Trust God

C.S. Lewis

Coffee Discipleship

Donut discipleship: don’t eat the donut and you’ll be a better person.  Eat instead the bran muffin, or the yogurt, or the hardboiled egg.  Just don’t eat the donut.

If you have to eat the donut, at least feel bad about it. Feel bad, and vow to do better next time.

But then again, there’s donuts at tomorrow’s meeting too.  Vow to do better next week.

Know deep down, that if you can find the strength to never eat the donut you will have achieved a certain level of holiness.  But for now, be content with the knowing that you are at least struggling to not eat the donut.  There’s a meretricious valor in the in little ways you try to become a better person.  Somewhere you believe you’re getting credit for wanting to be better.

Because, really, isn’t life a journey and not a destination?  This way I get to eat the donut, indulge my continued narcissism, and count it as part of my discipleship journey.  It’s a guilty pleasure precisely because I can enjoy being guilty.  All the sermons at church confirm this:  Don’t eat the donut.  But if you do, feel bad, try again.  Christianity is about not eating the donut.

Bad Metaphors: the Journey

Nothing like a journey

“Journey”, like the other J-word, has become the answer you can give in church to just about any question, without fear of ever being wrong. That’s because it’s not really an answer at all, more a kind of verbal smokescreen.

To be “on a journey”, spiritually-speaking, means you’re heading in the right direction (probably) but wouldn’t claim to have everything sussed. It suggests wisdom and perspective, balance and humility, without giving substantial proof that you possess any of those qualities. As such it is extremely useful. Try slipping “journey” in during a small group meeting and I guarantee that at least half the heads in the circle will nod empathetically, even if the question was whether you’d like a shortbread finger.

Given its unassailable status, how very tempting it is to stroke the cat backwards and try arguing that, on the contrary, your faith isn’t anything like a journey. I suspect that actual violence might ensue…

Mike (group leader): Andrew, tell us a little about your faith.

Andrew: Thanks Mike. Well, it’s become increasingly important for me to recognise that my faith isn’t a journey…

Mike: I’m sorry?

The rest of group raise their heads, glance at each other.

Basileia

Two recent posts on Basileia:

Inception, Infographics, and Discipleship

Try this exercise: have your staff design an infographic for the discipleship process at your church.  It’s a red flag if you get a roomful of blank looks or they end up with this after an hour:

continue reading here….

Awesome at….

In what ways does your church help people become awesome in the their day-to-day living?   Too often churches help people be awesome at church:  When to show up, where to volunteer next, what to give.

But try it another way.  Let’s insert specific words and see what we get.

• “We help Fathers be awesome at….”
• “We help Husbands be awesome at….”
• “We help Men be awesome at….”

continue reading here….

The Holy Assembly of the Fire-Baptized Brethren

or, Should Churches Have “Names”?

In response to Zach’s blog here.

Related posts from myself: http://tiny.cc/q3sq9

An article I remembered afterward.

Some quick thoughts on the subject:

I look at the situation from a brand vs product dynamic.  Usually people / groups like to brand themselves to show that they’re different, unique, or better.  Church 1 doesn’t do anything different than Church 2, but they believe in pre-trib rapture instead of post-trib rapture, or spiritual gifts, or Reformed theology.  Since they don’t do anything different, that is, since they don’t have a different product, it becomes necessary to differentiate by branding and marketing.

Let’s call branding the whole interaction of your product, their experience, and marketing.  Product is what you produce and what I take away; experience is how, when, and the contexts in which I engage and interact with your product; and marketing is the promise of what this product will do for me in the future.