TheyCallMePastorBryan

Just the writings of your stereotypical pastor / programmer / writer. Bryan is a leader of Sacred Roots, a small church in the Foster-Powell & Mr. Scott Arleta neighborhood areas. If you are looking for more information about what Bryan is doing or how you can help, click here

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• January 24, 2012

  Well, I’m back from vacation. Guess I didn’t follow through on doing those blogs. But they’re coming, oh yes, they’re coming.

  More to come, but know, vacation was great and I’m ready to hit the ground running again. Blogs soon!

• January 17, 2012

  Vacation

  Being on vacation is nice. It’s been great already to have some time to just breathe and enjoy the sun and read and hang out with friends. I have a sense that this may be just what the doctor ordered for me. Anyway there’s a little update on what’s going on with me. There may be a few blogs on the way too!

• January 13, 2012

  Missional in Suburbia

  Tomorrow I’m teaching a day of a Missional Church class the my friend Rob does at Whitworth University. In the past I’ve found that a lot of folks in class struggle with seeing what being missional looks like in urban settings but have a much harder time getting it for suburban and rural areas. I asked my friend Matt Bowen to share a bit about his experience of being at a larger established church in Beaverton as it has experienced transition towards being more missional in its alignment, and thought I’d share it here as well.

  Has the church in suburbia any chance at success in missional engagement? I recently met a church planter in my city who works in an urban context. When I disclosed the fact that I am a pastor in one of our city’s suburban areas, he became noticeably uninterested in our conversation. I concluded that mission in suburbia didn’t make the cut for this planter when it comes to worthwhile conversations.

  My sense is that both the great commission and Jesus’ sending statement in Acts 1:8 leave no room for turf wars when it comes to the necessity and urgency of the missio Dei in all contexts.

  However, I understand the church planter’s dismissal as well. Aren’t larger suburban churches known for high program overhead, internal focus, and large staffing budgets? Are they not the progenitors of Christian subculture rather than missional counter- culture? These are important questions, not to be avoided.

  However, as with all mission activity, the validity of the endeavor is not rooted in the opinions of others or the historical baggage associated, but in the call of God and the movement of the Spirit of God. Here are a few ways that we are paying attention to and attempting to live in harmony with the Holy Spirit’s movement of the church into suburban mission:

  Community: Our best expressions of mission have been the smaller communities in our church that believe they are called to share life together. The hospitality they demonstrate to neighbors and friends and the love they have for one another bears fruit for mission, even in the ‘burbs. We believe that even though people close their garage doors the moment they drive home, they have an innate longing to belong. Thus our groups are a powerful expression for mission when they take their call seriously. The more “successful” expressions of community have intentionally cultivated a presence in both public/social space among neighbors and place a high value on relationships. One group began a community garden that mostly hosts un-churched neighbors. Another group has embedded in a network of jazz musicians and offers a space each week to jam. Another group is making inroads into parents of teens by getting involved in the public schools and offering a place to be with other parents wrestling through similar issues. They key in each group seems to be a place to be oneself among others who accept and care in a context that is typically indifferent.

  Service: A church that serves its neighborhood without asking for anything back makes a dent. Recently we began a ministry that offers a free meal every week. It is offered in our building because we have the facilities to prepare a lot of food and host a lot of people. The reality of the suburbs is often very different beneath the surface than the way it appears above. Many people are hurting financially even thought they live in an area of town that appears comfortable and affluent. While people can receive a meal once a week, the real hope is that they will meet a loving family of faith that will journey alongside them. Another way our church is able to serve is through a food pantry that offers help to those in need. While these modes of service offer relief, some of the best service is the long term commitments we have with local schools or organizations that have primary expertise in transitioning people into stability and health. Much could be said about the resources available in suburban church contexts to serve the world. We seem to have an ever increasing population of people who are getting creative about serving their contexts and bringing others along in their mission.

  Children: One of the elements often overlooked in much of the missional conversation is what to do with children. Many organic forms of mission might not always have some of the safety elements that the typical suburban parent would expect when considering the needs of their children. One way that we have found solid missional engagement is to serve families by providing space for kids that is protected and free. We have provided date nights for free and summer camps that many parents in the neighborhood take advantage of. Often times the gospel finds its road into the family through the kids.

  In many ways our church is transitioning from a predominantly Christendom-era church to a more fully missional ecclesiology. Since it is a large suburban church we are experimenting all the time while moving the people we have into new forms of community and new contexts of service. We are frequently finding that many are already engaged and merely needing encouragement and validation that their lives are missional in orientation. It is important to keep mission at the forefront of our ecclesial imagination through teaching, telling stories and celebrating people who take risks. The more people catch a vision of the kingdom the more excited and inventive they become in living out mission in suburbia.

• January 06, 2012

  Destructive to marriage is the self-fulfillment ethic that assumes marriage and the family are primarily institutions of personal fulfillment, necessary for us to become “whole” and happy. The assumption is that there is someone just right for us to marry and that if we look closely enough we will find the right person. This moral assumption overlooks a crucial aspect to marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that we always marry the wrong person.

  We never know whom we marry; we just think we do. Or even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while and he or she will change. For marriage, being [the enormous thing it is] means we are not the same person after we have entered it. The primary challenge of marriage is learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.

  — Stanley Hauerwas | HT: You Never Marry the Right Person (Relevant Magazine) an Excerpt from Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage

• January 04, 2012

  a response to tallskinnykiwi’s 9 reasons not to plant a church

  I won’t make it much of a secret that I love Andrew Jones’(tallskinnykiwi) blog. It’s always interesting to read what he’s experiencing and the thoughts he’s sharing. Today, he posted a list of 9 reasons not to plant a church in 2012. It’s well worth the read, but I wanted to offer a few thoughts in response to further this, so go read it, then come back and take a look at my responses.

  I’ll post a summary of each of his points and a little feedback as well(this feedback is a little nervewracking for me as I have great respect for Andrew), so here goes:

  1. Traditional plants have 1 strong leader who then gathers people into the Sunday event he starts. I absolutely agree that this is not a good way to go. That’s why in Sacred Roots we launched with a team and our gatherings did not initially look like a Sunday service.

  2. Church plant measurements usually focus on attendance rather than transformation around them. Once again, I’m in total agreement. It’s incredibly hard to talk about church planting without talking numbers because this is so engrained in our thinking, but this must change. We need to realize if a group is big but isn’t really impacting the area around it in a Jesus way, it’s failing to be what the church is to be.

  3. Since most people who join have already been a part of churches we tend to duplicate what churches already do. At this point I find myself partially in agreement and partially worried. Absolutely, we don’t want to just carbon copy the best of other churches. This has a tendency to produce church connoisseurs who just want the best of each possible ministry. BUT neither do we want to throw away something just because it’s been done before. A context with church history is sadly lacking with many church planters and we end up creating “innovative” ways of doing things which also have a tendency to create a form of church connoisseur as well. One of the things that we often talk about in leadership at Sacred Roots is embracing that if people just want an awesome Sunday gathering, they’re going to be disappointed because we don’t have the best music and we don’t have The Greatest Sermon You’ll Ever Hear(tm). But we also believe that there are things that the church has done traditionally that are good things that we ought to continue. We believe that it’s important to be connected to the rhythm the church has developed over time. This can still end up looking differently and needs to be contextual, but there are some things that we do because we don’t believe we always have to reinvent the wheel.

  4. When the focus is on replicating the existing church we tend to just swap people from other churches. I agree with this, it’s why I hinted above that we need to give up on doing things just for that thing to be cool. In fact I wrote what I think to be one of my best blogs to date on this topic (take off the skinny jeans and put on your carhartts) 

  5. Asking people to commit to a gathering rather than Kingdom activities is counter productive to mission. I think this point has been hinted at already in a few of the others, and I agree. I can say however, even in a city like Portland when we only call people to missional activities and not also a worship community, people tend to view it as “I do mission with _____ and I worship with _____.” I don’t believe that this is a healthy thing, particularly when the missional community is trying to orient their time spent to allow people to have time to be on mission. This is part of the reason that Sacred Roots gathers together every Sunday to worship - it looks a bit different than a “church gathering” but it shares a lot of similarities, because we are wanting to create people who proclaim the story of Jesus in both word and action.

  6. New church plants create higher institutional visibility that causes problems. I understand this point and agree with it to a certain extent, but I also know, when problems are going to be caused, they’re going to be caused regardless of how things are done. The early church when it gathered borrowed heavily from the synagogue model in some places, but we see over and over in Acts that something about Christians churching together ends up being disruptive and riotous to the people around them.

  7. Funding traditional church plants isn’t sustainable or realistic anymore. This one I greatly agree with. It’s part of why I believe for better or for worse, teams of bi-vocational folks and business as mission will be on the rise. (Andrew mentions missional entrepreurial activities as part of this. Bravo!)

  8. Traditional church planting thrives in wealthy places but ignores the poor. Absolutely. I think many times this is because we lack imagination for what the Kingdom is doing and so our actions are subverted by a drive to be cool. My blog post I mentioned above gets at this, but I agree and think as we embrace bi-vocational teams, this becomes much easier to accomplish.

  9. In contexts where the church already has a bad rap for being greedy, asking people to give to a church comes off poorly. I agree. And I think this is because usually so much of the money we raise goes to the Sunday gathering. If we are clear that a large majority of our money is going to Kingdom projects, I think we can actually use this as a prophetic means of being.

  In all, I find myself in a lot of agreement with what Andrew has to say, but I worry a bit that there’s some ekklesaphobia (read David Fitch’s excellent piece on ekklesaphobia) involved here too. How do we press into being the church without being overly conscious of being the church? I’m not sure but I believe it’s similar to my struggles as a leader in moments where I apologize for being a leader - it’s counter productive to what is actually desired to be accomplished, and I wonder how we do that.

• January 03, 2012

  resurrected post: on mentorship

  This is a post I wrote a while back for my friend Tyler’s blog. It’s one of my favorite guest posts I’ve written and thought it a great post to share today.

  I have a confession: for the longest time, there was nothing I hated more than the thought of being mentored in a church. And I suspect I’m not the only one who’s felt this way.

  It’s not that I’m against the idea of mentoring, I believe it’s of the utmost importance to learn from people who have more experience in life and in following Jesus. It’s a model that Jesus handed down to us through his rabbi-discipleship relationship he models with the disciples. Eventually those disciples began to be referred to as apostles, a word which means “sent one.” And sent for what? As Jesus says at the end of Matthew’s gospel, sent to make disciples of all nations. So from the get-go following Jesus has been about this form of mentoring or discipling.

  And maybe that’s why for the longest time, I hated being mentored – because it had less to do with me learning to follow the way of Jesus and much more to do with shaping me into some sort of cog or known quantity to fit into the church machine.

  Since that time, I have been exposed to some fabulous mentors, mentors who have helped me to see the light about mentoring and become much less cynical about being mentored in a church. These great mentors have had two things in common: they didn’t believe they had everything figured out – that they might learn something from me while I learn from them, and they have been first and foremost concerned with developing me into who I am to be, and not something that I’m not. That is, although each of these men have much more experience and more education and have thought longer and deeper on the same issues that I think about, they have been willing to guide me in my own development rather than see me as an end towards their means.

  In some ways, this makes mentoring more of an art than a process. One time I remember listening to a wood carver talk about how to really do a good wood carving, you must discover what already exists in the piece of wood rather than coming at it with a plan for what you will carve. And I’ve heard sculptors talk the same way. The truth is, if we as Christians are to take mentoring seriously, we need to embrace the role of being soul sculptors, discovering along the way who our mentees truly are. There are enough mentors in the world taking the approach of being mentee molders – having a mold and figuring out how to push a mentee into it. But soul sculptors – those brave souls who are willing to engage in the unknown and help people develop into who they might be, there are not nearly enough.

  And so the challenge for us in church is to raise up that sort of courageous mentor, the type that will dive into the unknown, operating as a soul sculptor, helping scrape away the rough edges and discover who really is.

  Are you and I brave enough to venture out in that sort of mentorship?

• December 28, 2011

  I was listening to my Bob Dylan collection on random today and was struck by Ring them Bells. In the process I remembered that Sufjan Stevens had a great cover for the I’m Not There soundtrack.
  
  I love the message that Dylan was getting at on this, which seems like a bit more tempered version of the Apocalyptic fervor of his first gospel albums, but that carries a great prophetic call about the church needing to embrace its calling to love and serve the world.

• The Cost of Community

  Earlier this fall, my friend Jamie Arpin-Ricci’s new book The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis and Life in the Kingdom. I was sent a copy to review by Likewise, and it has been my favorite book I’ve reviewed this year.

  The Cost of Community in all truth has made me a little jealous. It’s the sort of book that I’d like to write - one that explores scripture but does not settle for leaving it in the abstract, instead rooting it in story. In the case of this book, Jamie’s exploration of the Sermon on the Mount is rooted in two stories, the story of Little Flowers, the church plant Jamie is a leader for, and the story of St. Francis.

  The combination of these two stories made the book a fruitful read, with a lot of movement towards thinking through what Jesus is actually teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. It was enjoyable to read it after just finishing a fall of reading through the Sermon on the Mount in our Sacred Roots gatherings. I found that Jamie handled the scripture quite well and was well aware of various approaches to interpretation in the text. But what really stood out to me was that throughout the book there is a dedication to focusing on what it means to really live out what Jesus is teaching. In a time where we prone to liking Jesus but coming up with great excuses to not do what he taught, this book comes across as a great reminder of the weight and cost of what Jesus is teaching.

  Seriously, go read The Cost of Community.

• December 23, 2011

  [Flash 10 is required to watch video]

  Skrillex Christmas Lightshow

  Hard for me to not be stoked about a combination of Christmas lights and dubstep. Merry Christmas Eve Eve.

  (Source: queenofdubstep, via girlsthatlooklikeskrillex)

• December 13, 2011

  Jesus vs. Ayn Rand: Christmas Smackdown Edition

  Will Willimon weighs in on how celebrating Christmas flies in the face of the values of Ayn Rand:

  I’m amazed that these politicians promote Rand’s philosophy without concern for her atheism. But more amazing is the grand celebration we Christians are about to witness. Christmas, the nativity of Jesus Christ, is an eloquent rebuke to Rand and her contemporary devotees, because Christmas is God’s grand revelation of who God really is. The incarnation, as Luke tells the story, occurred among those on the bottom. Poor shepherds working the night shift were first to get the news that a poor, unwed Jewish woman was bearing Emmanuel into the world. Old people once made silent — Simeon and Anna — were the first to sing. These social leeches, as Rand regards them, were the first to be told by God of “God with us”. The rich and powerful, Rand’s chosen few, resisted Jesus from the day of his birth. And Christians believe that strange story is the whole truth about God. Jesus Christ — a poor, vulnerable baby whose family (according to Matthew) was forced to immigrate to Egypt, who cast his lots among the homeless, the hungry, the jobless and the poor — is God among us.|source:Call & Response, HT:Dustin Bagby

  I touched on this earlier in the year with some other quotes comparing what Ayn Rand had to say with what Jesus had to say (Jesus vs. Ayn Rand), but this further highlights the absurdity that Christians would look to her philosophy which is based off of an atheist, will to power approach to economics, as something helpful to our current economic issues. This isn’t an issue even of whether or not we believe social programs ought to be provided by the government, this is an issue on a larger scale of whether or not we’re supposed to look out for the less well off among us, and in that regard Willimon is right on. The Christmas story stands in stark contrast to the philosophy of Ayn Rand.