Advent Hope

It's that time of year again; Advent is upon us and Christmas is coming. I love that the first Sunday of Advent is hope. The season begins with expectation. Before peace or joy comes the anticipation of God's good work in the world. We are not alone or abandoned. The miracle of Advent is that Emmanuel has come and is coming again.

On a grand eschatological scale, I understand the hope we have in Jesus. He has overcome sin and death to bring us eternal hope. God’s story ends well because Jesus has won the victory. But sometimes it’s hard to see how this hope trickles down into the minutia of our everyday lives. It can be difficult to sense how Christ’s incarnation solves problems of work situations, difficult relationships, or desires deferred.

This is a problem of vision not God’s sovereignty. Perhaps it feels like a baby in the manger does not resolve whatever is weighing on our minds, but that child did change eternity. When we allow ourselves to think our problems are beyond the scope of our hope, we put artificial limits on God and His good work. Our hope is not dictated by our present conditions between the two advents of Jesus. Jesus has not overcome some conflicts and some sins, but all. He came to rescue us and He is coming again. This hope we have should recalibrate how we see our circumstances.

Recently I was praying about various fears, and the more I prayed, the more I became discouraged. Amidst my mounting anxiety, I felt the Lord say “stop focusing on the problems. Fix your attention on me.” When I stopped concentrating on my fears, and reminded myself of who God is, my anxiety began to wane. I was reminded of the passage when Peter walked on water until he took his eyes off Jesus and looked at his surroundings (Mt 14:22-33). I’m sure we have all heard sermons about needing to keep our hope and our attention on God, but it's a lesson we easily forget. God is very patient with me and my forgetfulness.

I don’t know what hardships you may be facing. On top of life, with its business, comes the bustle of the Christmas season. In the midst of everything, may we not lose sight of the hope we have in Jesus who came into this world and is coming again.

1099 Days Later

1099 days ago, my wife and I moved to Grenoble France. We lived there for 990 days, 
and have been back in our native California for 109 days. As I read those numbers, it makes my head spin. I can hardly comprehend my life before Grenoble, how long we lived in France, and that we have already been back in California for so long.

Time and numbers are such fickle things. Can life be quantified? Is it accurate to say we have been back in California for 10% of the time we were gone? Often, trying to quantify life glosses over the quality of time. Life is more than a string of moments: seconds and minutes and days slipping by. Hours and days each have a set duration, but they do not all have the same value. How we spend, waste, or invest our time shapes us.

Our (almost) three years in Grenoble were (about) 10% of my life, but they were a critical 10%. God used our time in France, away from family and our native culture, as a means of transforming me. I learned, experienced, and changed more during this season than many others. When I look back on my life, our time in Grenoble will always be a significant period the same way going to university or getting married were in forming who I am. The rest of my life has been irreversibly changed, for the better, because of our time and our friends in Grenoble.

How much we engage with our lives and our time, and how much we allow the Lord, who is always at work sculpting us to be more whole and holy, adds gravity and grandeur to our moments.

How are you investing your time? Are you spending it in meaningful ways? What is the Lord wanting to do in and through you? What has the Lord taught or transformed in your life during the last 100 days? What is the Lord wanting to do with the next 100?

The Reason for Having Student Small Group Leaders

Do churches exist to perpetuate their own existence? Are ministries self-serving? As a leader of a college ministry, I have to consider these questions. Why does the group I am working to cultivate exist? What do we hope to achieve? There is an aspect of self-preservation in any group, church, or ministry.

Yes, it can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing too much upon maintaining the group. Many people have felt exploited and burnt out by serving, sacrificing, and bearing burdens beyond what they should have carried. Yes, ministries can abuse people to perpetuate their own existence, but we should not abandon the whole endeavor simply because there are pitfalls to avoid. We are called not to idolize, but utilize, institutions for advancing the Gospel and building God’s Kingdom. The college ministry I work for and the church you attend are not God, but they are vehicles for developing healthy faith communities.

My primary reason for asking students to become leaders is to empower them. I want to invite them into leadership to give them opportunities for serving and influencing their community. There is blessing in serving others, and I do not want to deny students the chance to experience this. Students should feel they are not just consumers in our group, but co-creators with us. I want them to know they have a role in helping our group become what God is calling us to be together. The goal of empowering students is negated by overtaxing them, and if a student feels overwhelmed I will see that he or she takes the necessary break from serving. God is not glorified by burnout or sacrificing someone’s well-being for the task; Jesus came that we might be whole and healthy.

Also, the ministry is not mine. I am not sole leader, and this is by design. As a leader, an important job for me is learning to delegate tasks, vision, and responsibilities. This can be a harder task than it seems. In the midst of our busy lives in our corporate world, it can be easy to concede to the old adage that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” There is truth in this saying, but the perspective is focused on the immediate results and my goal is the long-term growth of students. I have years of experience facilitating Bible studies compared to the sophomore student who never has, and while I may be better qualified to lead a small group, my goal is for students to learn how to do this. Rather than maintaining my control or the highest standard of quality, when we ask students to lead and serve it can involve lowering our expectations to create learning opportunities for them. Is the goal to have excellence now or enable others to learn how? There is a balance to sacrificing the short-term results in favor of the long-term goal of empowering of students.

I have also seen and experienced the impact that the opportunity to lead and serve has on student’s faith and relationship with Jesus. This is an important criterion to monitor in anyone who is serving our community; the sacrifice and experience should be developing students’ faith not draining it. Having student leaders also enriches the community. They breakdown the divide between student and staff, cultivating a leadership of peers within the group, and they are better able to relate and connect with students outside the group than someone like myself who has already graduated. While we must be wise and intentional with how to involve others in ministry, we should not miss this opportunity to see others grow through serving.

Why does your community exist? What is the vision and the goal for the group? Have you served in your church or faith community before? What was your experience? How did it affect your faith? What balances do you personally have from over-committing yourself? How are people able to serve within your body of faith? Does there need to be more invitations made and space available for others to serve? Does the group’s culture tend toward burnout? Are you in a position where you can help others avoid burnout? How do our beliefs about work affect our assumptions about serving our faith community?

The Simple but Good Nature of Modern Western Worship Music

From the beginning, we see music and singing used as a means for expressing worship to God. The styles and forms of the music have changed dramatically over the millennia, from ancient Near-Eastern songs to Gregorian chant to cantatas and mass. Pop/rock songs are the current style (in this blog post, I am addressing the American/Western Church which is my home), and the precedent of using the popular music as a basis for worship music goes back to Bach and before.

Today almost all, with a few exceptions, modern worship music has the same chords, rhythm, and structure. If you play an instrument (acoustic guitar is the modern manifestation of the harp we imagine angels play), see how many worship songs can be played using only the chords C, G, D, A, and e minor. And every worship song is in 4/4 time. If writing a song, be sure to use the format of verse 1, chorus, verse 2, chorus, bridge, chorus chorus. The melody should not be too complicated and the rhythms should not be too syncopated (placing the emphasis on a weaker beat within a measure).

Is it a problem that modern worship music is so much of the same music theory and structure recycled? What would J S Bach think? (Back in his day, Bach wrote the worship music for each week's service).

I believe the answer is no, it is not a problem. There are important characteristics and Kingdom principles reflected in the simple/redundant style of modern worship music. We have to ask ourselves, what is the goal of our worship music? Is it to perform a great rock concert? Hopefully not. Is it to glorify God by expressing our creativity? While I strongly believe one of the best ways we glorify God is through using our creativity, it is okay for Sunday mornings to not be the pinnacle of our creativity. Instead, worship music should be about the body of Christ coming together and expressing worship and value and thanks to God. 

While this is not required, I believe the worship music we sing should be easy enough for non-professional worship teams to play. You should not need to have studied at a music conservatory to perform worship music. It should be simple enough that people who have full-time jobs outside of the church are able to play and participate on the team. Perhaps a worship pastor or someone employed full-time by the church will have time to learn complicated songs, but if we set this as our expectation we alienate anyone else within the church body who wanted to serve but does not have the hours to dedicate to learning new songs. We should also be aware of the pressure to professionalize the worship team. There can be the unhealthy expectation for perfect technique and flawless performance, and while musicians should aim to give God their best musically, we are not at church to see a band perform. People may think they want a rock concert on Sunday morning, but what they need is to participate in a corporate time of expressing love to God.

The songs we sing at church should also be simple enough for new people to join in. The goal is not to see a concert, but to provide an opportunity for people to engage in singing/worshiping God. There should be no distinction between those "on stage" and "audience." The audience is God, not those of us standing in the pews. Our goal on Sundays is to worship God together. We should not expect everyone to already know the songs in order to sing along, but we should do everything we can to welcome everyone to join us in singing to God. To this aim: the melodies should be easy to pick up, the rhythms should not be too unpredictable or surprising, and simple song structures are sufficient. I just want you feeling invited to sing to God with me.

Finally, it is easy to temper my engagement in singing worship songs based upon minor issues like song preference and style choice. There are many worship songs which I find, personally and subjectively, to not be enjoyable. This is fine, but it should not be an excuse not to participate in worshiping God. Jesus is worthy of worship whether or not I like the song, the style, or those leading. I should not miss an opportunity to worship God because of something as fickle as genre or song selection.

So whether you are a pastor, worship leader, church member, or newcomer, this Sunday at church I hope you will join us in the Church global in singing to our wonderful God.

Processing Our Re-entry

We are back in California. The last six weeks were a blur of cleaning, writing letters (in French) to close our various utilities and accounts, and spending wonderful time with friends. We are now Day +8 from our departure from France.

It is strange to be back in California, and it's funny what moments of culture-shock strike us. Giant sodas with ice, free refills of drip coffee, restored cultural fluency; it has been an interesting reentry so far.

I miss Grenoble and I deeply miss my friends and community there, but at the moment I feel a bit emotionally constipated. I am sad, but not as sad as I expected. Perhaps I grieved enough leading up to our departure, or I am still too emotionally spent to feel much. Perhaps I think I am on a short vacation and will be surprised when our time in California does not end. Maybe I have been too busy/stressed/occupied to feel all the pent up emotions which will come bursting forth at a future moment in time. I don't know; I've never done this before.

But I am trying to place no expectations upon myself to feel a certain way, and I am working to provide myself time to feel what I want or need to experience.

The moments which have felt the strangest, when I have felt a bit like an outsider, have been when I spent time with friends I have not seen in three years. Of course their lives have gone on: jobs change, children are born and learn to walk, people grow, but when my mind has to catch up for the time we have been away, it makes me almost wish I had not come back. I was comfortable in the world of Grenoble where these dear friends, who I am now seeing again, were put on pause in my mind. I feel the weight of our time away most when I have to fast-forward three years of their lives to bring us to the present moment we are spending together.

I knew this day was coming and I grieved its approached. Now I also look ahead with excitement to what God is calling us to. Once again I am a maelstrom of emotions; sad and excited simultaneously. The process of re-entry will take the time it demands and I will allow myself this space. I am both home and away; resident and alien.

The idea which scares me most is when these feelings of being the stranger fade and I am fully acclimated back into my culture. Nothing will be the same, I am forever changed, but it feels a bit like I am losing my time in France. So I cling to my memories of Grenoble as I re-connect with friends and family. As we have come to say a lot these last few months, "life is weird."