Lord If I Know

Why Hold Back

I just got back from spending a week with some of the most amazing youth. For a little over 6 years I have been working with the program called Director's Invitational at Casowasco Camp and Retreat Center. This group of young people came together and challenged each other through discussion and exploration of who God is and the ways that we relate to God. It made me wonder why we, as supposed adults, have such a difficult time being in dialogue such as I say in these leaders of the church.

I wonder if we spend more time trying to keep people happy, or if we do not want to offend someone. I guess it could possibly be that we have not taken the time to think through our believes enough and we know if really challenged we would be lost. Could it be that we might have to face the fact that we might be wrong?

All told, it might seem more simple to just assume what another person thinks and leave it at that. It also might seem more simple to never challenge what we believe. However, do we ever grow then?

The Privilege and Responsibility of Invitation

“For it is by grace you have been saved, though faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. -- Ephesians 2:8

It is only through the grace of God, not our good works, not our human determination, or even through our will, that we gain full access to the riches and fullness of God. The only thing we did to receive this gift was to accept the gift. The grace of God was poured out for all humanity in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and is offered to every single person. Many of you reading this might have not only heard about the grace of God, but you have chosen to accept the gift. Still more of you may have gone from acceptance to living fully a life of grace. All who have accepted this grace are called to share the gift. Grace, while given to each person, is not only for the one person. As Christ Followers, those who have accepted the gift, there is a great privilege in inviting others to experience the grace of God first hand. A grace relationship with God through Jesus Christ is not something that we are to merely soak in the glory of. We are not to be selfish with what God has done through Christ. Not only is it our privilege to share the grace of God it is our responsibility. Part of being a Christ Follower is to act as Christ did, and that is to extend the grace of God to all people.

Establishing a grace relationship with God through Christ is not something we did. It is impossible for us to do enough good things to receive grace. It is a gift from God. It is not from us, and only for us. It is from God and for all people. There are many ways for people to experience this gift, one of the ways is through the church. I want to invite you to be praying about, and looking for people that you can share the grace of God with. Invite them to experience the grace God has freely given to all of us.

Let's Be Honest

Once again I found that I took a longer time between posts than planned. But here goes. Right now at the church were I pastor we are doing a sermon series called untouchable topics. We are looking at four issues that are often left out of the church and many peoples life. This week we were looking at racism, over the next few weeks we will be looking at politics, homosexuality, and greed. When these tropics are discussed in many places they are discussed from a purely emotional place. But what would happen if we, Christ Followers, began to have the discussion in a way that glorified God, remained true to our scriptures, and left room for God to be judge not us fallen human beings. Would the discussion be different? I think whether we identify ourselves with labels such as liberal, conservative, evangelical or progressive many of our discussions get put in theological terms, when in reality they are about our personal preferences and bias. It is time that we had honest, biblically sound, discussion around these and many challenging issues in the life of grace. Not providing of answers, or proving of our points, but honest dialogue. Anyone interested?

The Importance of Relationship

I am at the annual meeting of the United Methodist Church in North Central New York, and have been making some observations. The most significant right now is the inability, or unwillingness to build relationships with each other. I am sad to say that I see this most in my clergy colleagues. Sure there are those whom we share the highest affinity with, but we are in connection with all those who are clergy persons. We should be building relationships with people who we view life differently than, especially those people. Why is it that what we were designed and created for, what we long for, we are so poor at doing?

The Best Teacher

It is said that experience is the best teacher, in some regards this is true, but by another it is not true. Think about the best teacher you ever interacted with. One of the reasons you learned from that person was because you choose to learn. Experience can only be the best teacher if we choose to let it be our teacher. We need to take each opportunity to allow God to teach us through what we are experiencing.

By the way, who was the best teacher you ever had?

Who Are We To Be?

Life gets busy and things fall to the wayside, things like blogs, but I am back. I wanted to go back to the first entry about the biggest issue facing the church. There is no such thing as one issue facing the church in America today, the multiplicity of issues facing the church is truly staggering. At the core of all these issues however I thing one thing rises above all else. There are many ways to say it, are we more concerned with doing church and not being the church, or are we so concerned with being the church that we lose sight of being Christ-Followers? In the world of the church, which I traffic a majority of my time in, we are all too often caught up in the trappings of what we think church should be, and therefore confuse our image of the church with the Image of God. I don't think God has particular interest in many of the things that we as the church fret about. I do think that God has great concern about the things we wave a passing thought to. In the end, when all is said and done, what matters most is living the life that God gave us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and now empowers through the Holy Spirit. At its best our lives should be a grace-filled, love-oozing life patterned after the life of Christ. At minimum I think we all need to be able to say we don't know, and acknowledge that none of us has it all together, and we all do things that are in line with the verbal claims we make about out life.