SICKNESS AND SLEEPINESS

Shelby is just getting over a stomach bug. Last night half of Saint Patrick's was out with some sort of illness. I guess the time finally comes every winter when the germ pool has multiplied enough and sickness spreads. Here's praying it won't hit anyone else in our family!

I am moving to a new stage of being like my dad. When I was a kid he would always fall asleep in front of the TV. I always wondered what made him so tired. Now I get it. After long days -- especially Sundays -- I often find myself frozen and drifting off in front of the TV. Alas -- the ceaseless march of time ........

Cheers/

I posted this on the Saint Patrick's Church Blog (link over there on the right).

LENT AS A SEASON OF GRACE

I have been pondering Lenten 2005 of late. I have been thinking how easy it can be (at least for me) to think of this season of penitence as a season of scolding and nagging. Five weeks of nagging for holiness!

Here is what I have been thinking. In my own life, transformation and repentance have come on the heels of a deeper vision of the love and grace of God. My sense is that as I see more fully God's love and grace I trust him and his goodness more. This deeper trust in God enables me to give myself more fully to God. This giving myself more fully is what penitence and holiness are all about.

Perhaps sainthood is less about struggling to shed the rags of sin and more about gaining a less opaque vision of the great love and grace of God. The challenge is to grasp how lent can be a season of penitence and preparation through being a season of seeing God's love and grace.

Any thoughts?

Peter

BFAST WITH REES AND OTHER ASSORTED THINGS

In a few minutes Rees and I will leave for bfast at the local health food place -- ahem, McDonalds. Each week I take one of the boys out. No agenda -- just being together. Today is Rees' turn.

I am reading again David McCullough's masterful biography Truman. HS Truman is one of my heroes -- a great man and a great leader. A lot of good life lessons from his story.

Dylan is taking guitar lessons. He seems to be enjoying it.

Spent three days at the Close last week. The Close is a retreat in Southern Kentucky. It is a place fro silence, rest and reflection. I was there with two other men. Silence during the day -- chatting at night. I wish I be out there a long time. I had no great revelations while there. It was simply a few days of recharging my batteries.

Cheers!

GOING ON RETREAT -- IT'S COLD!!!

I am going to The Close today. It is a retret center in southern Kentucky. I will be there on retreat for three days. I am looking forward to the time except that the cabins are heated by a combo of a gas wall heater and a wood stove. This is all good until the fire goes out -- which it always does in the middle of the night (usually about 3AM). Mornings involve freezing ones you know what off while coffee boils and the fire kicks in.

Going there reminds me how good we moderns have it. My grandma Matthews had to get up every winter morning before dawn and stoke a fire in the fireplace to be warm and to eat. Going to the close makes me think to myself, "I am a pansy, I am a pansy, I am a pansy........"

I came across this reflection regarding the disaster in Southeast Asia. It is composed by The Rt. Rev. C. FizSimons Allison. Allison is the retired Episcopal Bishop of South Carolina and was Professor of Church History at Sewannee Seminary and Virginia Seminary.

He has written a number of books. The most recent is entitled The Cruelty of Heresy. It is an examination of the declarations of the early ecumenical councils. The book examines how heresy is cruel by undermining the grace of God by distorting the person of Christ and the nature of his work on our behalf. It is a great read!!

I think Allison's reflections are very compelling.

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TSUNAMI AND THE GOSPEL
By C. FitzSimons Allison

Natural disasters always provoke questions of God's goodness in the face of excruciating tragedy. It has always been so and disasters will always continue. It has not been given to Christians to dispel the mystery of evil. The cynic in us is tempted to resolve the issue by removing God from all consideration and doing what Job refused to do: curse (consign to oblivion) his own hope. Yet this choice saves no one from the terrible waves of water and leaves us with no hope or meaning beyond the devastation.

Jesus does not attempt to explain why the tower of Siloam (Lk. 13) fell on those 18 people but he carefully and adamantly denies that it was because they were worse sinners than others in Jerusalem. He acknowledges therefore, that there is innocent suffering but he goes on to say what seems at first unpastoral "...but unless you repent you shall likewise perish."

Is He saying to us, as we watch scenes of such sudden and unimaginable suffering and death, that unless we repent we shall likewise perish? It is difficult to make sense of the text short of saying "yes" to this question. The key to the sustaining hope in these conditions is Thomas Cranmer's wisdom about repentance, what he called 'renewing the power to love'. Leaving God in the arena of such disasters with Jesus' admonition to repent does not resolve the mystery of evil but clearly it does not identify God with tsunamis as in the current pantheism and panentheism. Instead, it affirms a personal love above, beyond and amidst any disaster as we repent, "renewing the power to love.

On a very practical level this means that each disaster is an opportunity to admit, as Jesus exhorts, that we have not loved as God would have us love and in turning to help the bereaved and stricken in His name we are given a power to love that we did not have before.

In this hope we can pray that the overwhelming, world-wide, international and interfaith response of help will lead to a love and peace among all peoples what was not possible before the disaster. God is present in and beyond tsunamis in our response of help by renewing the power to love. George Steiner once spoke about grace in disaster in regard to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony which was produced when the composer was deaf. Steiner observed that "it was an awesome encounter between God and one of the god-like of his creatures" and that to have heard such music out of deafness "is to have wrestled with the angel."

Each tragedy is a chance for us "to wrestle with the angel."

THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH GROWTH MOVEMENT

Sometimes ideas come to me in the shower. For some strange reason while I was in the shower, I began reflecting on the Church Growth Movement and what I think are some flaws in its approach.

First some caveats. I graduated from Asbury Seminary. If Fuller Seminary is the epicenter of the Church Growth Movement, then Asbury is the first aftershock. It makes sense if you think about it. The Arminian tradition that has shaped Asbury has always placed more emphasis on the power of the individual person to follow Christ and the power of the church to influence others to be part of the church. So the Church Growth Movements emphasis on technique and methodology fits in well with the tradition.

Second, I have benefitted from practitioners of the Church Growth Movement. I even took a class with George Hunter called "Principles of Church Growth." There were things I liked about the class and things I did not like about the class.

With the caveats out of the way let me surface my main problem. It is not that the movement emphasizes evangelism at the expense of discipleship or that it emphasizes buildings or that it encourages pastors to be ranchers rather than shepherds. I do have problems with these things, but I think these are symptoms of a deeper problem.

The central inadequacy of the Church Growth Movement is that it assumes a faulty anthropology. It gives much more weight to the power of technique to influence the behavior of persons than I believe the Bible does. I think men and women are fallen and are bondage to sin. Even our wills are in bondage. Now, I am not a high Calvinist. I do place myself within the Augustinian tradition, but I see an "Arminian" like John Wesley in the Augustinian tradition as well. What do I mean by Augustinian? That the primary factor in moving men and women to believe in Christ, to join the church, to grow spiritually is the grace of God. Where I differ from a high Calvinist is that I think this grace is potentially available to everyone -- not just to a select few called the "elect."

Seeing people come to faith, seeing people grow, seeing people come into the life of the church is a WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. I am not saying that those who minister have nothing to do or that those who follow Christ do not need to cooperate with the Holy Spirit. But the primary factor in the work of God in a person's life is the Holy Spirit undoing the bondage to sin we have all inherited from Adam.

The Church Growth Movement ignores this anthropology and proposes methodologies that are based on the power of human technique and assertion. But the progress gospel does not depend on right technique. The progress of the gospel is the result of a symbiotic combination of faithful articulation and embodiment of the Kingdom of God joined with the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of men and women.

GO PEOPLE NOW -- HURRY!!!!

Caveat -- I am NOT making this up.

My friend Megan Moore -- wife of Jonathan Moore (college roomate, best man at my wedding, all around buddy) and part of Saint Patrick's Church -- is on the cover of People Magazine and part of a feature story. The story is about a number of people who succeeded in losing weight and keeping it off.

Go buy it before it sells out! Thanks for the inspiration Megan.

Cheers!