Stop saying Christ has risen

Here we are in the Easter season and we are confronted with a small matter of language that has a larger implication toward our understanding of the resurrection. 

The traditional Easter greeting is one person says, "Christ is Risen" and the other says "He is risen indeed!" However, sometimes we slip into our language and it comes out "Christ has risen". This is where a little slip has a larger implication. 

To say that Christ is risen is to say that the event is not limited to history but an ongoing reality. It is not to deny the historical implications, but it does imply that Christ "is" and not just "has".

To say that Christ "has risen" is to imply, even if not intended, that we understand resurrection as a past event that we memorialize and celebrate but do not embrace its current impact. The same theological thought goes into funerals. Christian funerals are not limited to memorializing the dead, but celebrating the life and resurrection. 

So least we forget that resurrection IS the reality we live with, stop saying "Christ has risen" it just is not the whole Truth.

If New Church Starts Were Seen Like Tech Start Ups? (Church + Y Combinator)

In the area of the church that I serve in we have tried many different ways to start new churches. There is some technical lingo here, but new churches come from parachute drops to the cathedral model and everything in between. While there is a much training that goes into the new church and new church pastor, there is not a lot of support from other local churches to the new church.

There are a number of reasons why local churches don't support new church starts. Perhaps the most insidious of the reasons is the unspoken theology that guides many of our actions: the theology of scarcity. More commonly called "Zero Sum" thinking, the theology of scarcity is the idea that if one church supports another church then the original church will suffer. There is only so many people or resources that if one church were to give up some of theirs to benefit the other church, then one church would win at the expense of another loosing. 

So how do we combat the theology of scarcity in supporting new church starts? Might we look to the tech world and specifically to the Y Combinator.

You can read more about the Y Combinator here. But here is a sense of what it might look like:

• Recruit pastors/churches who want to start a new church or campus
• Enroll them in a 10 week intensive course where they work on getting it all set up
• Weekly dinners with specific keynote speakers who are experts in an area
• Regular Office hours with coaches, mentors and leaders
• Pitch the new church model at a gathering (Annual Conference?) where other pastors or church leaders can see the vision and the work done so far. 
• Leaders and churches can invest money or people into the new church, becoming partners to the new church
• New church receives support and resources from a partner and the partner receives things in return depending on their level of investment/support.

There is more to this but I hope you get the gist. The goal would be to see to it that potential partners have a reason to "buy in" and support the new church so as to combat the theology of scarcity/Zero sum.

Fighting With a Mystic: Good Friday Edition

Every Holy Week I recall one of Meister Eckhart's teachings that pricks me at my core. While I do as much as I can to distance myself from the difficulties of Christ's life and make excuses for the teachings of Jesus that call me to die to myself, Eckhart's teachings calls me back to a Truth that I don't want to know that I know:

"Scripture says,  "No one knows the Father but the Son." Therefore, if you want to know God, you must not only be like the Son, you must be the Son."

Many of us in the West are not comfortable with poetic mystic language. We tend more toward toward didactic (and verbose) prose. 

Enter Martin Luther. 

In much the same spirit of Eckhart, Luther wrote in The Freedom of a Christian (1520):

"As our heavenly Father has in Christ freely come to our aid, we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians..."

You may have seen on the internet the acronym TLDR which means: Too long, did't read. C.S. Lewis understood that many people were not going to read Eckhart or Luther so he wrote books that were more accessible and shorter. So to quote Lewis from Mere Christianity (1952): 

"Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.”

As we enter into Good Friday, I confess I am not ready to be a Little Christ.