Thoughts on living a life that God can bless

Our pastors and lay delegates just completed three days of Annual Conference. This is a time where we get together with pastors and laity from all over Central Texas — from Cisco to Waxahachie, Alliance to Round Rock, Winters to Ennis — some 350 churches, over 400 pastors, almost 1,000 people in all. Each year we meet to pray, worship, plan, approve and vote the direction the Church will take the next year as we celebrate what has been done. It took me 30 minutes to get there each day. When the first Conferences were held 200 years ago, many of the pastors were circuit riders, often serving dozens of church communities, traveling for miles on horseback throughout the year. When they came together to Conference, it might take weeks to get there, each anticipating connecting with God and others who had made the same sacrifices that year. To get an idea of their sacrifices, the average age of death for circuit riders was 34; disease, exposure, hunger and occasionally violence on the open road might take their lives. In this season, the Methodist Church grew faster than any other church in the world, reaching more people, entering more of America’s new communities than any other church. The Methodist Church was birthed by the sacrifice of men and women who were willing to give their all for the sake of Jesus Christ.

The courage to do this was not very complicated. It was a firm conviction that Jesus was who he said he was, and to follow him was the highest privilege there could be. One circuit rider said it this way, “Grace in this life and glory in the next.” Today many Christians have a very different idea about their faith. Some people have a sneaking suspicion that Jesus is not one they are supposed to follow but that God sent the savior to follow them around, blessing their lives, cleaning up their messes and not bothering them with the details. They are much more interested in God blessing the lives they are living than living a life that God can bless.

I just came back from a volunteer training for our Vacation Bible Camp that begins on Monday. Around 400 people gathered to get ready for an amazing week — staff, leaders, teachers and many young people are committing one of the first weeks of summer vacation to God and to the children. It is an impressive and inspirational moment for me to get to talk to them a few minutes and see the tangible enthusiasm that is so evident. We will have around 1,400 on the campus this week making this event one of the largest of its kind in the nation. What may seem normal to us is supernormal to most churches. The theme for this VBC is “No Fear,” taken from the words in Timothy, “For God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power, love and self-discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:7) It is a simple season where people follow Jesus by serving children and where children get a chance to receive a simple message, “No Fear,” as they are challenged to follow our Lord too.

Our lives may not call for riding a horse in a remote area of the west dealing with the elements and disease of that time, but it might call for us to sacrifice for kids, for our neighbor, for our family and for our community — not expecting Jesus to follow us but following Jesus as we work to serve one another and our world.

Please join me in praying for 2013 Vacation Bible Camp that begins on Monday — 1,400 adults and children, leaders and campers, centering around the words in the Bible, “For God has not given us the spirit of fear but of power, love and self-discipline.” (2 Timothy 1:7)

Thoughts on living out our faith

I came home late the other night, and there was a movie on the Hallmark Channel, usually a pretty family-oriented channel. It had a pastor and his teenage daughter as the central characters. The theme was positive in that it was about how she was able to help a boy get his act together before she died of cancer. (Did I say the Hallmark Channel?)

Now here was the problem. Both the father and the daughter, as well as the church, came off not looking very Christian many times — too judgmental, too religious, too angry and too exclusive of others, especially the father, who had little patience for anything or anybody. He spent most of his time talking about sin and preaching on the shortcomings of others, coming off as less than loving and more often hateful and especially self-righteous.

Why am I writing this? There are millions of people in our nation who do not attend church and have yet to encounter Jesus Christ in a personal way. And way too often, those people only know the church and Christians from the stereotypes and caricatures that popular culture produces on TV, movies, books, blogs, comedy shows, etc. There is little doubt that many who control the media might want to marginalize it because this is how the unchurched often see Christianity or assume Christians are. They reject the offerings of Christ and his Church out of hand. What does the Church do?

We know what Jesus did. He healed the sick, fed the hungry, cast out demons and offered the good news to everyone who would receive it. He engaged the culture, a Roman/Jewish world that consisted of Roman paganism and immorality and Jewish religiosity and condemnation, interacting with it in a boots-on-the-ground way. He did so among Roman power authority and Jewish religious authority that both sought to marginalize Jesus, eventually attacking and killing him. God raised him from the dead and the Church was birthed.

For us, this could be reflected as “in the city for the city,” serving the world around us as we become salt and light for a world badly in need of a little salt and a lot of light. But it also includes each believer living like Jesus did, living out our faith in loving, uncompromising ways. Doing this allows the people around us — who may have yet to come into a relationship with Christ and his Church — to form their opinion not based on popular culture but on you and me, our faith lived out in simple ways each day, the same way that so many of the common people followed Jesus in his day despite the efforts of religion, government and culture attempting to stop it.

Genuine faith, genuine love, genuine Christians still win in the battle for the hurting, broken and lost of our world. Just as despite the best efforts of Romans and religious leaders of the first century, the genuine faith, love and life of Jesus Christ won.

The fact that the power structure of our world (media) might seek to marginalize Christianity is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Christians follow Jesus themselves. This means we bless the sick, the hurting, the lost and the hungry of our world, person to person, church to community and faith to the world.

A few invitations:

• Join First Methodist Mansfield in reading the gospel of Luke this summer.
• Sign up the kids for Vacation Bible Camp that begins in a little more than a week.
• And, I hope to see many of you at First Methodist Family Night at Hawaiian Falls (two blocks from my house) tomorrow, June 7. From6:00-8:30 p.m., we have the park to ourselves.

Thoughts on the Bible and the study of it

This summer the message series is centered around the gospel of Luke, maybe one of the most beautiful books of the Bible, The Gospel of Luke: Investigating the Story of Jesus. Each week we will emphasize part of the book of Luke. Our GPS study will travel through this gospel as well, and I hope all of us will read through the book of Luke together. When we are completed, we will have read an entire gospel this summer and, my prayer, be convinced or even more convinced of the amazing claims made by Jesus himself and by his followers, including Luke who knew Paul and Peter personally and spent his life telling the story of the amazing savior we know as Jesus Christ. From the promise, through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, we will investigate this amazing life together, just as the format of the gospel of Luke does.

To prepare for this series, as well as the reading of Luke, I thought I would share a little of what I have grown to understand about the nature of the Bible and the study of it, something I think is probably the most important practice in life. It is here we find God!

First and foremost, I believe the Bible is inspired, meaning it is supernatural. The words, verses and stories it tells are literally the voice of God spoken in the relationships verbalized and imaged in the book. Here we see God, we see ourselves, and we see the relationship between us and God. The Holy Spirit works through these words in a unique way. God has chosen to interact with humanity through the words of the Bible. The Bible is an extremely honest book — honest about people, honest about God, honest about what a relationship with God looks like, and above all, honest about the amazing story of Jesus.

I also believe the Bible can be understood most clearly in three meaningful ways:

1. In context — This means the verses before and the verses after, including the whole book, as well as the entire Bible, give us a context to understand each part of the Bible.
2. In history — This means the history of the time when part of the Bible was written. The history of the Roman Empire, the Jewish world, the geography of the day, etc., all reflect on our understanding of a particular piece of the Bible.
3. Direct — Each verse, each word, each passage can speak directly to us as the voice of God. It does not always speak only in context or history. I believe this because this is the way that both Jesus and Paul most often treated the biblical word.

As you read the gospel of Luke with First Methodist this summer, join us in worship each weekend (or live online at www.fmcm.tv) and hopefully engage the Bible through our GPS study. My prayer is that God speaks to each of us in biblical context, through the history of its writing, and above all, directly as we experience the good news of Jesus Christ together.

Thoughts on where God is

When the world was calling for a messiah to defend them, save them, free them from the trials and traumas of life, God sent Jesus, who said, “I will be with thee,” and “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

Rather than end the trials and traumas inherent with being human, Jesus became human, “considering equality with God something not to be grasped.” Jesus as God’s Son had the right to avoid human trials but instead chose to embrace them with and for humanity.

His story: a cross, crucifixion, rejection, abandonment, injustice, death and burial. Jesus comes to us in every circumstance, any disaster, any crisis, as God with promise, to never leave us or forsake us and to proclaim that one day, “There will be a new heavens and a new earth, no more mourning, crying or pain anymore, the first things will pass away.”

In the light of an astonishing number of disasters, we might wonder where is God — when a school inOklahomais devastated by a mile-and-a-half-wide tornado, when a small city outside ofWacoexplodes, when neighboring towns are devastated by another tornado and the iconic Boston Marathon experiences terrorism.

Think the faith of Christianity, the faith we place in Jesus, who while on the cross said:

• “Today you will be with me in paradise,” to the thief dying next to him.
• “Mother, behold, your son; John, behold, your mother,” thinking of his family.
• “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do,” the response of loving grace.
• “I thirst,” Jesus was human.
• “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” feeling abandoned, isolated, hurt.
• “Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” in a season of death, trust.
• “It is finished,” the work he came to do was done.

The Resurrection would come, but that was in God’s hands. This broken world will one day be made whole, but that, too, is in God’s hands.

So where is God? God is with us!

Special Pentecost weekend opportunities

A Report on “In the City for the City”

In the City for the City has been our emphasis for 2013, where we committed to grow the church, change lives and build the community we live in. I wanted you to see some of the ways First Methodist Mansfield has been making that happen.

• Home Run: Our church promoted and brought this faith-based movie to Cinemark Theater. The Mansfield theater was #2 in attendance in the state of Texas, #8 in the nation.
• ESL classes: First Methodist graduated another great group of English as a Second Language students, typically a dozen languages spoken.
• Big Hope: We continue to provide almost 40 mentors for at-risk kids at neighboring school, Alice Ponder Elementary, partnering with Kids Hope and Big Brothers Big Sisters.

• In the City 5K & Cleanup: A thousand people gathered at Rose Park, many to run the 5K benefiting Habitat for Humanity and the Wesley Mission Center, and many helped clean up seven of our city parks. Two and a half tons of trash was picked up. This was a partnership with the City of Mansfield

• Feed by Grace: This Saturday a group will serve the homeless community in Fort Worth as a special Mothers’ Day weekend emphasis.

• West: We received a special offering, partnered with First Methodist Waco and Highland Park, to contribute to the Conference Disaster Relief. We also sent a team to serve directly in West.

• Easter in Mansfield: On Easter at the Center for Performing Arts, we had 6,000 in attendance, and we continue to receive guests and members who were introduced to First Methodist in this engaging and innovative way.

• National Day of Prayer: We hosted 14 senior pastors who gathered to pray at City Hall, followed by a prayer service attended by those in our community and city leaders, including the City Manager and the Mayor.

• Chick-fil-A Leadercast: This Friday we are hosting a leadership opportunity for the community at our church that will impact many.
• Chamber of Commerce: We sponsored a Chamber luncheon where I had the opportunity to be the speaker, sharing on servant leadership and becoming a “first follower.”
• Mission: A team went to Louisiana to continue our own efforts to bring recovery to a hurricane-ravaged area.

• City Council: We presented In the City for the City to the City Council, Common Ground made a report to the City Council and the City Council celebrated the city’s partnership with First Methodist Mansfield.

• Midlothian: Many of our members who live in Midlothian had an In the City for the City day, cleaning up a park in that growing community.

• Mission Conference: We hosted the Large Church Mission Conference in partnership with the Leading Edge.

• Confirmation: We had 103 young people confirmed in their faith, with 900 in attendance at that service alone.

• Membership: More than 220 people have become full members of First Methodist since January 1.

• Attendance: Our highest average worship attendance at this point of our year, over 2,500.
• Life and Mission: Our ongoing life and mission includes seven worship services, multiple opportunities to do Bible study, Care Ministries that touch people every day, the Wesley Mission Center that helps people every day and children’s and youth programs and ministries that continue to impact families weekly.

• Vacation Bible Camp in June where we anticipate 1,400 children and volunteers;
• United Mission Week for middle school and high school students serving in our community for one week, we anticipate over 200 impacting this area;
• The Freedom Project, a church-wide celebration beginning in the fall where we partner with Dave Ramsey to impact our church family and community in a transformative way;
• A summer message emphasis, Luke’s Gospel, Investigating the Story of Jesus.

National Day of Prayer

Heavenly Father, we bow before you, the God from whom all heaven and earth exists, the God who has chosen to bless America providentially and graciously for centuries. I thank you for the tremendous blessings we have and continue to receive as a nation. Forgive America where it falls short, and give us grace to change what needs to change, to grow where we need to grow and to bless one another and the world according to the rich blessings you have given us. May we always remember the faith and values that must undergird our nation, and may one nation under God always be our way. “I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust.’” (Psalm 91:2) We pray that you bless with wisdom and courage our president, our national leaders, our local leaders, our military men and women all over the world, and may you lead us to be a blessing to the nation.

We especially ask you to forgive us for our bent to call upon you when we need you and to ignore you when we don’t. We remember what Psalm 127 says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.” Today we recognize that America was birthed by your grace, has overcome many obstacles — many of our own making — because of your grace and exists today because of your ongoing, amazing grace. Forgive us for our tendency to take those benefits and that grace for granted.

And each of us prays that if we can make a difference for our country — beginning with our own family, church, neighborhood and community — reveal to us those ways and give us courage to follow through on the ways you would call us to serve. God bless America.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Thoughts on the Church in action

As we walk through an emphasis together, Skeptics, Wrestling with Our Doubt, think about a few things with me, especially about the world we live in. The Bible doesn’t give many whys when it comes to events in our world, but it does give an explanatory worldview.

Thoughts on living for what Jesus lived for

As First Methodist Mansfield continues in the message series Skeptics — Wrestling with our Doubts, there are a few facts that might be helpful to churches as we work to bring people to faith in Jesus Christ:

• America is the 3rd largest unchurched nation in the world;

• Of our overall population, 18.7% go to church on a given weekend;

• Average church attendance in American churches is 75;

• Ninety percent of churches are plateaued or in decline;

• Fifty congregations close their doors each week.

These statistics are from the Healthy Church Initiative, a program to help revitalize the Methodist Church, one in which I am a Church Coach. When we add to this that nationally the fastest growing religion in America is “none” — meaning those who mark “none” instead of a particular religion or denomination — these are striking figures.

Should these figures frighten the church? No, but they should challenge the church. When the Church began and there were just 12, then 120, then 3000, I don’t think those early church leaders — Peter, Paul, Priscilla and others — were that afraid about living for Jesus Christ in a non-Christian world. Instead they were challenged by it, especially when they were continually reminded of who they were by the words of Jesus.

“Go make disciples of all nations.”
“Be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the remotest parts of the earth.”

I can rephrase these two simple commands of Jesus, “Live for what Jesus lived for!”

Some years ago, I had someone send me an email. Her concern was that Christianity was going to decline and one day disappear. I reassured her that would never happen because the church always had Jesus, and Jesus would always draw people to himself. This means that as long as a church centers in Jesus Christ, lives for what he lived for, that church would be blessed and even buck the odds of the culture it is in. That was certainly true for the church in the first century, and I believe it is true for the church today. Some of the most exciting and effective churches in history exist today, and I hope First Methodist Mansfield is one of those. Churches are learning to share Christ, engage the culture and reach the community they are in in new and innovative ways. And the core of that is a church family who are centered in Jesus Christ, living for what he lived for.

Jesus lived for his heavenly Father.

Jesus was committed to the mission God sent him to do.

Jesus loved the people of his world and was willing to die for them.

Jesus forgave those who rejected him.

Jesus never forgot who he was and why he was in the world.

Jesus said, “As God sent me, so I send you.”

A story of grace

Even though you should be getting this on Thursday, I am writing it on Tuesday. Rhonda’s — my wife of 38 years — mother passed away this morning in Florida after a three-month struggle with cancer. Rhonda was there with her when she died. I will be flying out for the funeral, and then we will go to Key West where we will do as she requested and place her ashes on the grave of her mother’s first born who died at birth. The amazing thing is just a few feet away is the grave where Rhonda and I buried our first little boy who was born too soon to survive.

Rhonda grew up in a broken home and was raised by her father and grandmother. Her mother was not a very good mother. For many reasons, Rhonda and Eleanor (called El) had no contact for the last 40 years. I had never met her, and she had never seen her grandchildren. In January of this year, we found out her mother had terminal cancer, and a message was sent to Rhonda asking if she would call her mother. Rhonda did, and her mother asked if she would come see her. She drove to Florida in January with our oldest daughter, Julie. This first visit restored their relationship. A month later she went again with our daughter-in-law, Gladys, where they helped get her set up on hospice at her government apartment. It was good Gladys was there, she knew how to set up a hospital bed. Then right after Easter, we both went, and I met my wife’s mother for the first time. By this time she was declining fast.

When Rhonda saw there was no one there to give her mother care these last few days of her life, she stayed there with her and took care of her mom night and day, right up to the last — medications, prayers, comfort, changing her and her bed sheets, being a liaison with the hospice people and staying by her side until her mother breathed her last.

This is more than a story of reconciliation; it is the story of a Christian woman living out her faith in a boots-on-the-ground way. Rhonda was there when her mother needed her the most, when she had every reason to not be there at all. I am proud of Rhonda, for I am not sure I could have or would have done the same thing in the same circumstances. For Rhonda, her relationship with Jesus Christ has driven this story, a relationship that began when she was 12 years old in a little church in Key West, Florida, the same church where we were married in 1974. This relationship with Christ opened up a miraculous door of grace where she experienced a relationship with her mother and her mother with her the last three months of El’s life. It’s a miracle! God is big enough for Rhonda and her mother, Eleanor.