Your Next Step toward Community

31 01 2012

Tuesday Re-mix - 

Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray. Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.  And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. James 5:13-16

Passages like this one from Pastor James make us squirm.  We see them in scripture and we gloss over them, because they make us uncomfortable.  We honestly do not know what to do with them, because, if we’re being honest with ourselves, they bear almost no resemblance at all to the church with whom we are familiar.

The notion of being so involved in one another’s lives, so intertwined together, that we know each other’s struggles and are fully mobilized to help and to pray…the notion that we would be so interdependent on each other that we would share our deepest fears and our hardest temptations, i.e., that we would actually confess our sins to each other…the notion that we would live our lives fully open and exposed to our Christian community, knowing that it is safe and that they will love and support us even with all our flaws…these notions are all foreign to our culture of self-sufficiency and anonymity.

We have reared at least two adult generations of Christians who consider social interdependence a weakness in an individual.  Saying, “I am hurting and am needing help” is reserved only for the most severe needs.  Daring to share a sin problem with a friend is not only dangerous to us, but is thought by many to be an imposition on that friend.  We build up walls of protection around us and we keep our distance.  We put on shallow, plastic smiles and we act as if everything is fine, when our lives are in fact crumbling to pieces.  In short, we live exactly opposite from the way Christian community is described in scripture.

This is why communities of support groups and recovery groups feel so refreshing to Christians.  This is why prison ministries (where there is no pretense left) and street ministries (where only humility and grace remain) have become shining examples of Christian community, while mainstream congregations often remain graceless and aloof.  And yes, this is why so much scripture about “one another” feels so very foreign to us.

The question, then, for me to ponder as I listen to Pastor James extol the virtues of Christian community is this: what can I do today in my own life to get one step closer to the kind of intimacy James envisioned when he wrote these words?  What is my next step toward community?

© 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 : Church Unity, Everyone's a Minister, Genuine Community

When All Else Fails, Read the Instructions

17 01 2012

Tuesday Re-mix - 

Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. James 1:23-24

When installing an appliance or putting together a piece of furniture, it seems to me there are levels of understanding. The lowest level is when you know you don’t know anything at all, so you sit down with the instructions first, before you do anything.  The next level is when you think you know something about it, so you start without the instructions and soon find that your are in fact an idiot and then sit down with the instructions. The third level of understanding is when you know enough about the task to know that each case is a little different, so you start by sitting down with the instructions.

If there are higher levels of understanding than this, I admit to being totally out of touch with them.  I myself typically float back and forth between the first two levels. When my wife sees me walking through the house carrying a tool, she immediately drops what she’s doing and follows me as she grabs the phone and calls for help. I have learned (mostly the hard way) how helpful it is to read and follow the instructions from the beginning.  In my case, it doesn’t guarantee success, but it at least prevents me from screwing my table top into the floor, or other such embarrassing results.

When asked how I can mediate congregational conflict in such a wide variety of denominations and churches, how it is possible to effectively navigate church conflict even with little understanding of the culture, the answer seems obvious to me: I just stay focused on the instructions, i.e., scripture.  I learned early in this ministry that there is no amount of worldly wisdom or experience which can guarantee a peaceful, successful mediation in a congregational dispute.  Emotions are high, the pain runs deep, and volatile relationships are unpredictable at best.  There simply is no putting things back together without starting with the instructions: the Word of God.

Interestingly, once you start there, the cultural differences suddenly do not matter much.  Scripture has this remarkable ability to cut through culture and the things of this world.  I certainly cannot always explain why it works…I just know that it does.  That, of course, is what child-like faith looks like.  Finding our way through broken relationships requires a child-like faith in the Word of God and what it tells us about relationships.  As my Dad always says: when all else fails, try reading the instructions.

Of course, I have from time to time encountered a group for whom the Bible is not the final word…a group who questions its authority.  I am always quick to clarify for them that I really have nothing to offer them.  I wouldn’t even know where to start.  If as a “church” they don’t recognize God’s Word as their supreme authority, then for me it is like trying to put something together with no instructions at all.  If the instructions which come with my new appliance are nothing more to me than guidelines, i.e., loose fences to lean against, then chances are pretty good that my new appliance will never work the way it was intended to work.  For a Christian, “The Word” should be at the very center of life.  For a church, it should be the very foundation upon which all things are built.

When it comes to mediating congregational conflict and all its inherent complexities, I am just not smart enough to come up with my own “wisdom” about how it should go.  I am at the lowest level of understanding.  So, I start with the instructions.  I let scripture order my steps and inform my process.  I allow God’s Word to set the agenda.  Then, just maybe, there is at least a chance for success at the end of the day.

© 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 : 5 Principles of Unity, Church Unity, conflict, leadership, Peacemakers

Finding Focus in a Church’s Grief

10 01 2012

Tuesday Re-mix - 

“Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess.” Hebrews 3:1

I have been blessed with only a limited amount of genuine grieving in my life.  Frankly, I’ve done a whole lot more consoling of others than I have needed consoling myself.  But you don’t have to be an expert on grief to know that it has a profound effect on our ability to see truth.  In fact, a part of the healing process is learning to look through the pain to some larger truth which, difficult as it may be to grasp in spite of the pain, still has a way of guiding us.

But did you know that the grief process is not reserved only for individuals?  Churches grieve also.  They grieve the loss of a much-loved leader, the loss of a ministry or program, the loss of a “way of doing things”, the loss of unity…all of these can cause a type of grieving process for a church.  And like the grieving process for an individual, a church’s grief can be unpredictable and unrelenting.  It can last a few days or a few years, perhaps even an entire generation.  It can cause the church to do and say things it doesn’t mean to do and say.  But most of all, just like the grief process for anyone else, it is painful…unbearably so.

Moreover, grief has a way of disorienting us, both as individuals and as congregations.  It turns up into down and right into left.  It leaves us not even knowing which way to look for direction.  It is chaotic and complex and confounding.

So, it is in the pain of real grief where we are often left with little orientation other than to fall back onto whatever “safe harbor” we have established ahead of time.  For me, that would be God’s Word.  Whether in my individual grief or in my corporate grief, I have already long since decided where I will turn.  I have placed my most childlike faith in God’s Word, so that, even through the unspeakable pain of emptiness and loss, I can at least find some general sense of my bearings.

Of course, hearing the truth–perhaps even knowing the truth–does not take the pain away.  It does not bypass the grief process.  We must still go through all the pain which grief brings, for however long the process may be for us.  But fixing our eyes on eternal truth at least serves to give us direction, it reminds us to breathe, and then to breathe again.  It walks before us every day of the journey, calling us one more step forward…not around the grief, but through it.

It gives us the only thing we can trust during the otherwise mixed-up season of emptiness and loss.  There is nothing else trustworthy, nothing else which is not capable of leading us astray.  We must fix our eyes on Jesus and cling to His Word…and crawl forward, and then do it again.  And at some point a long way down that road, clarity begins to come again.  And though the loss is still there and has carved out a new normal for us, we still have the one thing worth holding onto through it all…God’s love.  And isn’t that exactly what your church needs most?

© 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 : 5 Principles of Unity, conflict, H2H, leadership

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