jonathan stegall

In March, Tom Sine of Mustard Seed Associates is releasing a book called The New Conspirators. The book has a blog here.

“In the UK, more churches were planted in the last seven years than Starbucks were opened–over 1,000 churches compared to only 750 Starbucks coffee shops. Interestingly, most of these church plants were ethnic and multi-cultural.

“God is doing something through a new generation, as I report in The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed At a Time, which will be published by IVP in 2008. I believe God is working through at least four streams: the emerging church, missional churches, mosaic church plants and the monastic movement.”

Amazing stuff. God is moving in the U.K., and most of us in the U.S. are totally unaware of what he is doing. We think of the country as totally secular, and most Christians see that as a bad thing.

I present the idea that that’s a good thing. I look forward to the day when the American church does not have the political and societal influence it thinks it has, and has nothing to save it from itself but the living God. Nothing it can do but figure out what God is doing.

On a purely anti-corporate note, I find it wonderful that there have been more new churches than new Starbucks.

Chapter six of This Beautiful Mess is a reminder that, although the kingdom is here, it’s around for us to join and live in, it’s also not here. There is a tension. There is a “not yet.”

Somehow Christians have a hard time saying things like, “I don’t know why the hell this is happening or how this will end. You guys must be scared to death.” I guess we all need to be able to explain life down to every last detail even when the answers don’t mean anything to us. We just can’t stand the questions. But in the kingdom of God, I have come to believe, it is all right not to have all the answers, and I think Jesus likes it even more when we don’t make up ones that are safe and easy but hollow.

I have been blessed with a faith community that gets this, and refuses to make up safe and easy, but hollow, answers. Does it make it easier that when we don’t know what’s going on, we know it’s ok? No. But it does give us the freedom for it not to be easy. To admit that it’s not easy. To ask the questions, and to be confused.

That kind of freedom, I think, is the only way to be authentic before God. To really know that God knows us, and not to be afraid of what he knows. Can you imagine being entirely known, and yet not being afraid of the one who knows you?

Chapter five of This Beautiful Mess gets me right here:

When Jesus talked about building the kingdom, He never talked about us building it or advancing it. Never. He said, “The kingdom is…” He simply invited His followers to see it, embrace it, believe in the unfading reality of it - and join in what His Father was already doing in the world.

I’ve said here before that I’m a Pentecostal. Sort of. I met Jesus in a Pentecostal church, and I attended a Pentecostal college to earn a degree in Pentecostal ministry. I have a theology that is profoundly influenced by Pentecostal theology and experience. And that’s a great thing.

Pentecostals often talk about building the kingdom. Evangelizing the earth. And so on. It’s rare to hear Pentecostals talk about seeing the kingdom, embracing it, and joining in what Jesus is already doing. That phrase, join in what Jesus is doing, has gripped me for several years. I have been fortunate to know Pentecostals (and non-Pentecostals) who get what that means. I’ve talked about it. Thought about it. Prayed about it.

And that’s become my passion for life. To know what Jesus is doing, and join it. I remember reading in one of Brian McLaren’s books or articles that he was told by a mentor to always seek the forefront of what God is doing and just get involved with it. I resonate with this. It’s a difficult thing to seek, but it’s a worthy thing to seek.

It’s difficult to throw off the desire to keep doing things, and building things, and achieving things, and think about being things. And that’s what this chapter is talking about. It takes the focus off of me. It puts the focus on Jesus.

The chapter has me again when it says:

Choosing to live in the kingdom dimension creates some major shifts in our thinking. One of those is the shift from advancing to embracing.

Here, Rick McKinley is talking about that desire to move “to the next level.” I have prayed that prayer so many times. There’s a constant desire to reach a new level of whatever it is that we’re trying to achieve. Here, though, he’s talking about living in a new dimension.

The dimension of the kingdom, where Jesus has already placed us. There is something significant in that thought. If we live in that dimension, we don’t need to be constantly comparing ourselves and trying to achieve the next big thing.

Chapter four of This Beautiful Mess begins the part of the book that is designed to teach us how to see the kingdom of God. It’s already here, but obviously there are many Christians who don’t appear to see it the way Jesus intended it to be seen.

The part of this chapter that gripped me starts like this:

One of the biggest challenges to following Jesus into His kingdom is not a lack of direction but a lack of desire. Most of us don’t really want to do it.

I’m often in that boat. I want to do a lot of things that I don’t ever actually start doing. He continues with some stories of the beginnings of his church, Imago Dei.

We had just enough desire to show up, pray, and get honest-and that’s what we told God… We told God that we wanted to care but didn’t-not really. We told Him we were afraid to follow Him completely because we didn’t want to look like idiots; we didn’t want to risk losing our comforts.

And this is where it begins. We begin to see ways we can engage with the heart of Jesus that we didn’t see before. We begin to want to do those things, and the things we saw and didn’t want to do.

Chapter three of This Beautiful Mess starts off like this:

“When I became a Christ follower, the sad truth is that I transferred Christ into my kingdom, into the context of my life.”

In this chapter, Rick McKinley talks about our tendency to create our own kingdom for Jesus to rule, or to simply leave him out of our kingdoms. Either we create our own kingdoms and expect Jesus to drive out or enemies and give us money and power and whatever else we want, or we allow him to be our Saviour but not our King. He can be King of the afterlife. Or King of something else that doesn’t matter, because we can take care of the things that do matter. In doing either of these, we miss the entire message of the kingdom of God: it is at hand. It is not of this world. It turns the world upside down.

The chapter finishes like this:

“From personal experience, I can tell you that he will let you live in your own construct if you choose. But He’ll never bow down to you or adapt Himself to your beliefs.

I believe that creating our own kingdom for Jesus to rule, or leaving him out of ruling anything important to us, is one of the easiest struggles for us in Western Christianity. We have it easy in this respect. If we want to baptize our preference of something, or our dislike of something, all we have to do is put Jesus into it. If we don’t want to deal with what he might think about something, we can just take care of it ourselves. But he doesn’t fit. People see right through our smokescreens.

Some time ago, I purchased The Practice of the Presence of God, and haven’t yet gotten around to reading it.

Understand that I have a massive list of books that are sitting around waiting for me to read them, but lately there hasn’t been much time to do so between the freelance work and other things.

Anyway. Recently, I received a free audiobook of The Practice of the Presence of God, and thought to myself, “I should listen to this in my car. I can’t be working while I drive.” So, today I decided to begin listening. The audiobook is slightly less than two hours in length, so it could be finished in a couple of days with my commute. Today, though, I listened to the preface.

I know a little bit about Brother Lawrence, from college and from the linked Wikipedia article, so I was already very excited about listening to this. The preface, though, blew me away. Brother Lawrence, in a summary, was a man who could commune as closely with God while working in the kitchen as he could praying at an altar.

I yearn for this. I yearn to be able to feel closeness with God as I design, or code, or drive, or walk through Wal-Mart. So I look forward to this book, and will post some things on it in the near future.

Chapter two of This Beautiful Mess covers the idea that Jesus cannot be separated from his kingdom.

We have taken His free salvation insurance like those folks on the hillsides who ate His free lunches. Then we go home. We carry with us a nice Jesus with a cool title. But all the same, we go home king-less.

And here we sit telling Jesus he can be our Savior, but he has no relevance to our lives. He’s not smart enough to understand what we deal with on a daily basis. We evangelicals are so good at this. We want everyone to accept Jesus and take on our beliefs, but we don’t think he is capable of or cares about influencing the world around us through our daily lives. He doesn’t care about war, or the environment, or the poor.

And liberals all too often go the opposite direction. Jesus said a lot of great things, and we should go out and feed the poor and help the sick and maybe even have a revolution and overthrow some corruption, but Jesus doesn’t care how screwed up we are, and isn’t capable of or interested in changing us.

Great book. I can rant about this stuff all day, but again, what am I doing about it? How is it changing me, internally or externally? I need this kind of challenge.

Chapter one of This Beautiful Mess introduces the idea of the kingdom of God, and how it can be beautiful and messy at the same time. Love it. In the last couple of years, I have become very interested in the kingdom of God. Through classes and professors, and books like Divine Conspiracy and The Secret Message of Jesus, I’ve learned and thought and questioned what the idea means. Living in present-day America, we often get the message that the kingdom of God is America, or that it is like America. If we get a bit more spiritual, we start to think maybe it’s the end of the world, when Jesus returns and rules over all the earth. But we don’t get the idea that it might mean something to us now. And this, I believe, is why the phrase “kingdom of God” has such a bad taste in the mouths of people we might talk to about it.

Anyway. Like I said, here we are introduced to the idea that the kingdom of God is a beautiful mess. It is messy in that we are messy. We are not expected to clean ourselves up. Jesus is cleaning us up, and using our messes. At Revolution, we often talk about how messy we are. But, in all honesty, the atmosphere there is “Is that all you’ve got? Come on in.” No messes are too messy to be beautiful in the hands of God. And that’s what this chapter is getting at. The beauty is that God likes us. That he wants to experience us, and us to experience him.

Out in Portland, there is a church called Imago Dei Community. They have a podcast. The pastor there is Rick McKinley, who is best known for being Donald Miller’s pastor. Enough links for three sentences?

Anyway. Rick McKinley has written a couple of books. Evidently, he has some copies of This Beautiful Mess around, and has offered to give a copy to people who will write a review about it on their blogs, or wherever. Today, I got my copy. Not only is it amazing that an author would do that, it looks like it will be an amazing book.

I’ve never done it this way before, but my plan is to blog about each chapter as I read it. Another series! Woo ho!

Carnegie Mellon University has created a new version of the ever-present CAPTCHA that many of us use to sign up for accounts all over the web. We all hate it, but most of us understand that spammers would be worse than they are without it. reCAPTCHA is a program that requires the user to enter two words. One word is a known word from its database, and the other word is a scanned image from a book. Massive numbers of books are being digitized every day. Saved for posterity, and all that.

Computers can’t always read scanned pages very well. Often they make a valiant attempt, but they’ll read the word wrong. This reCAPTCHA method allows computers to get new words. If the user enters the correct first word, great. If they enter the second one, whatever book that word is from is one step closer to digital existence, and they can pass the word around a bit to make sure it’s right. That’s awesome.