Intentional

To gain deep knowledge and understanding one must intentionally pursue these points with another person. On the agenda of time spent together there must be a purposeful path that takes us from discussions on the rain and Sunday’s game into the depths of who we are as individuals. The intentionality part is crucial because without it we continue on in a random series of tweet like updates with the person sitting across from us but never cross the ropes out of the shallow end of the pool. Deep water is scary. Deep water is dangerous. Deep water is intense. Deep water is larger. A willingness to get there with another individual begins the swim lessons and slowly but surely our tweets and status updates become strokes that take us into each other more fully.

Sacrificial

I sacrifice all of 3 seconds to sit down and give to the world some absolutely pointless thought that bears no meaning whatsoever on reality or relationship via facebook. It’s easy, it costs me nothing, it costs my reader nothing, and all seems well that ends well. Is this “well” though? I think not. To know another and to be known requires the sacrifice of time, comfort, pride, fear, security and a host of other ideals that we keep shrouded in our online discussions. Without the motif of sacrifice driving our relationships they actually become nothing more then a revolving door of two people trying to gain something out of the other that will not be given. Shallow.

Patient

It took my daughter 2 years of swim lessons, thousands of times of coaxing, and the example of her little friend who went before her to finally get her head underwater. It took time for her to go deeper. Knowing each other and being known takes much time. One must be intentional and sacrificial in giving the time needed. Like the farmer though who waits patiently when fruit begins to bud there is great joy!

The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In His greatest prayer Jesus would say “this is eternal life to know the one true God and the one He has sent.” God understands knowing someone and wanting to be known. The gospel is the lived out testimony of our missionary God intentionally coming, spending time, asking questions, planting thoughts, revealing Himself. The gospel is the story of God sacrificially making himself known that we might know Him. The patience of the gospel is enjoyed everyday as God continues to plead with humanity “know me” and does not rightfully abandon us in our rebellion.
May we as a church know Him and know each other all the more until that perfect day comes to pass where in we will be known even as He is.

1 John 2:3 And by this we know that we have come to know him…
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I’m convinced that if we would pray in light of the community of Christians God has placed us “what is your specific will for me in this community.” we would hear clearly. Instead of viewing the church as a place that is to give you what you want look at her as a place where you can give to others what they want. Instead of viewing people as a means to gain something for self look at them as souls who God the Son gave himself for. Within this paradigm shift of perspective I believe is one key to opening the deaf ears and blind eyes of our prayer lives as it pertains to God’s voice, direction, and will in our lives.

Happy praying and hearing my friends…

The focus this Sunday was on the work of the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts and the contemporary church as it relates to miracles and supernatural occurrences.

2 camps of thought and interpretation have arisen through the history of Church. Cessasionism teaches that the gifts of miracles, tongues, et al. ceased to exist with the death of the Apostles. Charismatics teach that all gifts exist for today’s church and are to be exercised as they were in the first century. Both camps have dangers and abuses associated with them. The Cessasionists can tend to quench and even grieve the Holy Spirit through intellectual endeavors of unbelief and boxing God. Charasmatics can tend to make experience and subjective unction the focus above balanced theology and the authority of Scripture.

As a case study we looked at the happenings of the Great Awakening under Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, Tenney and others. For a fantastic summary of this amazing time see Ian Murray’s biography on Edwards, particularly chapters 11-14.

Taproot has adopted a 3rd position called Continuationism. Like the Charasmatics we believe all gifts have continued on from the first century but must be tethered by and subsumed under a solid theology and the closed canon of Scripture. Like the Cessasionist camp we want to be gaurded against the excessive pursuit of experience while expecting God the Holy Spirit to guide, heal, empower, and move as He sees fit.

The Continuationst position is really a posture we adopt before God. Here’s five posturings of the Continuationist church.

1. A posture of prayer. We are to be always asking the Holy Spirit for guidance, power, miracles, experiences, wisdom, boldness, knowledge and protection.
2. A posture of expectancy. We pray expecting God to answer in accord with His will for His glory.
3. A posture of submission. What we receive is determined in the sovereignty of God, therefore what He allows us to experience or not experience, what He gives or what he withholds, what He does or doesn’t do, is submitted to and rejoiced in for His glory.
4. A posture of balanced orthodoxy and orthopraxy. If good orthodoxy operates in tension, i.e. God is triune but one, Jesus was fully God and fully man, God is sovereign and man is responsible, then our orthopraxy (practice) will also be tethered by a biblical, balanced tension.
5. A posture of belief. As Continuationists we continue to seek, pray, submit, and believe that God the Holy Spirit is still operating today just as He did in the first century.

To wrap it all up remember that our positions are held in gospel humility. Cessasionists will one day be in heaven with us experiencing the fullness of the Spirit that we are all longing for, Charasmatics will have their drive for experience satisfied in His presence together with us. In light of this we love and humbly articulate our differences with the various camps of orthodoxy that Jesus and the unity of His church might be seen.

Check out our SOMA Life notes for further discussion and reference. taprootchurch.org/get-rooted and download notes under SOMA Life for July 5th.

For those of you who don’t know, Dr. George Tiller, a health care practitioner and provider of late term abortions, was gunned down in cold blood as he served his church as an usher this last Sunday. He was killed in the foyer of that church. The people inside the sanctuary heard what some thought was a child popping a balloon. Tiller’s wife was singing in the choir at the front of the church at the moment of the shooting. An usher went and got her and lead her, alone, to her husband in the foyer. Her screams echoed through the church.

The reason I felt prompted to write this is because in situations like these it has all too often been my personal experience that people use “weasel words” to talk about what happened. Everyone knows you’re supposed to condemn something like this, but when you hear someone say a curt, unfeeling, “Well that was wrong,” and then they go on and on, and on, about the evils of abortion, you get the feeling they don’t think it was so very wrong. “Ok, he killed him and that was wrong, but do you know how many hundreds of thousands of babies are killed every year in this country?” You’re weaseling out of what you know you’re supposed to say. What this flows from is the fact that it is something you personally despise. The human nature tendency is to give the benefit of the doubt to something you agree with. “The man with the gun was pro-life, I’m pro-life—I’m not saying he was right, but I won’t be shedding any tears tonight.” No one thinks it that prosaically, but that is what we do. It’s why it was easy for those who didn’t like Bush to assume he was lying about WMD. It’s why whites could watch fire hoses and attack dogs be unleashed on blacks in the 60’s and not bat an eyelash.

The mark of a Christian, above all else, is love. Situations like these provide us with the opportunity to be other-worldly and not do the typical thing.

There is no justification for this senseless murder. We have no mitigating words to offer relating to the nature of abortion. The pastors of Taproot believe thou shalt not murder is still in effect and applies to this situation. Our heart and prayers go out to Tiller’s family who are now dealing with unspeakable pain.

Let me be clear: Taproot Church is a pro-life church. We do not personally see how one can be Christian and condone abortion. That is where we come down on that issue. That being said: In light of this man’s murder is not the appropriate place for anyone to be opining on the issue of abortion. To begin to speak about abortion in this context is to begin the walk down the road to justification. It is the equivalent to the man who beats his wife, and then says it’s because she lied to him. The evidence is immaterial, it is not a reason or an excuse, and to acknowledge it is to give aid and comfort to sin.

What if the roles were reversed? Let’s say your father was a pastor and influential leader in protecting traditional marriage, and he was gunned down. And then you heard people saying, “Yeah, it was wrong, but the guy was a bigot.” Would it be easy for you to see, regardless of whether or not that’s true, that it is beside the point?

On any given Sunday morning our little sanctuary is bursting out it’s seams with the most eclectic crowd one could imagine.

The back rows are filled up with little prayer power houses, i.e. the grandmas of Taproot as we affectionately call them. With ear plugs in to protect what’s left of their hearing they watch the next generation of the church fill up the front rows with smiles on their faces and prayers in their hearts.

Sitting next to the polished and clean cut Boeing engineer is a rather large and intimidating ex-gangbanger, covered in tattoos, who is holding back tears mid sermon as he realizes Christ was punished in his place. This fatherless son has found a family and his Daddy. His brother next to him was raised in a different world, lives in a different space, yet they are one in their Father together, forgiven in Christ together.

There’s an eighteen year old virgin. She’s fought the pressure and is committed to holding out for her husband. In the seat behind her is a stripper. Fresh out of jail, she’s tired of it, she’s surrendering. Each of these daughters are pure in the blood of their Bridegroom.

There’s a 22 year old guy with Bible open whose satisfying his hunger for theology by devouring Calvin, Lewis, Luther, and Edwards comfortably sitting next to a woman who is holding a Bible in her hands for the very first time.

There is an entire row of Cambodians, they can’t understand a word of the sermon yet, they just know the pastor throws his hands around a lot, is very passionate about whatever he’s saying, and that this church is mercifully helping them get a home! They aren’t hearing the gospel, they are seeing and experiencing it without words, beyond the language barrier.

And the diversity, and beauty of a gospel centered, Spirit led community grows in it’s kaleidoscopic complexity and with every twist and turn dazzles the soul and delights the heart.

I’m the white kid from Idaho. I’ve got the best seat in the house, up front. Every Sunday I see Jesus building His church, drawing from every tribe, tongue, and nation. I get to see Jesus crushing cultural divides, stereotypes, racism, prejudice, and fear. Sunday after Sunday and through the week I’m seeing Jesus build a missionary momentum that is unstoppable.

Just wanted to share my joy with you all and continue to encourage you. As you go about this day for the glory of God never allow the standards of society, the statistics on paper, or the supposed impossibilities in front of you stop you from believing and seeing Jesus do more then you could ever think or imagine!

The greatest moment for me in any book, film or story is when I feel like my thoughts or experiences have been lifted out of the life of my mind and translated and subsequently dissected for all to behold. Those random inklings and unclarified meanderings that I possess are articulated exactly the way I would say it if I knew that’s what I was trying to say. Those are moments that make me very happy to be alive, and I like to share them with people to see if they’re on the same page with me as well.

So here are some of those passages that made me feel like I am not alone in the way that I happen to be experiencing some of the trials and tribulations that this world offers us:

“We are neither gods nor puppets. Nor do we exist at some point on a line between these extremes. Instead, we exist in a dimension that is different from all such images. God is in us, we are in God, we are in one another, and we are very much ourselves. We are mysterious and so, therefore, is our responsibility.”

“Often I do not sense any clear guidance from God, no matter how carefully I try to open myself to it. And even when I do sense it, I can never be certain that I am not deluding myself. Because of my attachments, I can be sure none of my conclusions will be perfectly pure. Yet, in the very act of sincerely seeking God’s guidance, in the simple and sometimes pitiful attempts I make to turn to God, I do know that God responds. In addition, I have a head on my shoulders; I know, to some extent, what kinds of actions are loving and what are not. Further, I have Scripture and faith tradition and community to help me in the process of discernment. Once again, we are called to faithfulness, not success. We can only do what we can do.

“Doing what we can do means having the courage to act in accord with our best judgments, even though we know those judgements are not perfect. If we refused to act until we were completely sure of God’s will, we would be committing ourselves to one or another disaster. We would either avoid responsibility by doing nothing at all or abuse responsibility by convincing ourselves that we know God’s will. Authentic responsibility means acting with our best prayerful judgement, acting without complete sureness, acting in faith, but acting.”

“Tukwila school diversity leads U.S.”

This article goes on to tell of a New York Times study just released that found the Tukwila school district to be the most racially diverse in the nation. 65 different languages represented, just to give you some idea.

For you out-of-town readers Tukwila is the little municipality right down the hill from us.

Highline School District (our neighborhoods) also got an honorable mention and is the second most diverse district in King County. When I met the Highline District Superintendent a few months ago he told me there is over 30 different language groups represented in our district.

Here’s the quotes that gutted me in the article for good and sent me to my knees in prayer.

Ethelda Burke, Tukwila Superintendent, says “We have a little United Nations in Tukwila.” She added this profound remark, “For teachers and staff it forces us to examine our daily practices and learn about other cultures.”

I just sat back and prayed. “It forces us to examine our daily practices and learn about other cultures!” This statement comes from the lips of a secular educator just trying to teach kids. Then I thought about my “job.” I’m supposed to be a “missional Christian”. That’s the vocabulary I’m blaring every Sunday but has this region ever “forced” me to do anything? Until today, not really. I have my agenda, my vision for a church, my ideas, my plans, and I’m not sure that even once I’ve let the diversity of this region “force” me to ask if that’s what Jesus wants to do.

As a church we live in one of the most, if not the most, ethnically diverse areas in the nation. As a predominantly white, middle-class, congregation have we #1 realized that the world’s mission field is right across the street from us. That every tribe, tongue, and nation surrounds us in our grocery stores, work places, and recreation and #2 has this profound gift of God’s grace “forced us to examine our daily practices and learn about other cultures?”

The first man to take the gospel to Africa was a highly educated, extremely successful, sexually altered Ethiopian who happened to be led to Christ by an impoverished, uneducated, Jewish man. Two extremes of society brought together by the gospel and made brothers forever. Taproot we will meet both these men someday.

This must be our belief and the DNA of our mission to the south end of the Seattle metro. That the gospel is for every tribe, tongue, and nation and that the Holy Spirit is determined to break down walls via grace, mercy, forgiveness, the cross, and the universal reign of King Jesus over every soul created!

We must let our region force us to rethink our daily practices and the gospel must crush our prejudices. Yes I called us prejudiced. The mere fact that this blog post might be read as nothing more then a farce of an over zealous pastor’s imagination screams of our sinful disbelief in the inclusive nature of the gospel and exposes hearts entrenched in a satanic culture of classes, economic status, educational prowess, and tone of skin color.

I myself confess that even as I write this post my logical, rational mind keeps reminding me that this simply is not the way society works. This isn’t the way churches work. We have invisible boundaries, we have unspoken rules that must not be broken. “We” includes the black man who wouldn’t dare step foot into a white church or the white man who secretly mocks the fervor of worship at the local black church, or an educated man who can’t listen to a pastor with only a high school degree or the high school drop out who’s sure that the Phd in theology has robbed the Presbyterian minister of any power in the Holy Spirit, or the poor man who rails against the rich or the wealthy who quietly disdain those on welfare, or on and on it goes. “We” being sinful, deceived humanity, Christian and non-Christian, who continue to proliferate the lie that one type of person reaches that same type of person, you know, that’s just the way it is, right? This my precious Taproot family is a satanic society and the Kingdom of God operates in an entirely different frame of mind. I’m begging Jesus for a Kingdom mind and for Kingdom mission to be fulfilled through us.

I repent and call us as a church to repentance. As one of your pastors I’m asking Jesus for forgiveness for not believing, for not forcing myself to look at my daily practices and thoughts. I’m forcing myself to rethink my daily practices and at the very least try and learn about the diversity of humanity I’m surrounded by. I’m calling and challenging our church to no less. It starts with humble recognition followed by deep repentance and then prayer for guidance in action.

I pray that we would be effective in reaching the world with the gospel and it just so happens that the world is at our doorstep!

Father God, from whom every family, tribe, and tongue derives it’s name, we bow our knees before you and pray that you would crush our disbelief, overcome our prejudices, and send us into our mission field with boldness. We don’t know how this will work Jesus but we know You and you know every soul so in You we trust. We will obey you, we will listen and not doubt that you have placed a white, middle class group of people right smack dab in the middle of the most fertile mission field in the world for a reason. Lord be glorified and use us to touch every soul on this planet beginning right here in the south end of Seattle. In the name above all names, Jesus Christ, Amen.

Please read it and comment, but here are a few exerpts to whet your appetite:

“Evangelicalism doesn’t need a bailout. Much of it needs a funeral.”

“Despite all of these challenges, it is impossible not to be hopeful. As one commenter has already said, ‘Christianity loves a crumbling empire.’ ”

And here is a glimpse of his cold-eyed level-headedness that I love:

“I’m not a prophet. My view of evangelicalism is not authoritative or infallible. I am certainly wrong in some of these predictions. But is there anyone who is observing evangelicalism in these times who does not sense that the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential?”

One of the reasons that I struggle with putting a number on the amount of Christians is that it isn’t accurate. We don’t ultimately get to cast the deciding vote on whether or not we’re a Christian, God does that. Uh oh Jason, don’t go there.

Look, in general I don’t like to play the “who is in, who is out” game because inevitably self-righteousness is going to play a role in your decision making process. “How could they be Christians, they don’t hold their nose with their right hand while being baptized—it’s the fiery pit for them.” But there is a very simple explanation for why we can know that not all who claim the title are actually Christians: Matthew 7:21-23. Granted, you actually have to believe that the Bible is the word of God for this to mean much, not all people who call themselves Christians do that, but just go with me here. The bottom line is that when we get to eternity there will be a lot of surprised expressions on people’s faces.

What does it mean that we have significantly less people who call themselves Christians? One of my fears, and I don’t know that it’s accurate, is that the Christianity that so many churches are offering to the people doesn’t go deep enough. It’s hard to go deep—Jesus is on a relentless pursuit for our hearts, and we instinctively want to protect them from him. So if a thinking person takes a look at Christianity and sees that it means they’re supposed to try really hard to be good, or they’re supposed to hate gays and Democrats (or gun owners and Republicans), or if church doesn’t look like much more than a social club, then I don’t blame them for walking away. Of course what I want is for them to fix their eyes on Jesus and not focus on the hideous things that Christians sometimes do in his name. But I recognize that churches are responsible for significant damage to Christ’s cause on this earth. Should churches shoulder some of the blame for not properly educating their people?

Another interesting trend is that the number of people who claim “no religion” has gone up from 8 percent of the population in 1990 to 15 percent today. But there has been no corresponding rise an any other religion. What that probably means is that these were people who called themselves Christians at some point. Why are these people walking away? There is no one reason, but it’s certainly an interesting question to explore.

Another puzzling fact—only 69 percent of people believe in a personal God (as opposed to an impersonal force like “fate”). That means that a chunk of people who call themselves Christians have literally no idea what is going on. I’m not making fun, I’m just stepping back and saying “wow.”