jonathan stegall

Before I moved to Atlanta, I spent the last period of my residence in Lakeland, Florida as part of a house church. I feel blessed and privileged to have been a part of that community.

The interesting thing is what kind of responses I got back then, if I told someone that I was part of a house church. Essentially, these responses varied from, “Oh, you go to a Sunday evening Bible study. That’s great for you.” (with a warning to ensure that I wasn’t part of a cult) to “Oh, that’s great. My church has those, too. We just call them Sunday Schools small groups cell groups life groups house churches. Then, the church meets together on Sunday mornings.”

I’m sure you can catch the implication that is in both of these responses. I don’t necessarily believe that the respondents were intentionally trying to either reduce the community to a Bible study, or assume that they already understood what was going on because it went on in their churches. But I do believe that this is an issue that is worthy of consideration.

The state of house churches

In the United States, there is a movement away from the building-based churches of the past 1,600+ years and toward smaller, less building-based churches that you could call house churches. George Barna believes that these churches (and their attendees), which are not housed in church buildings (whether they are cathedrals or shopping malls) will outnumber those that are housed in church buildings within just a decade or two.

Understand that we in the United States are behind the rest of the world in this trend, as the remnants of Christendom have stronger influence here than in other countries. As postmodernism and postcolonialism are two sides of the same coin, Christendom on the earth will hopefully have its days numbered.

You can read more about this in his book Revolution. These churches do not all necessarily meet in homes, as they might meet in bars, coffeeshops, nightclubs, or other neutral spaces. The main point is that they forgo the use of “religious spaces.”

A large percentage of these house churches, as my friend Brad Culver says, function in such a way that they try to transplant a traditional, building-based church into a home, or other space. So, this kind of church maintains an identical ecclesiology to the church on the corner. This is what we encounter when people believe that they already understand what a house church is, simply because their own church has small groups that meet in homes.

There is also a percentage, which I believe is probably growing, of house churches that function as a community of people that are angry with the traditional church. Many of these churches do have a genuine hunger to create something different for those who are angry, or hurt, or rejected by the traditional church, but because there is such a root of bitterness they will almost certainly be unsuccessful in truly finding the heart of God.

In alternative ministry, where my wife and I function, this is extremely common. You may be aware of the fact that alternative subcultures (punk, goth, metal, retro, etc.) are to a large extent rebellion against modern culture. They identified many of its shortcomings with incredible perception, and railed against them. In this sense, when they arose in the 60s and 70s, they were the first manifestation of postmodernism outside universities.

But because many of them, in their defining periods as subcultures, defined themselves by what they were against rather than what they were for, there is a potential for deep seeded anger and resentment (this is similar to the deep seeded anger and resentment that many Christians have for the secular world that they have railed against). Thus, when these subcultures are reached by the message of Jesus, they often retain their anger and resentment, and when the traditional church does not accept them in the way they function as a church or the way they function as people, this anger and resentment is turned against the traditional church as well.

Certainly, this kind of church, based on rebellion and bitterness, is not unique to alternative ministry or to the house church movement, and not all (or even most) alternative churches are characterized by this kind of foundation, but it is something against which these churches must intentionally guard themselves.

Finally, there are house churches that function as part of a genuine move of God that is happening in the earth. I want to again glean from the wisdom of Brad Culver, who calls his own community a “micro-missional faith community.” In this sense, he is able to define what his community is rather than having to defend what it is not.

In any case, these kind of communities have a beautiful potential for variety, and we can look at what they are like in another post.

When I was in high school and began getting to know Jesus, it was trendy to compare sharing one’s faith to having a cure for cancer that the world desperately needed. If only we would go out and tell people about our cure, they would come to us to receive it and be healed of their various deadly conditions. After all, what cancer patient would turn down an offer for a cure? Other popular comparisons were made to rescuers offering a lifeboat to people who were drowning, firefighters offering rescue from a burning building, and so on.

I very strongly wanted, and still very strongly want, to introduce Jesus to people that didn’t know him. I don’t remember ever using this kind of disease rhetoric when discussing faith with anyone, and I’m positive that if I did use it, it didn’t work and I would happily apologize to anyone with whom I may have used it.

Theologically, the idea of a cancer cure is not a bad concept. Humanity is messed up, and we all know it. I believe that one of the reasons that postmodernism exists is that modernism, with all of its science and objectivity and reason and knowledge, could not stop the most technologically advanced society of the 1930s from putting people into ovens. Following this time period, people earnestly questioned their knowledge and reason, and the idea of an innate human goodness.

Also, I don’t think there is a theological issue with the idea that Jesus can help us in our messiness. Many people, Christian and not, would agree for various reasons.

My issue is with the environment into which we are expected to put that concept. In post-Christendom, we as Christians are much more likely to be viewed as a cancer that needs a cure, contributing to the horror of the world in which we live, than we are to be viewed as people that might have a way to make the world a better place.

Especially in a conversation with a new friend or acquaintance, the idea that I have a cure or vaccine for the world’s problems because I’m a Christian is going to be met with ridicule at best, and a lifelong rejection of any consideration of Jesus at worst.

Recently, I’ve been reading Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change.

I have also read The Secret Message of Jesus, which is meant to be read as a companion volume. If you have not read The Secret Message of Jesus, feel encouraged to click the link and pick it up, as it is on sale for $6.99 at Amazon.

In any case, as I have been reading Everything Must Change, I have found much to be challenged by, to remember, to share with others, and to allow Jesus to shape my life by. Most of the things that he presents are at least familiar to me, if not things that I’ve thought, prayed, discussed, taught, been taught, and been convicted by. Often, though, he expresses these things in ways that I have thought but not expressed, or have forgotten, or particularly in ways that bring up new implications for my life.

As an aside, there is a review of this book that Jonny Baker wrote several months ago, and it is worth reading. Jonny Baker is one of the people that is most aware of what God is doing in Western culture, and he has a brilliant mind and spirit. The post indicates that much of the thinking is already established in the U.K., although it is certainly radical in the United States. Brian McLaren has an insightful comment on the post, as well.

The strength of this book lies in the insights that it presents into what powers the world, especially America and those who are impacted by the American Empire, and in the insights that it presents into what Jesus has to say to that power. The “framing story” that Jesus offers really can and should change everything, in my life and your life and in the ways we interact with the world around us.

There are countless examples and quotations (and misquotations) floating around on the internet, and a quick search will bring up many of them. But there are a few things that have really shaken me, and inspired my imagination.

Communism, [Rene Padilla] says, specialized in distribution but failed at production. As a result, it ended up doing a great job of distributing poverty evenly. Capitalism, he says, was excellent at production but weak at distribution. As a result, it ended up rewarding the wealthy with obscene amounts of wealth while the poor suffered on in horrible degradation and indignity…

The twenty-first century began in the aftermath of the defeat of Marxism. The story of the coming century will likely be the story of whether a sustainable form of capitalism can be saved from theocapitalism [the religion-like seeking of prosperity], or whether unrestrained theocapitalism will result in such gross inequity between rich and poor that violence and counterviolence will bring civilization to a standstill, or perhaps worse.

There is an amazing amount of depth in that paragraph. and it helps introduce the “suicide machine” and its systems that this book is attempting to deconstruct. Certainly it is not an optimistic statement, but the book is constantly balancing it with statements like this:

If we believe, the decadent and self-indulgent West can be converted from overconsumers to creative stewards, from empire builders to community builders, from sex-obsessed and self-indulgent couch potatoes to people like Graciela, Luiz, and Leticia and their family - who along the way through their life, discover a magnificent vision and a sacred mission that give their lives unimagined meaning.

And this is the kind of statement that challenges everything about the way I live, and inspires my visions about the way I want to live. This is the kind of thing that makes the book a valid challenge to those of us who claim the story of Jesus.

I’m a male, Christian feminist. I have learned and taught the truth of Scripture, that before God there is no division between men and women, just as there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles. I have sought to authentically live that out, as a minister, as a husband, and as a person.

Now that I’ve gotten that statement down, I want to look at a couple of challenges that a guy who makes that statement faces.

When I was in college, one of the really trendy books for “young Christian men” was Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. I must confess: I read it once. Further confession: there were certain parts of it that I liked, and that I think spoke truth to me as a man (and, I feel that I was able to integrate certain concepts into my very different perspective). But other parts of it made me sick.

I haven’t read any of his other books, and I haven’t read his wife’s book (books?) either, so I may not be entirely informed on his views. But, a fairly large part of my memory of this book is the mental image of a man feeling alive and masculine because he was able to hike up a mountain with a gun, and kill a bear. Another fairly large part of my memory is the concept of a man being alive and masculine because he can rescue his lovely princess from dreadful dangers, because of course she wants a knight in shining armor to come galloping by and do just that.

I don’t believe guns make anyone masculine, and certainly they don’t make anyone alive. I think guns are barbaric, even when they are used against other beings that know how to use them. But against a bear? Bears may be big and look impressive, but what are they really going to do to a man from hundreds of feet away? Growl? Maybe stand up and wave their arms around, if they even see him?

Further, I don’t believe my wife needs a knight in shining armor. Certainly, she needs support. She needs to feel cherished and celebrated, and her mind sees those things manifest themselves in different ways that mine does. But rescue is a universal thing, and she’s as capable of rescuing me (and I need it just as much) as I am of rescuing her. And, of course, ultimately neither of us are entirely capable of rescuing each other anyway, and will utterly fail at marriage if we expect that from each other.

I was reminded of all of this as I was watching a video called Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage. Apparently, it is a series of six (or so) videos, and I’ve seen two of them.

First video

The first one was decent. It discussed the metaphor of a man’s brain as being full of boxes that are, by default, separate. So, there is a wife box, a kid box, a work box, a car box, a recreation box, and so on. Each box stays as separate from the other boxes as possible. Then, there is the metaphor of a woman’s brain as being like interconnected wiring. Everything touches everything else, and so everything affects everything else. An argument my wife has with her boss may pop up while she’s watching a movie, while an argument I have with my boss may never pop up outside of work.

This is not a new metaphor. I learned it in counseling classes in college, from people who’s wisdom I respect, and I do see evidence that it is at least partly true. I don’t entirely disagree with it (as long as its implications are not blown out of proportion, which they often are). However, it does bring up a strange question. Is this a Western issue? Typically, Eastern worldviews (this includes Jewish thought, which is very important to those of us who seek to understand Scripture that was predominantly written by Jews) are very holistic. Spirituality is not separate from the rest of life. Eastern thought, for example, does not have the saying, “I’d do ______ if only I weren’t in church,” because it recognizes that one’s interactions with Jesus are not confined to a single location for a few hours a week.

So, does this metaphor break down outside of Western society? Are Eastern men as non-compartmentalized as Western women? If so, why? How? What can I do to become less compartmentalized? If Western women do not have compartmentalized minds, how do they have an equally compartmentalized worldview (the above quote is given by women just as often as it is by men)? If Eastern men do have compartmentalized minds, how do they manage to have a holistic worldview? What can I do to get a more holistic worldview?

Second video

Now, I also saw a second video. This second session went into the oft-repeated idea that men essentially want to be action heroes, and women essentially want to be in wonderful relationships. Men want to beat up the bad guys, and (direct quote) “go back for the girl.” Women want to be in relationships, and for men to (direct quote) “go back for the girl.”

Aside from the obvious exceptions to both of those rules, (I hate action movies, unless they have intelligent thought, and don’t care to beat up anyone or anything, and my wife loves to make fun of chick flicks) the statement that the guy needs to go back for the girl has a direct implication that she is behind him. That makes me entirely sick, and in the context where it was used it reeked of chauvinism. It brought up the image of a man doing _____ while his wife sits at home, taking care of his kids (which was used as an example) until he comes back to sit down and talk to her until he goes back out to do whatever it is that he does.

The (most) frustrating part of the message presented in this video is that it takes legitimate differences between men and women (the fact that they do not think the same way), and uses them to impose limitations and illegitimate gender roles (because they don’t think the same way, certain limitations are seen as necessary) on the people who listen to it. It’s not the kind of message that says, “everything that can go wrong in a marriage can be fixed if the woman just does what the man wants.” It at least has progressed beyond that, as it regularly talks about mutual give and take between the partners in a marriage. I think there is good information mentioned in the message, and if this post weren’t already so long I might go into some of it. But the good information in part two, at least, seemed to be subpoints to a main point that is essentially oppressive.

The struggle that makes this post worth writing is this: being a male feminist who wants to continually improve his marriage is a difficult thing. I enjoy going to marital counseling with my wife. Whether or not I think there is room to grow, of course there always is. I enjoy resources that teach me to grow as a husband. In order to get anything out of some resources, I have to filter what I’m seeing or hearing through my own perspective because the perspective of the given resource (in the case of Wild at Heart, or this video) may be entirely antithetical to my own.

Other things

For what it’s worth, there are some great resources that can speak to a desire for equality.

• Are Men Really Human? (written by a male feminist)
• Christians for Biblical Equality (always a great presence at Cornerstone Festival)
• Christian Feminism blog
• Women in the Bible - Christian Thinktank

Thoughts? I may look further into what it actually means to be a male feminist if there is interest, but for the sake of this post I wanted to look at an issue that repeatedly arises in trying to improve one’s marriage.

The other day, via this link, I learned that To Write Love On Her Arms t-shirts are now being sold in Hot Topic. You can see for yourself here, and there’s even a nice little description.

I first learned of TWLOHA shortly before Cornerstone, 2006. If you are not familiar with them, go ahead and go directly to the story, and learn. Anyway. In 2006, they were still very new, and many people first learned of them that year at Cornerstone. People would walk through the merch tents, stop at the table, read the story, and then look up and realize that the girl the story was about (Renee) was right in front of them.

It’s a beautiful story, and a beautiful ministry that has been birthed out of the story. Since then, these words have been driven into my mind, and they return often:

We were made to be lovers bold in broken places, pouring ourselves out again and again until we’re called home.

In light of all this, I think it’s a beautiful thing that these shirts are being sold in Hot Topic. I’m not a fan of the store. When I was fifteen (maybe sixteen?), I bought my first Goth CD in a Hot Topic near Charlotte. Back then, it was much darker, both in atmosphere and music. The decor seemed to ooze out of the store, along with the music.

Now, it serves as a sanctuary for the mainstream alternative. Certainly, though, this scene needs a ministry like TWLOHA. My fear is that the shirts will become useless statements that declare a person’s store preferences, but I don’t think this is a realistic fear.

To Write Love On Her Arms is a bold statement in a place full of weak statements, and I think it will stand out there. I think it has potential to have a great impact, from the people who work there (who are often amazing, thoughtful people) to the people who shop there (who, from time to time, are also amazing and thoughtful). There are many hurting people who shop there and need a message like that, and I’m glad it is there.

I want to let you in on one of my greatest fears. And one of my greatest hopes. I wrote recently about the ways I’ve grown into things of emergent, and before that how I grew into the underground and have desired to reach out there.

For a little more background on how I got to my current place, I want to give a little more history. While I was in high school, trying to un-learn some things that I had learned before I met Jesus, and trying to figure out what those things meant and what the new things meant, and how to put it all together, I had to figure out what to do about college. I felt strongly that I needed to learn ministry, so I went to a A/G college that is now a university, and pursued a B.S. in Church Ministries with a Bible concentration.

There, one of the first things I was faced with was the question of how I would financially support the kind of ministry I wanted to do. Prior to this, I hadn’t thought about it, at least not in any in-depth way. This was my idealism. It occurred to me then, though, that I could use and enhance the skills I had in web design to support myself. I could create websites on a relatively flexible schedule, do a lot of original, creative work, and make enough money to support myself (and my family, if I were to get one) and also hopefully to support a ministry.

Thus, I had become somewhat cynical of the church. I believed it didn’t care about the kind of ministry that I wanted to do (which, to some extent, is true, though I think it is less true than it was seven years ago when I was preparing to graduate from high school). I benefited from my education even so, much more than I expected. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. My theology and spirituality and hope for the church as a whole. and my part in it, were shaped in powerful ways there, and I was fortunate to meet and marry an amazing woman as well. But, I had traded the first idealism for another idealism, that I could quickly transition into funding a ministry from the creation of great websites.

When I finished the first degree, we weren’t yet financially able to leave Florida, and Florida is still quite behind in technology, and also art, education. So, I pursued another bachelor’s degree, in Interactive Media, at an art school. I learned a lot through it, as well, and then was finally able to leave Florida and see seasons again. Also, I became extremely fortunate to become a part of Revolution Atlanta, and feel like I am involved in, and can be more involved in, ministry there.

Now, I find myself trading, or perhaps balancing, the web-related idealism with cynicism. Do I need to pursue graduate school? If so, where? Who pays for it? If not, can I ever get to the point of doing my own thing? If I do transition into an individual way of working, will I have time to do ministry then? If I don’t, can I work in a relatively normal position, and still have time to do ministry? Who pays for it then? Does that mean I do need to pursue graduate school, more importantly than otherwise?

So, there is much to learn and question.

From Emerging Pentecostals:

…a conversation about emergence within a pentecostal framework would be helped greatly if we took some time to share our stories of emergence.

This is a wonderful idea, and I want to be a part of it. Thus, consider this my story of emergence, or of how I came to be involved with both the pentecostal church and what is commonly called the emerging church.

I met Jesus when I was just shy of fifteen years old, and met him through what you could call a dramatic encounter that took place in an Assembly of God church in Salisbury, North Carolina. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a part of the supernatural actions of God in the world. I wanted to be close to him in tangible ways, and I wanted to bring others to be close to him as well.

As my faith developed, I began to grow in some very specific ways that together have shaped the person I am now, almost ten years later. First, I began to seek out how I, specifically, should serve Jesus with my life. I looked into being a pastor, a missionary to an obscure country, and a number of other things, because I felt strongly that I was called to reach out to people that were far from God.

Finally, I found confirmation in the idea that I was called to reach the outcasts of our own society. The people who did not fit in with the traditional church, whether because the church rejected them, because they rejected the church, or both. This manifests itself in more ways today than it did ten years ago. At the time, most of this kind of ministry was happening in the various underground subcultures, and it still is. But now, it has moved significantly further into the mainstream with organizations like Emergent Village. In any case, my heart was inextricably linked to the underground, and it remains so now.

As I began to learn about this calling, I also began to learn that I had a passion for being at the cutting edge of whatever I could. I can still remember a message I heard that described the church of today as the kind of organization that would build a church at the site where Jesus performed some great feat, rather than following him to see what he would do next. I passionately want to be involved in the current mission of God in the world. I don’t want to be where God was five years ago. I want to know where his heart is today.

In addition to, and as part of, these previous things, I began to have a deep desire to communicate with love, grace, and power to people who did not yet know Jesus, that they might see him as he really is and give consideration to the kind of influence he would like to have on their lives.

These areas have been molded and shaped through education, experience, prayer, thought, and conversation over the last several years, but at their core they remain the same, and they are derived from a desire to live in intimacy with Jesus, thus my involvement with the pentecostal and charismatic church. I am well aware of the shortcomings of the movement, and at this point I identify far more closely with the term Post-Charismatic than with pentecostal or charismatic, but I am also aware that there is much good in the movement.

As for my involvement with the emerging church, it began through my desire to be a voice to the underground. For most of my life, I have fit with the underground, and I’m comfortable with this. I feel at home there. It’s natural that I would want to share what I believe is commonly hidden about Jesus from these unique people.

As I’ve said before, I have been blessed to be involved with the Underground Railroad and learn from and be in community with the wonderful ministries that are part of it. Many of these ministries have been around for decades, and have been doing the kind of ministry that is now known as “emergent” for longer than I have been alive.

Thus, I have come into the emerging church, and thus into Emergent itself, from what you might call a back door. I have learned ministry by grace, unconditional acceptance, and the power of authenticity from the underground, and have sought to learn how it fits with my personal theology, my personal experiences, and my personal areas of calling. Many other leaders of the emerging church, including Andrew Jones, also came to be involved in similar ways.

I feel that this is one of the most valuable facets of the emerging church and the Emergent conversation: that people who spend their lives reaching out to the darkest corners of western society can come together with people who study postmodernism in universities or painting in art schools, with people who understand that colonialism is dead and its obituary is the power of the non-Western world, with those who do research on the effectiveness of modern Christianity in the Western world, and with those who simply feel like something is missing from their normal church experience.

More interesting still, than these examples, is that no one fits into only one of these areas. For example, I have a passion for walking into dark places as a shadow of Jesus, but I also have a ministerial education from a pentecostal university, an art degree from a secular art school, and a weird job history of discussing theology and politics and philosophy for hours at a time while cleaning toilets and mopping floors. Emergence indeed.

Craig Gross of xxxchurch.com writes The Gutter. I’ve followed his ministry for some time, and admire the places he goes and the things that are accomplished through him.

This book is a great introduction to ministry outside of the methods that are typically considered to be normal. It strikes me as though it is written to Christians who are in a comfort zone of some kind. Maybe they are Christian college students, or part of traditional churches, or whatever.

The book is designed to show some things outside of that comfort zone. There are some amazing stories and brilliant thoughts, regardless of what comfort zone a person might fit into. Everyone has a comfort zone.

There are several things that really gripped me.

Imagine what must have been going on in her mind [here, he is referring to the woman in John 8 who is brought to Jesus after being caught in adultery]. Maybe that’s a difficult request, but I’m not asking you to imagine yourself as a scantily clad adulterer. I’m asking that you think about being a person who has missed the mark, maybe for the hundredth time. Someone who has a perpetual problem with that thing that always trips them up. Not necessarily committing adultery or even having sex, but something else. Something like (this is where you fill in the blank with whatever secret sin you may or may not have, the one you never talk about. You know, that thing.)

I don’t think this necessarily expresses the depth of the situation where the woman found herself (or where many people find themselves after encounters with Christians today), nor that it is supposed to, but I think this is a brilliant way for us to engage with these kind of thoughts. To teach us to think about ourselves along those lines.

I believe that if we are ever to become people of reconciliation, we have to learn how to see ourselves differently. Much of the issue with the way Christians see the rest of the world, which I want to talk about with unChristian in the near future, is derived from how we see ourselves. So many of us see so much of the world as scum because we see ourselves as so amazing. As being better than the gutter, and better than the people in it. None of these, if one really sits down to think about it, are true at all.

With part three of This Beautiful Mess, I decided to write a post about the rest of the book by section, rather than by chapter. This is mainly because of lack of time to read while not sitting in doctor’s offices, or in front of monitors that don’t work. I mean come on, I don’t even have time to design this website.

So in part three, Rick McKinley begins to apply his ideas of the kingdom to the way it plays itself out in the world. He stands against the all-too-common idea that the kingdom of God is all about waiting around for death so we can sit around in heaven.

As a personal aside, I don’t like thinking about heaven. At various times in my life, because I’m a nerd, I have sat down to think about it. To think about a time period that never ends. I don’t like the idea. It freaks me out. In the way that quantum physics will freak you out if you sit down to think about it.

In any case, the only times that the idea of heaven really strikes me is when I have significant encounters with the presence of God. Then, I can point at something that is tangible to me and say to my self, “Self, that’s what heaven is like.” And that’s a great thing. But that’s not the kingdom of God, or at least not all of it; the kingdom of God is bringing those things into the world, and that idea is part of the core of what God is doing in our culture with things like the emerging church.

So, in this section, which is the last section of the book, there are a lot of stories about the people of Imago Dei, and the causes they are part of and the people they touch. And this is what it’s about: they are taking the relationship they have with Jesus, the knowledge they have gained of his heart, and taking it to the poor and the marginalized, and to all the hurts of creation. While being willing to sacrifice, share, and try to learn how to “strategically suffer” and learn from those who do strategically suffer in order to do so.

The part about strategic suffering is what grabbed me. One of my favorite books of all time is called The God Chasers. It spoke, and continues to speak, to me in ways that few books have. In one part, there is a discussion about the Western church, with all of our facades and selfishness and consumerism and struggles for useless political power, compared to the church in the rest of the world.

The rest of the world faces countless issues. Pain and suffering and torture and death. Some of it is caused by us in the West, and some of it is not. Even as it faces these issues, though, it is not stagnant. Culture in the two-thirds world is changing. It is moving into a post-colonial age, and parts of it are skipping the modernism that has so bogged us down in the West. This is a powerful thing for the message of Jesus, and for the power of God to move in the church.

But in that discussion in The God Chasers, there is a part where world leaders who strategically suffer for the Cross pray for us in the West.

The idea, there, is this:

They see our arrogance toward the rest of the world, our addiction to pleasure and comfort, our culture of sensuality and excess, which make it hard to fathom many of Christ’s teachings - they see these not as evidence of superiority, but of disadvantage and poverty. They mourn our deep losses and have told us that they pray for us about these very things.

They pray for us in our affluence, because in our affluence we are poor. We don’t get it. We are so busy fighting for the Constitution to fit with our theology that it doesn’t occur to us that we might gain something if we lost our power and our sense of superiority. If we learned how to suffer with others.

When I was in college, I had an English teacher that told us regularly to, “Take on the pain of the world every day.” This touches me every time I think about it, and it’s an amazing thing to try to grasp the power of that statement. To try to be changed by it.

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.