But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Acts 1:8

These days, we Americans can’t seem to commit to anything. Gone are the days of “company men”, who work at the same job for years. Other things seem to be going that way, like having a “home town”. We’re now living in a culture that has a created a new relationship: the “Starter Marriage.’ We see this in churches. People float from church to church.

They might leave because of a conflict, a move, or because the personality of the church changed. We aren’t leaving because we want to go. We leave because we want a sense of purpose. We are leaving because we want to feel like we were sent out for a reason.

We need some deprogramming before we can understand what this idea of being “sent” means. They say that the average American moves, about once every 2-4 years. We don’t feel the risk of changing locations. We have to separate the idea of just moving from the concept of being sent.

Jesus sends his Apostles to Jerusalem, what’s usual, first. Then, Samaria, what’s unusual. Then the ends of the Earth, what’s unknown. For a lot of us, the hardest thing we can do will be to simply stay, in our Jerusalem and Samaria, until Jesus sends us somewhere new. One of the most countercultural things we can do is commit to staying in one place, even when we get bored or upset.

I’m not suggesting that people should stay in a dangerous marriage or an unhealthy church. However, a case can be made that American culture makes it too easy to leave.

What if we decided that we would never leave until we knew that God was sending us somewhere else? I’m not saying don’t take a job in another city or move to El Salvador. What if, instead of one of us just leaving, we as a community, came around those who were leaving and commissioned them?

About a year ago we my church community said goodbye to a good friend. She had only been with us for about a year, but in that short time, she had become an integral and loved part of the family. She went back to her native country of Kenya, where was going to continue her work for Comfort the Children International. She had been such an important part of our community, and many us loved not only her, but her passion for the children of her country. On her last Sunday, we prayed over her a prayer of commissioning. We prayed a blessing that she would know that she wasn’t leaving our church; she was going to do what we could not: go on our behalf, to spread the love of Jesus to the children of East Africa.

We are going to go other places. What if, we didn’t just leave. What if we were commissioned?

The post Stop Moving Around Until God Sends You Somewhere appeared first on Chris Morton.

To me, it was some Catholic holy day that I, as an evangelical Protestant, didn’t have to worry about, thanks be to God. In my view, all of “that religious stuff” detracted from what really mattered, which was having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In my early evangelical years it never dawned on me that some of “the religious stuff” might actually enrich my faith in Christ.

It’s hard to get much more evangelical than Eugene Peterson, who explains the need for liturgy this way:

To ward off confusion let me first say what I don’t mean by liturgy. I don’t mean what goes on in the chancel of high Anglican church; I don’t mean an order of worship; I don’t mean robes and incense and genuflections before the altar…I am after something deeper and higher and wider.

What I want to do is to recontextualize our reading of Scripture…into a huge holy community of others who are also reading it…

The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements: First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God…Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of loving and obeying, ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives out on the street participating in the work of salvation…

…There is nothing ‘churchy’ or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic ‘story-ing’ making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don’t leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions.” (Eat This Book).

Liturgy is a pulley that forces us to experience the whole story of God and his people.  Center to our story, and at the heart of Ash Wednesday, is the truth that we “were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ.”

I would not suggest that you quickly start practicing the Liturgical calendar.  (Especially if you skip the important step of creating a missional calendar.) But I would suggest that you find a means to regularly remember the whole story.  This means creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of salvation, but it also means taking times to fast, repent and realize that dust we are, and to dust we will return.

The post Ash Wednesday Spotlight appeared first on Chris Morton.

An Guide to Advent For Us Ahistorical Evangelical Types

Advent is about waiting.  Waiting isn’t fun.  But it’s important.  Enjoy.

The post Advent 2011 appeared first on Chris Morton.

1.  We give things up for Lent because it leads us to Easter.  Rather than indulging in what me missed during our fast, we seek to find this small part of our life resurrected.  We give up what controls us through Lent so we can be free of it come Easter.

2.  I failed at Lent, in a deep fundamental way.  Posting on this site, Facebook and elsewhere what I had given up is a direct contradiction of Christ’s words on fasting.  This cheapened my fast and misled others.  My apologies.

The post Failing at Lent appeared first on Chris Morton.

The post An Easter Song appeared first on Chris Morton.