Last Supper = First Meal

We have decided to celebrate the Lord's Supper once a month in our worship service. I've been to churches that celebrate it every week, and to churches that celebrate it quarterly. There are pluses and minuses to every option, and I don't hold that there is one "right" schedule. As long as the practice is frequently before us without becoming empty habit, I think you've got a good thing going.

There is one habit that I'd like to recommend you try on occasion. I heard it from some friends, and on certain occasions have done the same. The idea is simple - practice a fast leading up to the Lord's Supper. Some choose to simply skip breakfast so that the Lord's Supper is their first "meal" of that day. Other choose to fast for 24 hours leading up to the Lord's Supper (do this only if you know you're in the right health for that).

Two of the benefits from this fast is that it helps you focus in prayer, and it makes the Lord's Supper a little more special, being the food that finishes your fast. Fasting often aids us in being more focused in prayer, for whatever reasons. Some of my best, extended times of prayer have come while fasting. It's no magic formula for awesome prayer - I've had times of fasting with absolutely nothing special going on in prayer. It's just an aid.

But there's also that sense of letting the Lord's Supper be the thing that breaks the fast. You don't have eggs and bacon on your breath, already pretty full from other food. You're hungry, but you're seeking satisfaction more from Christ (and the symbol of Christ) than from food. There's not the lingering memory of breakfast to make the Lord's Supper seem like common food. The symbolic significance of the Lord's Supper can be heightened if we set it apart from other food.

If your health allows, consider a short or medium fast before this Sunday's celebration. If it doesn't help, feel no need to try it again. If it does help, great - even if it is of benefit only one time.

Pullin' weeds

Every time I pull weeds, I can't help but think of the spiritual lessons I'm holding in my dirt-encrusted hands, thinking about the "weeds" of the spiritual life.

• It's easier to pull weeds when they are small, rather than letting them grow talk, thick, and strong. Letting spiritual problems grow stronger only makes it harder to remove them later.
• Rather than bypass the thorny weeds, wear gloves. Some spiritual problems are painful to deal with. Rather than ignore them, letting the thorns get thornier, bring in the right equipment to handle the job - such as a wise counselor, a good book, a change in lifestyle, giving up something in order to remove the weed, and so on.
• Some weeds are insidious because they drop new roots every few feet, making them harder to remove - killing one section doesn't kill the next section. Spiritual problems can foster other spiritual problems, which then take root all by themselves. Better to remove the weed early before it drops new roots a few feet across the lawn.
• You gotta get the root, or the weed comes right back. It's tempting to deal only with the surface of spiritual issues, rather than getting to the root of the problem. Just masking a spiritual problem to look good in front of the neighbors only allows the roots to grow stronger and pop up new surface issues harder to remove than before.
• Sometimes you gotta dig to get at the root. Sometimes, you need people who are trained in counseling to really figure out what the root problems are. But you must get to them to get rid of the weed.
• The neighbors have weeds, too. Rather than worrying about how my lawn compares to the neighbor's lawn, I need to tend to my lawn, and to have empathy for the weeds in his lawn. We're both trying to grow healthy lawns, so comparing doesn't help anyone.
• Weeding is never finished. Tending to your spiritual life takes constant, life-long effort.
• The best way to keep weeds out is to have a thick lawn with healthy roots. The best way to keep spiritual weeds out is to be as healthy as possible in my spiritual life, disciplines, and practices.
• If I do nothing, the weeds will take over. If you do little to maintain your spiritual life, you won't just stay in the same state - weeds will take over, and your spiritual life will decline. 

I'm sure you could come up with several of your own analogies. Usually after weeding, I'm motivated again to clear some weeds out of my life, too. I like how the lawn is healthier without all those weeds in it.

Less is More

I was in John 3 this which, which includes John's statement in response to some of his disciples leaving him to follow Jesus, "He must increase; I must decrease." I generally get what John's statement means for an individual, but then I wondered what it means for a church. Is there a sense where a church says, "He must increase; we must decrease"?

In a sense, yes. Of course we want every local church to grow (increase), which means that Christ is increasing. But like John, we also want "our" disciples to "leave" us and follow Jesus directly - meaning that they become less disciples of Grace Fellowship (and her elders) and more disciples of Jesus directly. They leaders become less - the people become less dependent on the leaders, who become less of their connection to Him. Instead of a church that builds a following of the leaders, we want to "lose" our following like John did. Just the image of disciples leaving the tutelage of John specifically to go follow Jesus directly is a clear picture in my head of our task - to "lose" disciples to Jesus. This can happen while we grow in numbers - we still "decrease."

As one of the leaders, I want to eventually become less important in your life as a leader (but more important as a friend!).

Vision

The all-church survey is in, and we're sifting through the results. Great feedback from not a few responders, so thanks to all of you for putting your thoughts into words and sharing them with us. The elders had a meeting earlier this week to discuss the results, and will spend this Friday and Saturday combing through it all, collecting ideas from personal interviews I have conducted, taking in the various elders discussions throughout the year and prayerfully considering where to set our sights for 2011.

Developing "vision" is a common practice for organizations, religious or secular, to focus limited resources in the face of unlimited possibilities. There are so many good things we could do - the question is what should we do at this time? A vision statement brings that focus. Even from looking only at your comments in the survey, there are far more good ideas that we could do than we have time and resource for. Some good ideas are good ideas for us now, some good ideas are good ideas for us at a later time, and some good ideas are good ideas for someone else. (And, of course we could come up with any number of bad ideas!)

Our "vision" statement will be a statement that helps us focus the energies of each ministry toward a common, single, clear purpose. It is a statement that should be unique to Grace Fellowship, in the sense that it is what we should focus on, without any suggestion that other churches should focus on. Our vision is what our church's unique contribution should be in the Kingdom of God.

Our "mission" statement, however, is not the same thing as our vision statement. A mission statement is bigger than a vision statement. A vision statement is usually good for a period of time, whereas a mission statement remains constant throughout the organization's lifespan. I believe that every church in the world has the same mission - it was a mission that Jesus gave us, called the Great Commission:

Matthew 28:18 Then Jesus came up and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 28:19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 28:20 teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Every church has the same mission, and therefore the same mission statement. We should all be working toward this mission of making disciples of all nations, under the authority of Christ.

Our "vision" statement is the unique proclamation that says how this particular church intends to add to the overall mission that we share.

Please pray for your elders as they prayerfully develop a vision for our church.

Decision-making

OK, so I'm going to solve the problem of how to make decisions in 300 words or less. OK, so ... maybe not.

The process of making decisions compresses thousands of years of theology into a single moment. In making a decision, you bring in the theology of God's sovereignty, the theology of man's freedom to choose, the theology of the role of the Holy Spirit, the theology of the wisdom of the Bible, and several other theologies all into the practical, daily activity to choosing A instead of B. Whew!

So, how do we do this well? Do we wait on major decisions until we believe the Spirit reveals His will to us? Do we just go with our best guess and ask the Lord to bless it? Do we make minor decisions one way, but major decisions another way? If we make a wrong decision, are we outside of God's will? And if so, how do we get back "in"?

First, I recommend a book co-authored by a friend of mine called Decision-Making and the Will of God (found on Amazon here). The authors take the approach that 1) if God has a specific thing He wants you to do, He will not encrypt it into a puzzle that you have to be clever enough to decipher by reading events like tea leaves, and 2) the wealth of wisdom literature in the Bible is there for a reason - when He does not have one single specific thing He wants, He gives us wisdom to make one of many possible God-pleasing choices.

Second, our own personal experience has taught us a few things along the way. When making a decision, of course we do all the things we know to do: pray over many days or weeks (and listen!), seek out several wise counselors, read His Word for guidance, discuss together, praying some more, patiently weigh our options  using wisdom to evaluate everything, and praying yet some more. On several occasions, we have eventually come to the point where the choice we should make becomes clearer and clearer. The question for us changes at that point from "What should we do?" to "Do we have the courage to actually make this decision?" The question goes from wanting information to a matter of the will and of trust.

But, there are times that even through all this process, the best decision was still not clear to us. What do we do then? If we have earnestly pursued all these avenues with openness and patience, and still we're not sure, we have on several occasions tried an approach that has been very helpful to us.

We eventually conclude that we need to make our best-effort decision. And then we pray, "Lord, we're not sure what to do, but this is our best decision we can make. We're going to take a step forward in faith. If we're on the wrong path, please stop us." Then we take a step forward on faith. Then we pray again, "OK, Lord, here we go ... stop us if we're going in the wrong direction." And then we observe.

What we have found on several occasions is that after taking that step of faith and checking back with the Lord, He will then either affirm the decision or show us it's not a good step. It seems that He does not, however, affirm or contradict our decision until after we take the step of faith. If we don't step out, we don't get any more clarity. If we do, He has often at that point let us know His will.

At times, it means we need to retreat and try something else. Other times, He has clearly affirmed the choice, and it become even clearer that it is a direction that He enjoys for us to take.

It's important to remember, though, to hold your decisions with an open hand and earnestly ask Him if you're walking in the best direction, allowing Him to redirect you. If you're not really willing to be redirected, then asking anyway just makes a sham of it. That willingness to accept whatever He wants is crucial!

I believe that doing all you can to make the right decision, checking before and after with the Lord, and especially by taking a step of faith, we have discovered His will for our lives on particular decisions. It's important not to leave out any aspect of this practice.

I would love to hear from others who approach decisions this way and how that has resulted for you.

The NET Bible

I like to use several different translations of the Bible, depending on my purpose. I like the New American Standard Bible (NASB, Update 1995) and the English Standard Version (ESV) for study, although I sometimes use others. I like the New English Translation (NET) for personal reading, and sometimes for study. Some translations are more word-for-word ("literal", such as NASB, ESV, NKJV, NRSV), and some are more thought-for-thought ("dynamic equivalent", such as NET, CET, NIV).

The difficulty with translating is that a strict word-for-word translation often comes out very difficult to understand in English. For example, a very literal translation of Romans 5:8 is "But demonstrates his own love into us God that yet sinners being we, Christ for us died"! We get the point, but you wouldn't want to read an entire Bible like that! Every translation makes it more readable in English than this, but some go further than others to smooth out the language. But, the further one goes to smooth out the language, the further from the original it gets.

There are several websites that have many translations available for reading, comparison, and study. I particularly like Logos, YouVersion, and Biblos. They allow you to compare translations, make personal notes, even share your notes with others, and investigate the original language versions (Greek and Hebrew). There are many others: The Unbound Bible, StudyLight, BibleGateway, and so on. Many versions have their own on-line versions, like the ESV.

One of my hands-down favorites is the website for the NET. The NET is a translation that's meant to be a little easier to read (it's more of a dynamic equivalent than a literal), but it stock-full of thousands and thousands of footnotes. But the footnotes in the NET are different than in most Bibles, giving you the best of both worlds in translation.

Most footnotes are commentary about the text or something about the ancient copies of Scripture. The footnotes in the NET, however, are mostly about the translation choices made by the translators. In other words, most of the extra comments are about why the translator translated the passage as he or she did, what other options were available, and so on. If the NET chooses a phrase that is more clear in English, there's often a footnote telling you what the Greek or Hebrew phrase is literally. So you get the best of both words - a very readable translation, but also information about what the original language says quite literally.

The NET website also has tons of other study tools: You can get to the Greek and Hebrew easily. There are commentaries, lists of hymns and artwork that go with the passage you're reading, and a way to compare several translations at once. And of course, you can search for just about anything - and it will find what you're looking for in not just the NET translation, but in any of the 10 translations it supports.

Give the NET a spin. Just click here. And if you want to really have fun, the main website that hosts the NET Bible is called Bible.org, which has online articles, audio, video, self-study courses in theology, and so on. (And for super Bible nerds, my newest favorite website is BibleArc.com, which is a great tool for analyzing the structure of a passage - watch the helpful instructional videos to watch how it's done.)

Wise Investments

Thanks to all who helped with the Carnival last weekend! We had well over 500 guests, more than double last year - which is why we ran out of prizes, frisbees, pucker powder, sno-cones, and so on. Because of you investing your time, we all had a blast. The weather was as good as we could expect for mid-August, and a lots of kids (and parents) had a great time.

And a super "thank you" to Susan and Susan! They did the lion's share of the work - it was far easier for us because of them. Thank you, ladies.

My friend Jim took pictures, which you can view here.

Please pray that the informational packets we sent out would intrigue those who don't already attend church to consider attending a good church, whether it's ours our not.

Take a breath. A quick one.

AWANA starts this Monday! Jim has an impressive crew of volunteers, and already I'm extending my thanks to all of you (including those who have committed to pray consistently for AWANA throughout the year). AWANA boils down to a great excuse for adults to talk to kids about Jesus, and to model His character before them. All the games, lessons, Scripture memory - the most important feature of AWANA is adults investing into kids.

The AWANA leadership material is clear as it coaches each volunteer how to execute their part of the big picture. Jim still needs a handful of volunteers to round out the teams. We've adults for every group, but a few need one more person. Would you please pray a simple prayer: "Lord, do you want me to help AWANA this year?" That's it. Pray that prayer sincerely, listen, and if the answer is "Yes," please contact Jim.

Investing in kids has a much better ROI than investing in the stock market or 401k's - I give it a maximum "5-star" rating. There are other things you could do on a Monday night. There are few things you could do that are better investments.