An Example of Transformational Ministry

I have begun to make friends with and have great respect for Mike Queen, the long-time pastor of First Baptist Church, Wilmington, North Carolina.  Recently, FBC Wilmington went through the process of purchasing the old jail from the city.  They have turned the old jail into a ministry center.  Apparently, the church received some criticism for their plans, but went through with courage and conviction.  The result is that the center has been transformed.  And surely many lives will be as well. 

 

Here’s a story on the local news about their project: http://wect.com/Global/story.asp?s=6844768.  It’s text and a video of the newscast. 

 

I think that this is the kind of thing that churches should be about and I’m proud to know Mike.  At the end of August, I’ll be traveling down to Wilmington to visit with Mike and his staff and get a sense for what FBC does and is all about.  This is a CBF church that seems to ‘get it’ when it comes to ministry and being missional in their own backyard.

 

One well-known Christian leader wrote this to Mike:

 

 

Mike,

You and the folks at First Baptist are certainly to be commended for your foresight, insight, and faith-sight to acquire this facility and make such good use of it. You well deserve the affirmation of this opinion piece. It is another affirmation of the response of you and your congregation to God’s calling on your ministry. I am glad to count you as friend and a fellow Baptist Christian!

 

Another wrote this:

 

Mike,

In these days when many of us in the Wake Forest community, including you, are reeling from the tragic death, but always resurrection, of our basketball Coach Skip Prosser, it is so very good to get resurrection news about the transformation ministry in the old jail in Wilmington..... and the courageous ministry and leadership of you and Jim and your board and congregation of First Baptist Church, Wilmington...... this is a well written, well deserved news article. Let's always take risks, for Christ sake! Stay strong in hard places! May God's peace be within you!

 

 

Blessings,

 

Eric

How Rich Are You?

When we read the biblical accounts of the Rich Young Ruler, we feel better that Jesus is not talking about us. When we read any of Jesus' many scathing condemnations of the rich, we think about people today who are much richer than we are. That's just human nature I suppose. Most of us don't think of ourselves as 'rich'. That's a designation that belongs to people who have much, much more. Of course all of us can find someone who has much, much more. So, by that train of logic, no one is 'rich'.

How do you know who is really rich? According to Donald Kraybill in his piercing The Upside-Down Kingdom, about 10% of people in Jesus' day were in the wealthy class. The other 90% were poor. There was no middle class. Jesus, as the son of a carpenter, would have been at the top of the poor heap. So would most of his disciples: fishermen. But there was a significant and impenetrable gap between the poor and the rich. When Jesus talks about the rich, everyone would have known who he was talking about: the chief priests, tax collectors, government officials, and others who benefitted from an unbalanced economic system in which all the resources flowed upstream.

So, given that today, we have a pretty large middle class (upper middle, middle middle, lower middle, etc. notwithstanding), who is really rich? For whom will it be harder to enter heaven than thread a camel through the eye of a needle? According to the folks at www.globalrichlist.com, you might be surprised. It might be you. According to them, I am in the upper 1% of household incomes in the world. Where are you?

How rich are you? >> I'm loaded. It's official. I'm the 55,146,441 richest person on earth!

Good Morning!

I've been reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's marvelous Life Together with a small group of people this summer.  In his chapter on "The Day with Others" Bonhoeffer wonders what we should be like every morning when we wake up and face another new day in the light of the resurrection.  He writes:

 

If we were to learn again something of the praise and adoration that is due the triune God at break of day, God the Father and Creator, who has preserved our life through the dark night and wakened us to a new day, God the Son and Savior, who conquered death and hell for us and dwells in our midst as Victor, God the Holy Spirit, who pours the bright gleam of God's Word into our hearts at the dawn of day, driving away all darkness and sin and teaching us to pray aright--then we would also begin to sense something of the joy that comes when night is past and brethren who dwell together in unity come together early in the morning for common praise of their God, common hearing of the Word, and common prayer.

 

Do you feel like that in the morning?  My wife says that she's thankful that I'm generally in a good mood in the morning--and most of the time without coffee.  For this I am thankful.  But I'm not sure I share Bonhoeffer's resounding praise of the glory of the dawn.  But I'm willing to have my attitude changed.

 

I've always been impressed with friends in the African-American church who share their prayer requests together and often (and sometimes repeatedly) thank God for "waking me up this morning."  You just never hear that in the 'white' church.  We take waking up this morning for granted, as much as we do cereal left in the box, a little fresh cold milk and a cup of coffee.  It's sort of our birthright I suppose.  I might be in a good mood, but I don't really ever feel thankful to have awakened this or any morning in particular. 

 

Bonhoeffer was living in a different context of course.  He was leading an underground seminary during the pre WW II Nazi Germany.  He was suspected by the German authorities for being a traitor.  So, I suppose he would be thankful for waking up after another long dark night of avoiding the SS.  But I don't think this is all that Bonhoeffer has in mind.  He is convinced that a Chrisitian should not only be thankful but feel praise and adoration in the morning because of all that it represents.  The arrival of morning is not just evidence that you have survived a night, but is the promise of another day, it's an echo of resurrection morning.  "It is the time of fulfillment, the resurrection of the Lord.  At night Christ was born, a light in the darkness; noonday turned to night when Christ suffered and died on the Cross.  But in the dawn of Easter morning Christ rose in victory from the grave. (Life, 40)" 

 

Good morning to you . . .whatever time of day it is in your life.

The mortal blogging sin

I know I've committed the mortal sin of blogging by not posting for over a month. No excuse, just got a bit out of the habit and spend much of the month of June out of town--on family vacation to the Outer Banks, on a Sunday School camping trip, to DC for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Assembly. Anyway, it's been a big month. It's good to be home for a little while.

Broadus News:
/ Saturday is the groundbreaking for our Habitat House we are building with the Blue Ridge Mountains Rotary Club. I shared a nice breakfast meeting with them last week and met many folks with whom I'm looking forward to working. One thing they have in common with us. Both of our names are mouthfulls. Can you imagine the sign Habitat has to post at the job site, "This house brought to you by the Blue Ridge Mountains Rotary Club and Broadus Memorial Baptist Church." Yikes.

/ The visioning process continues to proceed. Hopefully by early Fall, we will be ready to have more congregational wide conversation and participation.

/ We had our firstr Crave Experience last Wednesday. It's new to us, even those of us involved in the planning of it. So it was a learning experience, but an experience that God was in and used in the lives of at least several people in powerful ways. Always much to be thankful for.

/ Vacation Bible School is in a couple of weeks. Broadus VBS has grown every year for 4 straight years. I suspect this year will be the largest yet. Cool. But the neat thing is that every child gets personal attention and love. That's really cool.

Hope to see you soon.

Peace, Eric

Hitting the Trail

I'll be hitting the trail this weekend for what has become an annual Memorial Day Weekend men's backpacking trip.  Each year for about 4 years now a group of about 4-6 of us strap on the packs, get out the gorp, and suffer through three or four days of slogging.  Actually, we do some hiking, but the trip is as much about eating.  Steaks, potatos, pancakes.  We basically try to outdo each other each night for dinner.  Good stuff. 

 

So, let's see. . . 

 

2004    The Priest Wilderness

2005    Ramsey's Draft Wilderness

2006    Cranberry Wilderness, WVa

2007    Mt. Rogers Recreational Area

 

There are some beautiful places where we live.  These experiences make me appreciate the magnitude and beauty of God's creation each time we go.  Good stuff.  Later . . .

Stuck in Heaven

So my four year old paused briefly in her constant verbage from the backseat and asked, "Daddy, when I get to heaven, will I have to stay there?"  "What, honey?" I asked, not quite sure what to make of the question.  "Daddy, um, when I get to heaven, will I be stuck there?"  "Stuck there?"  "Are people stuck there?" 

 

I've been asked a lot of hard theological questions in my ministry and haven't been shy about saying "I don't know" when I didn't know.  But this question really got me.

 

So, I asked, "Well, honey, Heaven is a wonderful place . . .where else would you want to go?"  And then I got my answer about what could be better than Heaven . . ."I want to go to Disney Dancing Princesses on Ice!"  

 

Oh, well, hard to compete with that, even for eternal bliss, the constant abiding presence of holiness, the very presence of the Divine. 

 

Of course this is the same little girl who asked the other night, "Daddy.  Daddy.  Will you watch the Barbie and the Twleve Dancing Princesses on the Island of the Magical Rainbow with me?"  Darling, I'm sure that someday I'm going to wish we had more dancing princess movies around here, but, um, no, I just can't sit and watch that movie.  I'd rather be stuck in heaven.

Get Out There

So I heard a presentation yesterday from the Community Health Director of a local hospital.  In her very interesting presentation about a wide range of subjects, she said that the hospital offered Blood Pressure and Heart Health Screenings about monthly.  So, once a month, people would line up to come to the lobby of the hospital on a Saturday morning to have their blood pressure checked and other tests for free.  Some people would come who had just been checked out the month before "Just to be sure."  The hospital is glad to help anyone who needs it, but suspected that they weren't really reaching the people who needed it the most. 

 

So, they started setting up the Screenings at Wal-Mart, just outside the McDonald's in the store.  So, with the waftings of Big Macs, French Fries, and Chicken Nuggets in the air and the stampeding sounds of the masses collecting bargains at the Superstore, they offered the same tests.  Here's what they discovered.  In the same confines of the hospital, only 20% of people were in the danger zone physically.  At the Wal Mart McDonald's 55% were in the danger zone.  The Community Health servers had to go to the people to help them; the people who really needed the help weren't coming to them.

 

Seems like the Church could learn something from this example.  It's only when we get out of our walls and meet people where they are do we find the people who really have the needs.  Jesus said that he had come for the sick, not the well.  We are most effective when we join him in that work.

Garden State

I saw an interesting movie the other day: Garden State, starring Natalie Portman and Zach Braff (also directed).  It's a film that has many familiar themes to movie-goers, but is also a good example of post-modernity for anyone who is still wondering what that whole thing is all about. 

 

I won't give away any plot spoilers, but just to say that it's a "boy meets girl", "boy falls for girl", "will boy stay with girl" kind of movie.  Nothing too unusual there.  But the larger themes of the movie are revealing.  The story is centered on Andrew Largeman's return home to his mother's funeral.  She drown in the bathtub and may or may not have committed suicide.  Either way "Large" doesn't feel a lot of sadness for her.  In one scene, he describes how he couldn't cry at the funeral.  He tried to think of every sad memory and movie scene, but he couldn't make himself cry.  The bigger picture is that he has become so numbed to the world because of medications his psychologist-father gave him as a kid, that he basically feels nothing.

 

After deciding to go off the medications, his eyes begin to open to the world around him, the 'real world' of the here and now (which basically is a world centered on Natalie Portman).  In the process of waking up to his own reality, his newfound awareness is subtly contrasted with the false worlds all around him.  His dad relies on medications as a way to numb himself and others to pain and love.  His friends believe in get-rich-quick schemes (taking merchandise off the store shelves directly to the return desk, a pyramid scheme, and those real estate tapes that promise huge returns for little time), based on what life "could" be rather than what life really is.  God is not real, but is only a bottomless abyss (as is the search for some kind of Platonic ideal for life.  Life just is what is in front of you--how very Aristotilean.)

 

It's not a downer of a movie.  "Large" has some interesting adventures and comes to the conclusion that he must stop waiting for life to happen.  It's happening every day and he has to take it for what it is--the joy and the pain.  But it is a post-modern commentary on the foundations of modern life: religion as void (except for its hope of forgiveness), science is suspect, the economy is a game, family is broken.  The only thing you can really trust is your own experience and the world as you experience it in this very moment.  That's sort of the conclusion of both the movie and post-moderns.  In this way the title of the movie is biblically ironic.  What if Garden State were not just the slogan for a state, but a state of being biblically described.  We live in anything but a "garden (of eden)" state of being.  Life is broken.  Sometimes its hard.  But it's life and it's the only one we have.  It's worth living for.

 

The thing that Jesus showed us is that life is also worth dying for.  And that's something missing from most post-modern reflections on the world.  In the opinion of God, you are worth dying for. 

 

 

 

    

Another Worst Church Sign Ever?

 

Thanks to my friend Ashley for this one.

 

Mosaic Church in LA was a great experience last week.  Their Origins and Ethos Conferences are really exciting, interesting, and insightful.  I could sit and listen to Erwin McManus all day and got to for the better part of three days.  He's just really really good.  And the ministry that Mosaic is doing is out of the box for what most of us know as church.  But of course, Los Angeles is out of the box too.  It's definitely not Charlottesville or anywhere else I've ever lived.  But the postmodern mindset and lifestyle that is pervasive in California isn't far from the rest of the country and in that way it is already here and all over the place in some ways.

 

Check out Mosaic's take on televangelists.  Go to Youtube.com and search for Mosaic Church Televangelists.  You'll immediately find their 2:30 min video.  It's pretty amazing.

Live From Los Angelas

I'm here on a morning break during the Origins Conference hosted by Mosaic Church.  This conference is really about being exposed to the vision and mission of this particular church.  And it's quite a church. 

 

Basically a typically sized Southern Baptist community church that was active in missions through this 1990s, The Church on Brady transitioned in the late 90s into this powerhouse ministry that is reaching thousands of young, single, urban seekers with the message that God loves you and God wants to unleash you on the adventure of a lifetime.

 

This conference is built around exploring the 5 core values of Mosaic, but the highlight is getting to listen to lead pastor Erwin McManus speak throughout the day.  Erwin is really, really good.  He's passionate, articulate, driven, humble, and full of energy.  But it's an energy that invites you in rather than overwhelms you.  You want to believe his vision and feel like that to be a part of this movement, you would find some of your sense of calling.

 

That's not to say that Mosaic and Erwin shouldn't have legitimate critiques: do they foster a growing sense of discipleship and love of God in those they reach?  Is the life of prayer emphasized sufficiently?  Where is the call to justice and mercy beyond evangelism?  These are just some of the questions that should be answered.  But if they are erring, it's refreshing to see a church erring on the side of engagement with the culture, adventure, revelence, and passionate evangelism.  They really believe they are on mission to save the world and everything else is driven by and organized by that vision.

 

What works in LA will not work in most places in America, including Charlottesville.  LA's just a different kind of place.  (That's an understatement!)  But Cville is such a neat place with so much culture, talent, and interesting people who are also seeking Christ in their own way . . .we have a lot to learn, but Broadus has the heart and the mission to be a part of God's work in our part of the world.  I can't wait to continue to see what God does in us and among us, and, perhaps most importantly, through us in the world.

 

If Mosaic is any indication, it's quite an adventure.  

 

I'd love to hear of churches whose ministry you find fascinating.  If I know anything about your favorite, I'll respond with anything I know about it.