From South Africa with Love – Week 1

16 09 2010

I leave for South Africa today with a team of trainer/facilitators from my ministry.  We will be teaching Five Principles of Unity and other unity material in churches there over the next two weeks.  For the names of the team members and our respective schedules, click here.  Please pray for us!

For my Thursday posts during this time away, I will be featuring thoughts and writings from one of my favorite South African pastors/writers, Andrew Murray, who pastored churches in South Africa from 1850 – 1917.  Two of his works which I have loved are Abide in Christ and With Christ in the School of Prayer.

That You May Bear Much Fruit

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing…This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” John 15:5, 8

“We all know what fruit is.  The produce of the branch, by which men are refreshed and nourished.  The fruit is not for the branch, but for those who come to carry it away.  As soon as the fruit is ripe, the branch gives it off, to commence afresh its work of beneficence, and anew prepare its fruit for another season.  A fruit-bearing tree lives not for itself, but wholly for those to whom its fruit brings refreshment and life.  And so the branch exists only and entirely for the sake of the fruit.  To make glad the heart of the husbandman is its object, its safety, and its glory.”  A. Murray, Abide in Christ

I am struck by this single thought: my maturity in Christ is directly proportional to the degree to which I am bearing fruit for others. In other words, the point of my Spiritual formation is NOT for my benefit at all, but for the benefit of others.  To what extent, then, is my focus on pouring myself into the lives of others, whether in my fellowship or outside my fellowship?  To what extent do I permit God to draw me toward others for the specific purpose of meeting their needs as opposed to meeting my own need for validation or to free me from guilt or some other such selfish motive?

And since a church is nothing more (and nothing less) than the sum of its “members”, I believe this same principle is true of churches: they are only as effective as they are focused on meeting the needs of each other and of those outside their walls.

Thanks, Andrew, for this reminder!

© Blake Coffee

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com


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Categories : Books that Changed Me, missional, Spiritual Formation

Languages of Worship (The Biblical Illustration)

24 11 2009

Tuesday Re-mix – This is a popular post from last year, updated and resubmitted for your consideration and comments.

The LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him. Genesis 12:7

David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the LORD with all his might… II Samuel 6:14

Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. John 12:3

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death… Philippians 3:10

My first post on this topic (and by this title) was  here.  Think of it as an introduction.

If you have ever had to plan a corporate or “gathered” worship experience for a diverse group of people, you know how challenging it can be.  This person prefers hymns, that person prefers choruses.  This person loves  Power Point, that person hates it, and so on and so forth.  And it is those differences in preferences which have contributed to what we call the “worship wars” troubling so many of our churches today.

I believe those differences can be sorted out into two categories.  Some of them have to do with cultural upbringing.  In that respect, the preferences are learned languages which we have developed over time.  I grew up singing hymns so I have developed a love for them, a preference.  Others did not grow up with them and find them to be difficult to understand.  They prefer a more “user friendly” chorus.  This category of preferences is very akin to the Mac versus PC issue in the computer world.

But there is a second category of preferences that go beyond just cultural or learned responses.  Going back to the computer metaphor, there are some worship preferences which have more to do with our circuit board than with whatever application we happen to be running at the time.  They are about temperament or personality.  They have to do with how God created us.  If the first category of issues is essentially a “software” issue, this second category is more of a “hardware” issue…all the culturalization in the world will not change it, because it has to do with how we were hardwired from birth.

In his book, Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas challenges us to consider how very different many of the “worshipers” in the Bible were from one another.  For example, consider four of them: Abraham, David, Mary of Bethany, and Paul.  If you were called upon to plan a worship experience that would engage all four of these worshipers, what would it look like?  Abraham was a traditionalist, always looking back at what was and remembering.  He approached God best by building altars.  David, on the other hand, was passionate and exuberant in his worship.  He celebrated being in God’s presence with singing and dancing.  Mary’s (of Bethany) pathway to worship was just sitting in Jesus’ presence, gazing adoringly at him, contemplating His love.  Paul was an intellectual.  If you want to engage him in worship, you better have your Bible opened and be challenging him with thought-provoking truths.  Each of these dear friends loved the Lord and was loved by God.  Each of them were wired completely differently in terms of the environment in which they preferred to approach the Lord.

Can we in the church today learn to give each other the leeway to be wired differently from one another?  Can we learn to embrace those differences and use them to make our worship experiences even richer?  Can we as leaders in the church learn to exert our influence so as to promote tolerance in our people for a variety of forms of worship?  I say yes, yes and yes.  I have faith in the church.

By the way, for more on this concept, you should check out Gary Thomas’ website and particularly his book, Sacred Pathways. Intriguing stuff.

© Blake Coffee

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com


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Categories : Books that Changed Me, Church Unity, Worship Wars

Trusting God’s People…Again

8 10 2009

I’m posting this under the category, “Books that Changed Me”.  When I created that category, I didn’t intend it to be for books I had written.  But I suppose it goes without saying, every book you write changes you.  This one was certainly no different.

trusting_vFINALlowDepending on whose statistics you use, anywhere from 15% to 40% of Christians today would say they have been wounded deeply by other Christians.  Think about that.  That is an enormous percentage.  If there are 100 million Americans today who claim to be Christian, that means that somewhere between 15 million and 40 million would say they have felt genuinely betrayed by their Christian brothers or sisters.

That betrayal coming at the hands of the church is among the deepest emotional and Spiritual pains imaginable.  After all, the church is supposed to be a safe place for us, a place where we are genuinely loved and accepted even with all our flaws and shortcomings.  When betrayal comes from there, it comes from the last bastion of Spiritual safety we know.  It cuts deeply and it renders us Spiritually (if not emotionally) incapacitated for a season in our life.  You may be one of these wounded saints.  If not, the chances are high that you know one.

The question this raises: what is the church’s responsibility for responding to these dear friends?

The reality is that the pews (or chairs, or benches) in your worship center are often filled with people hurting from this very pain.  They were hurt deeply in another church and left there and are now in your church.  And they brought all that baggage with them.  What they want most is to just sit in the back of the room and be invisible for a while.  They’re fairly certain they will not re-engage  actively in church again…after all, that’s how they got hurt in the first place.  But something in them tells them they do need to be here.  So they come and sit quietly, hoping to remain anonymous.  But they are not healing.  They are not growing.  And having studied these very people for some years now, I can tell you unequivocally that time does not heal these wounds. A person can go for decades without ever dealing with these injuries and without ever even coming close to healing.  The only way healing comes is when that person decides to embark on a healing journey.

This, it seems to me, is where we (the church) can help.  We can provide that journey.  We can prepare an environment for them which is safe and accepting of them.  We can give them a place where they can tell their story and cry and read God’s Word and slowly begin to trust Him and His people again.  And we can give them each other, i.e., help them know that they are not alone and that there are others who know their pain well  because they have experienced it themselves.  They can carry one another’s burdens and pray for one another for a while and they can go on this healing journey together.  The church can provide that.

Now here is where the possibilities get pretty exciting.  What do you suppose might happen in our country if we were to bring genuine healing to 15 million to 40 million Christians and re-energize them for ministry?  Could you get excited about that?  I have.

© Blake Coffee

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way and do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction. For web posting, a link to this document on this website is preferred. Any exceptions to the above must be approved by Blake Coffee.

Please include the following statement on any distributed copy: © Blake Coffee. Website: churchwhisperer.com


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Categories : Books that Changed Me, H2H, leadership, Reconciliation

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