto)

Admitting to counting the times that Jesus is mentioned in the sermons and messages they hear, Sweet and Viola report that he is mentioned maybe once or twice, and sometimes not at all.  They then compare this with Paul’s letters, where, in one example alone, Jesus is mentioned almost thirty times (Colossians 1).  No wonder then that Paul could say: ‘For me to live is Christ, to die is gain,’ (Philippians 1:21); and, when it came to his message, ‘we preach Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 1:23).

My question then is: What would it mean to so focus on, connect with, and love this Jesus, both as a person and as a member of a community?  Do we think we’ll soon exhaust the experience and so will need other themes and subjects to explore as the faithful: ‘may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ’ (Ephesians 2:18)?

When God speaks at the baptism of Jesus (This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased – Matthew 3:17), is it that God is taking time out from all the important things he has to do to endorse the ministry of Jesus, or is he inviting us to gaze upon the constant object of his affection?

When it comes to the Celtic church, I see something not be be replicated, but to inspire possibilities of communitas to embody these things.  Bradley points to three aspects of their monaticism that incredibly pique my interest: 1) It produced collegiate and communitarian ministry; 2) It encouraged and embraced a great variety of ministry alongside one another; and, 3) They expressed high levels of commitment and discipline.  I see a future-orientated exploration of these things being required.  Bradley suggests that the break down of the parochial systems of being church (focused upon following the Norman Conquest of the British Isles – individualistic and with a single kind of minister – are under irresistible strain.  In my denomination of Methodism this is certainly true.

It is now manifgestly collapsing under a number of strains, the most sever being being the shortage of money and human resources. … The last thirty years have already seen a radical departure from every parish having its own full-time resident priest or minister. … The strains on the diminishing band of clergy, now more isolated than ever, are all too clear in the rising levels of ministerial burn-out, stress, broken marriages and resignations. (Colonies of Heaven)

Methodism has never operated a system of one church/one minister, there only being a few exceptions, but now the mass of retirements and small number offering for ministry is causing problems that are belatedly beingtackled.  It could perhaps be said that the experience of the Celtic church would fast-forward this process:

Within some of the larger monasteries, solitary hermits lived and prayed alongside married monks; professed monks and nuns coexisted with lay brothers and sisters; regular and secular clergy, ordained and non-ordained, men and women, shared their common life with many pilgrims, penitents and other guests who regularly stayed in the hospitium. (Colonies of Heaven)

Perhaps one of the things we love about church most of all is the Sunday worship, and maybe this is one of the things that will be most challenging for those who want to focus on, connect with, and love this Jesus – perhaps the last addiction to be broken:

there is not one command in all the Gospel for public worship … whereas the religion or devotion which is to govern the ordinary actions of our life is to be found in almost every verse of Scripture (William Law -1686-1761; Organic Church by Neil Cole)

It is this larger life that the Celtic and Anglo Saxon monasterium sought to give context to: some of the larger monasteria fulfilled the roles of hospital, hotel, school, university, arts worskshop, open prison and reformatory, night shelter and drop-in day centre, as well as church, retreat-house, mission station and place of prayer and spiritual healing (Colonies of Heaven).

Part of wanting to write this is in order to share it in the context of my own work within a denomination.  I see increasingly the exploration between my colleagues akin to collegiate and communiatarian ministry, the development of which to include others could be a dynamic beginning of something greater, possibly first of all in our smaller congregations.

I do not see this as the only way to exploring the future, but it is one way t move from the doldrums of church life and to pick up the winds of the Spirit.

I wonder if you see possibilities forexploration where you are,or if you would like to be apart of a journey that we might share despite the distances that separate us.

(The following is my attempt toget my thoughts together for sharing at a service on Sunday.)

Earlier in the week I had my first experience of an Atheist/Christian bible study (looking at Exodus).  I wonder if anyone else has experienced anything like this: just about four hours of deeply challenging conversation, including some deeply searching questions to face, like some of the following:

• Why do Christians need some external authority by which to live their lives?
• Why do we think the bible is something special when I had said that I  see important truths in other literature?
• Instead of coming up with convoluted reason why one thing is said in one place and something quite different is stated in another place, why can’t I just admit that something is wrong?

At one point one of the group pointed out that I was talking like a humanist.  (I wish I could remember exactly how he put this, but with getting into bed just before midnight and up before six, my memory is struggling), but I had to admit he had got me – I had to admit that I was a Christ-following humanist!  (I prefer to call myself a Christ-centred human.)

You might like to have a go at some of these questions.  I’ll wait a moment while you do that ….

….

How did it go?

The thing about the need for having some authority (experience?) coming from outsiide is really the story of Jesus, and I shared how I came to invest my life-faith in Jesus when he appeared (popped up uninvited in my imagination) one night when I was hearing the gospel for the first time in my life.

On the night I said something about the length of human history captured in the writings we call the bible, containing much of the stuff and themes that recycle themselves  through the human story: birth, death, love, deception, honesty, betrayal, greed, anger, murder, fear, hopelessness, vision … .   You name, it’s probably there.  There are also the root stories that I believe help us to interpret everything else: humans made in God’s image, and the journey of Sarah and Abraham as parents of a people who are meant to bless all people groups.  I would want to add the entire story of Jesus is in this collection of writings (I missed incuding this at the bible study; I’m not sure how but I’ll blame the speed at which the conversation raced along, just so you don’t worry about me).

For the third questions, amongst other things, I mentioned how in Exodus, there were some contradictory things – like how the Israelites were told to look after foreigners and strangers in the land as well as their obliterating of people groups, and why did they perhaps have to justify what they did by saying God told them to do it (other conquerors in history didn’t do this – let me know if you know of any who did)?  I think these are real questions – and I don’t have an answer, by the way.

Other questions raised concerned the disreputable characters that got to lead Israel, like Moses and David: how do you justify a murderer becoming a leader?  Moses had spent forty years dealing with this, or had he?  Couldn’t you also say that he’d done quite well, living a free life of a shepherd, able to marry and bring up a family – never vocalising regret for what he did?  My new atheist aquaintances had a point – I automatically apply huge amounts of mercy and grace when reflecting on these things, without thinking about the ridiculous nature of mercy and grace.

The next morning, groggy from my lack of sleep, I sat with God, as I do at the beginning of every day, and tried to remember just what had happened the night before.  I read the following words: Anyone who comes to me but refuses to let go of father, mother, spouse, children, brothers, sisters — yes, even one’s own self!—can’t be my disciple. Anyone who won’t shoulder his own cross and follow behind me can’t be my disciple. … Simply put, if you’re not willing to take what is dearest to you, whether plans or people, and kiss it good-bye, you can’t be my disciple (from Matthew 14:51-62; The Message).

As I reflected on these words and talked with God, I had to admit to him that we are crazy people called to do crazy things.  Okay, we understand the device Jesus was using to show how following him took priority over the other universally understood relational priorities of human beings, but that just adds to what he said about following him.

We are crazy people, invited to do what, in the eyes of others are crazy things.

I told God that I had no problem with that.

The trouble is when we want to suggest to others that ours is a reasonable faith that makes complete sense, in respectable and civilised ways, so when you read the scriptures you see all those doctrines streaming helpfully for us so we can organise our well-run churches, with staff and committees and finances – that people will so much want to be a part of.

If I used expletives, I would probably introduce one here … but I don’t.

We do not have a reasonable faith.  It’s a story that’s full of crazy people, and impossible ridiculous things, calling us to live a life of centredness and commitment to a God we cannot see, or prove to others, yet the story invites us to join in to be people who take and share what we cannot see or prove to others.  How crazy is that?

There are some days I feel I am being driven out of my mind as I am talking with God and he is sharing the things he does through the scriptures and the things others write and the emphasis the Holy Spirit weaves into these: the hopes he has for his world, what we can do with our lives, what a human community can look like, the intimacy he envisages having with the community and with each of us … .

I look forward to the next Atheist/Christian bible study – hoping I’ll have caught up my sleep – but it’s not about winning any reasonable arguments.  It’s about being reminded about the ridiculous and crazy way we have been invited onto by following Jesus …

And living it.

When we live this together we are beginning to be “church.”

What do you think?

Tonight a party of people will gather as the cityofdreams, an environment for as many as possible to be able to identify and explore the dreams God has for their lives.

Over previous parties we have explored talents and abilities as they appear in our own and others’ lives, and we have also reflected upon how each of us connects and walks with God differently (often a taboo subject in “churches”).  Now we explore how we all have special gifts or attributes, given by the Holy Spirit, so that we can be servants of one another in this world of ours.

Talents, God-relationships, Spirit-gifts, and dreams.  When we appreciate how these connect, and we live them out through our lives, we might say that we are living the story we are meant to live, or, that we are singing the song we are meant to sing.

What I am saying for the individual begins in the community or party.  This crowd of people have Talents, God-relationship, Spirit-gifts, and dreams, and so we can say that they have a story to live or a song to sing.  In fact, that’s what we are going to begin to form – a real song from the things they will share together.  The music and the words of this song as we listen to the music and words of the songs God is singing through our lives, countless variations of the one song of love he has been sung through creation.  (Click here to listen to Matt Redman’s The Father’s Song as you read this.)

To help us listen and to find the words of our song we will be reflecting on three movements identified by Henri Nouwen (Reaching Out); these are:

1. From Loneliness to Solitude (exploring our relationship to ourselves)
2. From Hostility to Hospitality (exploring our relationship to others)
3. From Illusion to Prayer (exploring our relationship to God)

Each of these are two-way roads.  Each day we wake to make choices over which way we are going to take: towards loneliness or solitude, towards hostility or hospitality, towards illusion or prayer.

Each of these words are of course like zip files full of so many things (the following is a mixture of Nouwen’s thoughts and mine).

The First Movement: We must enter into our loneliness, our deeper brokenness and dysfunction, recognising that who we find is loved by God, and we can be one with who we are, so that our loneliness becomes transformed.  Here we can listen to the pain of the world, recognising them to be our own, and out of the willingness to embrace our own pain comes healing, comes the best of who we are to share with others.

The Second Movement: In the first movement we see the seeds of hope for moving from hostility towards hospitality (did Jesus call this loving our neighbour as we love ourselves?), though the movements are not sequential.  As we make this our choice, strangers become guests, bringing their full selves (‘we discover our gifts in the eyes of the receiver’), allowing us to be fully who we can be, together creating a transformative space.

The Third Movement: For prayer read “intimate relationship with God.”  It is this relationship which makes more, more.  The five elemental truths (Life is hard; Your are not as important as you think; Your life is not about you; You are not in control; You are going to die) break the illusion that humans are godlike and help us move towards the prime relationship that makes it possible for the other movements to go further and become more integrated in our lives.

What kind of song might we sing together from life-movements like these?  What kind of song might we sing out from our own lives?  What Nouwen calls the prayer of the heart, is not only about connecting us to God in a unique way, but is vocational – it’s about identifying how we are to live our lives in service of others (bringing to bear our connection to God, our Spirit-gifts, our talents, and our dreams).

What do you think?

Two questions:

How do we enter into intimacy with God (something we traditionally call prayer)?

How do we identify our created purpose?

On the face of it these are two different questions, but really they are connected up.

Just in the last week, my attention has been caught by these words from Henri Nouwen (‘Reaching Out’) – which I somehow passed over when I read his book last year:

Where do we look, what do we do, to whom do we go in order to discover how we as individual human beings – with our own history, our own milieu, our own character, our own insights, our own character, our own insights and our own freedom to act – are called to enter into intimacy with God?  The question about the prayer of our heart is, in fact, the question about our own most personal vocation.

What I see here, in what Nouwen calls prayer of our heart or our prayer signature,  is how our prayer life, or intimacy with God, is wrapped around our calling.

As I think about this I have to admit that I have found the following to be true:

• Identify what the purpose for your life is and your praying (life with God) will change – for the better.
• Dive into intimacy with God (prayer) and you will identify your purpose or vocation.

Not only are we seeking the purpose God has in mind for our lives, but he is searching for a life that will be his home (a place of intimacy), and Frank Viola connects these together when he writes:

Jesus Christ did not die and rise again just to forgive you of your sins.  He died in order that His Father could obtain a home.  The Lord saved you for a high and holy purpose (‘From Eternity to Here’).

Viola may be talking about a purpose true to all of us – that of becoming a home for God (something given greater significance when followers of Jesus Christ come together in communitas), but within this there is a more specific purpose.

What do you make of the connection?  What’s your experience?

The way to life is an intentional way.

It will unmask what Henri Nouwen dubs ‘our illusion of immortality’ (Reaching Out).  Put another way, it will lead us through what I think of as the five elemental truths of life: Life is hard; You are not as important as you think; Your life is not about you; You are not in control; and, You are going to die.

The intentional way is not taken once and for all, but re-embarked upon many times throughout our lives.

I stepped upon it for the first time in 1976 when I heard the good news about Jesus (I felt I had literally met Jesus Christ in the message of a retired Anglican priest), but then in 1998 something happened for me that made it feel as if he’d hardly stepped onto the way at all (I was a burnt out church pastor trying to figure out what “church” was all about).  At that time I was captured by God’s love and grace for me, and also by these words from T. S. Eliot: ‘We must not cease from our exploration.  And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’

There have been many experiences like this along the way, and again in 2010, my experiment has taken me back to the beginning once again.  And I think I see it more clearly now, that I am not going backwards, rather I am going forwards so that I might arrive where I started and to know the place for the first time.  I am growing forwards towards a decision I made 34 years ago.

Because this is the way faith works – faith is something calling us forward rather than something that has happened in our past – I am never allowed to move from the concrete to the abstract.  It’s found in the real, tangible things of life, with real stories and real people.  Bruno Forte might write ‘Deeply felt here is how the Ultimate draws us beyond all that is penultimate: to travel beauty’s path is to be led to walk unfamiliar ways, to know exile, to savour solitude.  Beauty can only be encountered in the many this-worldly realities by following a movement upwards away from self and into unknown distances’ (The Portal of Beauty), but what is he imagining as he mentions ‘the many this-worldly realities’?

Don’t get me wrong, I love these sentences from Forte, but I need him to tell me what he’s seeing here.  As long as we are human we never step outside of these bodies of ours as they encounter joy and pain, people and contexts, sunshine and rain, food and coins, decisions and gardening.  Each step towards my future takes me through myriad encounters with people and things and places.  Because of this, faith is always future-concrete and never past-abstract.

So, these thoughts result from a past week in which I experienced an encounter of scriptures, several books, times of reflection, journalling, living with my wife (as we approach thirty years of marriage), meeting my eldest son, working with a group of young Americans explore a journey “into the city”, and with a number of people with whom I journey in an exploration of amazing talents and abilities for making the world more human.

Behind it are ideas shared within and through a group of human leaders longing to make the world more human.  They reflect upon, and seek to give expression to, how God has set in motion two trajectories through human history: the Nexus trajectory (see Genesis 1:26-27) – human beings bearing God’s image – and, the Emigrant )see Genesis 12:1-3) – when we begin to see this we are sent out to live it in good ways to others.  A song-writer got that he had been made special, and cries out ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Psalm 139:14 – the nexus) on another occasion, realising that this is everyone’s song, a servant of the first churches includes the words of what we think was a new song, tracing a journey that leads to God making his home in a human so that the home of the human might be found in God (Philippians 2:5-11 – the emigrant).

This is our journey too.  Life is all about aligning our lives with these trajectories, so, when Nouwen writes about the movement in a human’s life from loneliness to solitude, he is exploring the nexus trajectory(we find our true identity in God), and when he names the movement from hostility to hospitality, he is exploring the emigrant (we are made and meant to bless others).  These are made possible by the movement  mentioned above: from illusion to prayer (moving from self to God).

The importance of this hits me harder each day, because it is the movement in our lives towards the future that reveals our contribution into the lives of others.

Each of us is taking a journey towards freedom – captives set free, if we believe what Jesus said he’d come to do – and then we notice that the stories of God’s people are just such journeys: the exodus and the exile, the personal stories of Joseph and Jacob and Paul, and more.  Vince Antonucci (Guerrilla Lovers) points out that we cannot give what we haven’t received.  Antonucci goes on to tell the story of Harriet Tubman, born into and living in slavery until 1849, but then she escaped, only to return many times to help free over 200 people from their slavery.  her apparent step backwards was actually a step forward for all these people.

Here’s the thing about why faith calling us forward is so important: the thing from which Harriet Tubman was freed marked out the purpose for her life.

And the same is true for you and me.

A faith that is about the past cannot provide us with this.

I can only gasp at the implications of this.  I thought I’d been going back to the beginning, but I find that I am moving forward towards it.

What is it you are being freed from?

How does the freedom you are experiencing mark out the purpose God has for your life?

Who will you help to step towards their freedom?

What is it that you have been especially been gifted to do towards this?

May I just encourage you to step forward into the beginning of your faith?

It’s the London Marathon on Sunday (25th April) and the Edinburgh Marathon on the 23rd May.  Although they’re about to embark on 26.2 gruelling miles, the runners will probably remember how their first ever attempt to run had them feeling as though their throat and lungs were being had been torn out.  Then, after a few more attempts, the gasping pain would subside and they could focus on exploring breathing in  rhythms that suited their running.

Breathing rhythms alter depending on whether you are on the level, on an incline, and according to the speed you are setting.  The wrong kind of breathing rhythm can leave you struggling, like it’s pulling you in a different direction.

Breathing is the fuel for the run.

I love working with people who want to live their lives with creativity, enjoyment, and generosity.  Breathing is one of the metaphors that helps me to identify and work on how we can do this.  I suggest that there are a number of breaths that we take: breathe in, breathe out – one breath.

The first breath is life with God.

We breath God in (Creator, Liberator, Empowerer): we discover the rhythms of our breathings are different.  That is, we all meet or connect with God differently.  When we breathe out it is the oxygen of transformation as we become more like Jesus in his humanity, towards others.

The second breath might be called the purpose of our lives.

As we become more more self-aware we are breathing in: identifying our talents and abilities and the things we MUST do, and becoming indifferent to those things we must not.  When we breathe out it is in service to others and here we become aware of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and we experience the focus of the grace-gifts.

The third breath is the relationships of our lives.

When we identify the relationships that sustain and grow us we are breathing in: individuals and groups.  When we form relationships of care and service with others we are breathing out.

These three breaths form the rhythm of our lives; we might also call it the dream God has for us.  Where these three breaths come together to form a pattern or shape for our lives, the breathing in is about us becoming the person God dreamt for us to be, the breathing out is enabling others to become all that God dreamt for them to be.

We have lots of phrases to articulate when things aren’t right: gasping for breath, hyperventilating, breathless, winded, suffocating … .

How is your breathing in these three areas and how is the breathing rhythm of your life?

Where does passion and motivation come from?  This is a question that intrigues me right now?

What are you passionate about?  What ignites you? – as Daniel Coyle would phrase it (The Talent Code).

Why do you think that is?  Why haven’t you chosen to be passionate about something else?  Where does it come from?

These things capture my attention as my experiment continues.

What I didn’t imagine at the outset of this year was how sorely challenged I would become in regards to my work.  I find myself wanting to explore more of how people identify and develop their talents and abilities, this in order to make the world more human, and how can environments be created and formed that make it possible for people to do just this.

Why does all of this fascinate me the way that it does?

As soon as I write about how I didn’t see this coming, I realise how ridiculous this appears: how on earth did I think that living towards greater awareness of God each day and hoping to somehow be made more like Jesus could possibly leave me alone when it came to my job (or vocation).

What do you think about passion?