Hope in Baseball (and Christ)

Each spring there is a sense of hope that moves through the hearts of so many people. There is a sense that this is the year that all the pain of the past will be destroyed and that all the shame of mistakes and falling short will be redeemed. It is the sense that finally, after much work, recovery from injury, getting the right leaders and trusting in the basic fundamentals that this is the year the Cubs will win the Major League Championship. 

This sense of hope has moved through the hearts of Cub fans for over 100 years. There is always hope that this is the year the Cubbies, or any team for that matter, will overcome all the difficulties and struggles of the long season in order to stand victorious. And even if they don't, well there is always next year. 

As Peter Gomes said in his book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus:

 “Hope is not merely the optimistic view that somehow everything will turn out all right in the end if everyone just does as we do. Hope is the more rugged, the more muscular view that even if things don’t turn out all right and aren’t all right, we endure through and beyond the times that disappoint or threaten to destroy us.”

The thing about baseball fans is there is a sense of hope and not just optimism. These fans don't abandon the team just because they did not preform the way the fan hoped they would have. Fans are not driven by optimism, but by hope. They will turn out even when the team stinks and all hope is lost. 

 The question for the disciple of Christ in the Easter season is are we just optimistic about the Way of Christ or are we hopeful? 

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.