Jesus & The Kingdom

Brian McClaren on Jesus and the Kingdom of God.

Tom Wright on Heaven

Here's some more to think about. Bishop NT Wright is an author, teacher, anglican bishop, and a biblical scholar. Here what he has to say about life after life after death. Post your comments afterward.

What the hell is salvation from and what's the kingdom?

For some time now I have been trying to figure out this whole “good news” and salvation thing. It never made sense to me that the good news was that “if you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior” then you could get out of Hell free and go to heaven. How is that good news for those who don’t believe? I was talking with someone the other day about this very topic. He said that he was having a hard time because he just didn’t see the whole thing as a good thing. God was going to get all these people together and then he was going to protect them, destroy the earth, and let them start all over again on a new earth. Now I don’t know that this is how many people view the whole thing exactly but it did get me thinking about what we call “Salvation” and how the “good news” doesn’t sound like good news to everybody.

What if we didn’t have this right? What if we were to have a different perspective? Don’t get me wrong, there is a necessity for personal commitment, but is there a necessity for a personal savior and salvation from what? Many of us have grown up with this whole salvation thing meaning did you pray “the prayer”, did you respond to an alter call, did you ask Jesus into your life. Is this what salvation is? Is there any reference in the bible to personal savior in the Bible? What is the focus of the salvation in the Bible? Is the “sinner’s prayer” in the Bible anywhere and is anyone mentioned as ever saying it? I have seen so many lives unchanged on a deep level by saying and believing the prayer. This doesn’t seem like the point to me.

In Togo (where we lived for 9 months) we had initially went around “Sharing the Gospel” with people. What I noticed was that many of the people had heard the gospel and actually believed it to be true but they still went home at the end of the day with the world unchanged (sound familiar in our own lives?). So, I began to think that this whole thing was missing the point. So if it is missing the point, what is the point?

What if we were to say that what we read in Genesis about the Garden of Eden is painting a picture. Let’s say that this picture shows us a place of peace, a place where everyone is safe, a place where everyone has a place, everyone has food, people are in communication with God and interacting with him like they live in the same house. Let’s say that this picture is the picture that God gave us of the Kingdom of God. Let’s say that this is the picture of the way the Kingdom is supposed to work. Or, if you don’t like Genesis in that way then what about  the prophet Isaiah when he says “They will beat their swords into plows, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” What about Isaiah 11:16 that has all of these enemy animals interacting peaceably with each other. Or, what about Isaiah 65:17-25 that describes no more crying, people getting food when they need it, and things being all around good. What if these are paintings the Kingdom of God.  Didn’t Jesus say the Kingdom of God was now and that it was here?

You may look around you and think that these pictures can’t possibly be the Kingdom of God if it’s now because this is not what this world looks like. So, the natural conclusion must be that it is not for now but is talking about a future. What if it didn’t have to be? What if this was the blueprint for what we were trying to build? What if what God is asking you to do is to join him in bringing the Kingdom of God to the world? What would it look like if you were finding your spot in this Kingdom and following this painting for the world?

So, what does this have to do with salvation? What if salvation is a journey and not a destination? What if the call to salvation is the same one God gave to Moses? A call to blessing so that he will be a blessing. This means that when I make a personal commitment I commit to join God in his work to restore the world in the image that God has given to us. I am saying that Jesus was the ultimate picture of the way we are supposed to be in this world. He is the picture of behavior, he is the picture of priorities, he is the picture of friendship, he is the picture of humans like the Garden of Eden is to the Earth. We had to know that he was God and that even in his goodness the world would still not accept him because why would we do the things we would have to do at such a high cost if he was just a man. We had to see what it looked like for a man to do what we have to do to bring about the world in the pictures that we have been given.  The salvation would then be brought to the world to free people from all of the crap that doesn’t fit this picture. We would go and feed people, build houses, free slaves, protect people, provide healthcare, work to solutions that would bring peace, show people they matter to us, put others first, stand up against people being treated poorly, and many other things that I can only begin to work out.

This would make the “good news” that the Kingdom of God is here and a Kingdom where everyone is trying to build the picture that God has given us is always good news. I just can’t see it as a sinking ship that we have to save people off of before it goes under. I see this as a ship that is damaged but not beyond repair, and the Good news is that the captain and crew are asking us to join them to make it the best ship that ever sailed the seas and by doing this everyone on the ship will be blessed.

Please feel free to post your thoughts. I'm just thinking out loud here and hope that we can discuss this here. If you find scriptures about salvation, save, kingdom of God, or anything else you feel is relevant then please leave a comment with your thoughts. Thanks.

My Enemies Are Men Like Me

This is quite challenging in light of some of the responses that have resulted towards certain groups of people after 9/11. What do you feel that the Christian response should be to war and aggression by others?
Is the way of Jesus different from "The American Way?" Take a listen below. 

I have hesitated to put this up because people will think that I'm somehow unpatriotic and I'm saying something about our troops, and I'm not. I'm  asking that we think about the choices we make in our lives in light of Jesus and how he commanded us to respond and stop equating American political perspectives with God's perspective. Do we have separate political and religious lives and if we do can they be contradictory and are they contradictory?
Take a look at this article by Marcus Borg God's Non-Violent Revolutionary because it might help us think about it.

We're all gonna die! (check out vlogbrothers 2.0 and John Green)

So, which games are we choosing to play and not play? Are the games we choose to play in line with how God sees the game? Because the games we choose to play change the world, these might be some questions that we might want to ask ourselves if we are trying to change the way Christians play the game or at least change the way that Christians are seen by the other players. How do the other players see Christians in this world and is it how we want to be viewed?

The Church BEING the Church gets me excited.

I have been trying to come up with a way of expressing how I view the purpose of the church and in the process came across Brian McLaren explaining it. Check this out.

Brian McLaren has always been a person who has resonated with my experiences in life and my understanding of the Bible. I have to say that every time I hear the Church described this way I get excited about being a christian.

This is the ugly face (no I'm not talking about Mrs. Phelps Roper).

Whether we like it or not, this is often the face that people see.
http://www.godhatesamerica.com/ http://www.godhatesfags.com/


Westboro Baptist Church (not affiliated with any Baptist denomination) out of Topeka, KS has become the latest face on Christianity. They are an extremist group of people who have become yet another negative face. I know that these people are not the norm, but I do think they represent some of the underlying, even if not as extreme, feelings of many Christians. I have heard a number of people that talk the way that these people do even if it is not even as extreme or, most of all, they show it in their actions. We have a responsibility to keep people like this from becoming the face of Christianity.

What's wrong with our face?

I have a hard time with church. I have grown up with church all around me. I have been a “Christian” nearly all my life. I have been the staff youth pastor at a church. I have read the Bible cover to cover. We lived in Africa for 9 months doing mission work. I have an awesome marriage and two wonderful kids. I have a hard time with church. It just seems so pointless most of the time. The mission statements always sound nice. The people seem friendly at church. Some church goers even go out of their way for each other, but that is where most stop, or at least hesitate.


I have a hard time with church. It doesn’t seem like this is what it is supposed to be. I just don’t see a match when I look at what I read in the Bible and what I see when I go to church or when I look at The Church. I’m trying to get my mind around what it is but I can’t. If I can’t and I have been around this whole thing my whole life then I am sure that intelligent people that haven’t been raised around it will have an even more difficult time seeing the point of the whole thing. I think this is why it is so easy to wake up on Sunday and think to yourself that you would get more productivity done by mowing the lawn than by going to church (which take about equal amounts of time).

So, I guess the point of church becomes a chance to learn more about the Bible (or repeat the same stuff) so that we can go and tell other people about it. It reminds me of something someone once said and it goes something like this ‘you go out and find someone and convert them and then once they are converted you make them worse than you are about reflecting God’s purpose.’

I have attended churches all over from small (50-75 people) churches to mega-churches (10,000+ people) and though the cover may be different they all seem the same under the hood.

Ultimately, it is not exactly church that I have a hard time with (the buildings are usually pretty nice). I have a hard time with what the church looks like to everyone else (the people, not the building). There is a reason why we are the ugly sibling in the room. We must be missing the point when we don’t even look right to ourselves anymore. That’s why I started writing this blog. I’m tired of cringing every time I hear a Christian on TV. I’m tired of the phoniness that we feel we have to pay each other when we show up together at church. I’m tired of the face that we put on when we know that others know we are a Christian.

I want us to re-imagine a church that looks good to everyone because we are actually making a real difference to this world we live in. I want us to be doing things that are making things better and not just taking that route when it’s convenient. Let’s stop the “God hates fags” BS and direct our time to real problems (i.e. poverty, violence, war, depletion of the Earth’s natural resources, pollution, hunger, education, HIV/AIDS, world health etc.)instead of ones we make up. Mother Teresa should not be a unique person but yet she was because it is so rare for someone to devote their lives to fixing the broken pieces of this world (and I don’t mean metaphorically). If the roughly 80% of people who claim to be Christian in the US were devoting their lives to BEING the Christian instead of talking about being Christian, then maybe we would, quite literally, change the face of God and get some real things accomplished in our communities.

Let’s raise our eyes from the Bible for a moment (you know what it says) and stop pretending that we don’t know what to do and just go do something. Fix this world with confidence knowing that God’s restoring this world with you and the work you do won’t go to waste.

Walking The Other Way

Frustration, tiredness, and irritation. The meeting had just ended with the church leaders and it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Just weeks before, we had been having a great time hanging out with the kids in a converted bay of the garage in the church parking lot. Weeks had been spent planning and designing the space to make it a comfortable place to come hang out that didn’t require people having to come into the church if they were intimidated in any way. There is a lot of people that just don’t want to walk into a church, especially those that we wanted to be around. So, we put up temporary walls, set up a café serving free espresso, Italian sodas, and other drinks and selling candy and stuff to help cover the costs and then had some café tables set up with chairs so that we could all hang out, play games, listen to music, and spend time together. The big hiccup in the whole plan was that we took up space in the garage where lawn equipment used to be parked. We had carefully arranged and cleaned the remainder of the garage so that all the equipment had a space and could be easily moved in and out of the other garage bay but it still got on someone’s nerves. Needless to say, the youth ministry didn’t win that battle, we had to move back inside, and we decided it was a good time to change scenery.

This may seem like a trivial thing but I think is representative of how far much of mainline church has gotten off track. We say we are about people, changing lives, changing the world, but sometimes the functioning of the church itself becomes the end and not the means. We spend endless amounts of time in meetings every week to plan one or two hours of missions. Or, the flipside is that we don’t plan and don’t do. We meet together every week to preach to each other and hang out and eat cookies, but the majority of people don’t allow any of it to really change how they do life.

I would argue that the majority of people who attend church would not have their lives significantly changed by not attending church. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that church doesn’t have a purpose, I’m saying that I don’t think the majority of people have any clue, or have forgotten what the purpose of the whole church thing is. So, we continue to show up and discuss the Bible, Church, and missions like they are fine wines but in the end we just end up drunk and asleep on the couch.

A valuable lesson was learned when we were living for 9 months in Togo on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. We couldn’t wait to get there and help make all these awesome changes and make a world of a difference. We spent most of the 9 months sitting there allowing the kids to climb on us, sorting out fights, talking with the older kids, helping to set up a budget, communicating back to the people in the states and hiding in our house because we were too overwhelmed to do anything else. The whole thing wore us out.

It was incredibly difficult to live in Togo because life was so different from what we knew. First of all, every day was 90-95° F and 90-100% humidity. The roads were drivable at best because we lived in the poor part of town. There was no real government interaction in the day to day lives of individuals and the interaction that they had was not usually positive. Everything could be done faster if you were willing to slip in a little gift to the government official (lesson learned while registering the car we purchased), and police weren’t always there to protect (lesson learned when pulled over for running a “red” light which was actually green and having to pay the officer and his military “buddy” to get my passport back.) To top it all off, you couldn’t communicate effectively with the kids, the people around you, or with those back home because of language and technology barriers. The life changing part was realized at the end of this crazy adventure. When we sat down to do an “exit interview” with the orphanage director he said something that changed the way that we looked at missions and mission work. He said, “By watching you two interact with the kids and each other I learned how to be a better husband and a better father to the kids.” In that moment we realized that missions were not about what was said. This world is not changed by words, this world is changed by the actions of people that step out into areas where the people know that you shouldn’t be there and you still are. The world is changed when people live in front of others that demonstrate their respect for people, their respect for the Earth, their respect for themselves, the respect for other cultures, the respect for other faiths, the respect for everything.

I grew up believing that it was my God given duty to get people to “accept Jesus into their hearts as their personal Lord and Savior.” My duty is to become part of restoring this world to the way it was intended to be. This means to treat the world, the people, the animals, the environment as if it is all God’s on loan to me, and when I do this and treat everything and everyone with this kind of care and love then I won’t have to use words to tell people that the “Kingdom of God is here.”