How to fight fair
30 June 2008 Jeff Gill
Some only slightly tongue in cheek lessons on how to fight fair taken from the sword fight in The Princess Bride. This was for our weekend meetings on the theme of conflict resolution.
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What if...
10 June 2008 Jeff Gill
- All the millions of dollars and hours spent over the last 35 years pointlessly trying to overturn Roe v. Wade had been spent on helping women who had or were at risk of having crisis pregnancies?
- All the millions of words used to attack and defend Todd Bentley had been offered up as prayers for people who don’t know Jesus or used in conversations with friends to share God’s love?
- The evening I frittered away reading arguments about Todd Bentley and looking at a clever new phone that I have no intention of buying had been spent doing something useful or interesting like finally watching Life on Mars or starting the project that I really want to do, but find intimidating?
- I didn’t do any frittering at all tomorrow?
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If just one person was saved...
29 May 2008 Jeff Gill
…it was worth it was the way organisers of failed evangelical Outreach Events liked to comfort each other in my hometown Tucson, Arizona, the site of many failed evangelical Outreach Events. We planted some good seeds was also popular. But to use those platitudes someone has to show up at your event.
10 minutes before our neighbourhood craft event was supposed to start my son went round to his three friends’ houses to remind them like they asked him to the day before. None of them were home. Also not home were our new neighbours who told me the previous evening that they would probably come over.
I’m pretty sure this was the conversation in all four houses:
Mum: Hurry up and get your shoes on. You need to go.
Child: Is it time to go to the Gill’s carefully planned and super-fun neighbourhood craft event already?
Mum: No! You’re not going there. Didn’t you see the invitation? It had the name of a church on it. They’ll probably try to make you speak in tongues.
Child: So where am I going?
Mum: I don’t care. Why don’t you down to the park and look for discarded syringes and porn.
It was probably nothing like that. I’ve never come across any syringes or porn in our park. I know that reality is almost always more benign than what goes on in my head, but I’m nervous that our desire to share the life of God with our neighbours could turn us into the local freaks.
‘Darn the dang nerves!’ I say. We carry on. Maybe a barbecue next.
Or maybe I’ll just huddle at my laptop and write essays on Emerging Into a Theology to Support Missional Praxis in Postmodern Semi-Rural (Non)Community. That could be even more comforting than a platitude.
Finally,
Are you, or is anyone you know trying anything like this or sort of like this? How’s it going?
This is a great article on making friends with people rather than making projects of people.
The photos are by the brilliant Marya Figueroa aka emdot.
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Can we go back to theory, please?
26 May 2008 Jeff Gill
Our church has done a very good job of making a place that is easy for non-church people to come to – for starters, we meet in a pub – and people do come. About half of the people of i61 didn’t go to church before they came to i61 or else they had not gone for a very long time.
Easy to come to is good, but for a while Christine and I have been feeling that it is very important for us to go, to share the life of God with people where they already are. Since we are the children’s pastors, we decided to do something with kids. Since there is no time like the present, we decided to do something this half-term week. The obvious place to start is Someone Else’s Neighbourhood. Unfortunately, the Someone Elses had to work all week, so we are doing it in our neighbourhood at our house.
It’s surprisingly scary.
I printed up a little invitation, and yesterday I went out in the rain and passed a bunch of them around. People I don’t know got them through their letterboxes. People I do know or have spoken to a bit got me knocking on their door inviting them. The response was tepid at best. People seemed to think of it as a thinly disguised wheeze to get their kids into church.
The response at last house I went to completely took the wind out of my sails. Our village shopkeeper lives there. He always seemed like a nice guy. We chatted once about the woes having BT as an internet provider. His teenage daughter babysat our kids a few times. But yesterday he said, ‘No, not interested,’ before I could finish one sentence. When I stuttered something about it being just some games and crafts for the kids, he cut me off again.
Like I was selling double glazing!
Or I was a bleeding Jehovah’s Witness!
At that moment I acquired actual empathy with a friend from church who went out for a Christmas meal with a bunch of mums from her children’s school. She didn’t drink because when she’s indulging in extra calories she prefers to get them from food. The real reason doesn’t matter though. She’s a Christian. She didn’t drink, so obviously she’s judging their lifestyle. Now they don’t want to be her friends anymore.
Jerks.
Actually, they are just being people who are living in the culture we live in. That’s not an excuse for other people’s bad behaviour; it is a reminder that we kingdom of God people still have a lot of barriers to move out of the way when we go where the people are.
I’m pretty sure some of Callum’s neighbourhood friends are coming. I’ll let you know how it goes. I think it will be good.
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Blogging will turn you into a self-righteous [insert naughty noun of your choice here]
2 May 2008 Jeff Gill
It’s easy. Just make sure your feed reader is stocked with a steady supply of bloggers you agree with. Make sure you cut out most of the non-Jesus blogs so that all your culture comes filtered and packaged like a carton of Tesco Value apple juice. When you are not online, try to be in your church office. It’s comfortable there. Read enough rants conversations about Mark Driscoll/John Piper/Bill Gothard/Some Other Reformed and/or Fundamentalist White Male to be at least strongly tempted to write something about him yourself – nevermind that he’s on a different continent and spends a big chunk of his life trying to connect people with Jesus. Once you’ve got all that in place, sit back and enjoy the slide into becoming exactly the same kind of [naughty noun] that only a few years ago made you think seriously about whether or not you actually could carry on being a Christian for much longer. Don’t think twice about any of this until your 15 year-old throws out a statement like, ‘You don’t like anything that’s different.’ Immediately deny it and try to ignore its truth by reminding yourself that you aren’t narrow like all those other people. You’re just right. You’re a pastor at the hottest church in [your region], for crying out loud. Carry on with some success until you start to prepare to talk to your teenagers about an area or two where they aren’t acting like Jesus. After you have been crushed by the weight of your hypocrisy, you might find repentance is the best tool for re-inflating your lungs.
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It's all been leading up to this moment
14 April 2008 Jeff Gill
have this way of beginning sentences when they speak that makes me think they are announcing the conclusion of an Important Study. Their brains must be super laboratories, collecting data, testing every hypothesis, analysing the outcomes with a mental process made immensely powerful through years of experience. And when they speak they are not giving me an answer; they are giving Results and Findings.
If only we could all be so authoritative.
Actually, their secret is simple. I am going to share it with you right now.
Scientists start their sentences with So.
So when we look at the specimen…
So the pathology of the virus…
So the quantum state…
Two letters. One little word. That’s the difference between expressing an opinion and explaining the universe. Look:
So I’d like the vegetarian lasagne and a glass of the house red.
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Once something feels real, making it real is a lot easier.
19 March 2008 Jeff Gill
—Seth Godin
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...stuck in a linear rut, imposing patterns of one-way flow on a universe that consistently moves in circles
28 February 2008 Jeff Gill
This has stirred up my thinking about a bunch of different things that I hope to write about soon, but for now this will serve as a good reminder for me.
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Shame on you! And while I'm at it, let me give you some condemnation and rejection as well
10 February 2008 Jeff Gill
In my experience, there are a number of life issues and sins-that-so-easily-beset-us that the evangelical church really stinks at addressing. We’re good at inspirational messages about How To Succeed and How To Get Over It (and those are often useful and necessary). We are very good at shock and shame and savagery when people Don’t Succeed and Don’t Get Over It. But we are not so good at teaching people How To Fail, nor are we very good at coming alongside the failures among us and walking with them into success. We are really bad at understanding Getting Over It and what an ordeal that actually is.
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Eight subversions of Christianity
17 January 2008 Jeff Gill
Greg Boyd, my favourite pastor that I don’t know, wrote in his blog earlier this week about a book he read called The Subversion of Christianity by Jacques Ellul.
In his review Greg writes that the church has been subverted by success, money, morality, religion, pragmatism, violence, politics, power.
Every one of these things is realised in the kingdom of God, just not in the way or the timing that we humans necessarily want it to be. That’s what makes us so susceptible to temptation. We are so easily like Abraham with Ishmael, Saul with the pre-battle sacrifice. But we can be like Jesus when satan offered him easy shortcuts to everything God was giving him.
Have a read of Greg’s post, then come back here for a quick look at the good things that are subverted by each of these eight things and what implications they have for a life of following Jesus in our time.
Success God’s dream for the world has always been for the whole world – from Adam (fill the earth) to Abraham (all the nations of the world will be blessed in you) to Jesus (my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations; go into all the world…) to the apostles (God desires all people to be saved). The temptation is to try and make it happen by dumbing down the good news: Say a prayer, buy a T-shirt, you’re in the club. Salvation is transformation and that rarely happens while being swept along in the emotion of a giant crowd. The good news is for the whole world, one real connection with God at a time.
Money The bible talks so much about money. It is full of promises about our needs being met, about us having an abundance. But ‘all these things’ are added as a side-effect of seeking God’s kingdom, and we freely receive so that we may freely give. The temptation is to make the side-effect the goal.
Morality Living a moral life is not the aim. Living a life abandoned to God is the aim. The Kingdom of God is a return to eating from the tree of life. Goodness is a by-product of God’s kind of life. The temptation to base life on ethics and morality looks so good. It is so safe and easy. But it has no power to enable us to live a life that is truly good. The rules are a wall that separate us from really knowing the source of goodness. That brings us neatly to…
Religion Paul writes about people holding on to a form of godliness but denying its power. That’s a good definition of religion. There is this urge in people to be like God. That makes sense; we are made in his image. Religion gives us a set of boxes to tick in order to be like God. It gives us a feeling of accomplishment. Except that it doesn’t in the long run. Religion grows and looks for more and more behaviours to control. Look at God’s original terms of covenant with Israel – three chapters in Exodus. Look at what it turned into by the time Israel got to their land – Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Religion’s promise of making us like God or pleasing to God is a false one. Jesus said once that the one necessary thing was sitting and being with him. Fact is, it is a lot easier to try and define life with rules.
Pragmatism God has been at work to fix the world ever since sin came into it. We humans have a natural desire to join him in it. The problem is that we stink at fixing the world. The thing that fixes the world is the spread of the kingdom of God. That doesn’t make sense to our natural minds though. What makes sense is: I see a problem; I’ll try to fix it. And then it gets more broken, giving us more to fix and so on, leaving us completely distracted from the real answer. Living and spreading the Kingdom of God causes the world to be fixed without all our clever efforts
Violence See my upcoming post Hooray for violence.
Politics It’s religion, it’s fixing the world, it’s being willing to be bought (even though we’ve already been bought by God for an infinite price), it’s playing by the rules of this world’s system (which guarantees we lose*), it is ultimately a quest for…
Power Jesus says, you shall receive power. Paul writes about God’s power working mightily within us. People want power. It’s one of those built-in things that goes with our God-given mandate to take care of the earth. Once again, the temptation is to try to seize power. But the power that God promises is the power to be his witnesses, the power to lay down our lives for others. It’s funny how unpopular that kind of power is. Nevermind that it is the same power that Jesus had, the only power powerful enough to reach the world, to remove the fear of lack, to make us good like God, to connect us with God, to fix the world, and to defeat evil.
We Christians, if we are willing to let God change our minds about almost everything, could actually be the kind of humans God designed us to be.
—
*for an example of how to win by not playing by the rules, look at David fighting Goliath.
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Parting your soup is not a miracle, Bruce, it's a magic trick.
8 January 2008 Jeff Gill
—Morgan Freeman as God in Bruce Almighty. My favourite line in the film. (We do love the magic tricks, don’t we?)
Be the miracle!
Bonus:
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Everyone is stupid and wrong
8 January 2008 Jeff Gill
Anyone who gets any position of leadership soon learns that people are stupid and wrong and stubborn.
Anyone who keeps any position of leadership…
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tags: humans,
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Ah, Spring. The sun is shining. The trees are blossoming. The druids are writing blogs.
4 April 2007 Jeff Gill
I don’t usually start the day wondering what The Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America has to say, but you never know where the life (or the internet) will take you. A blog I read linked to this article about peak oil (basically, a so far accurate theory for predicting the rise, peak and decline of production in any oil field. This theory predicts that oil production for the whole earth will peak this decade.) The entire article was interesting, but this is what really caught my eye:
…human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths, as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere.
In other words, what really matters to people, what really creates change is
- the stories, not the facts
- the heart, not the head
- the love, not the being right
- the feelings, not the thoughts
You cannot bring someone into the family of God through a rational argument. They must come through Jesus, a person who told stories that touched people’s hearts. He showed love in ways that were meaningful to first century people — healing, feeding, casting out demons. He made people think, oh yes, but even more he aroused great feeling in people’s hearts.
The Grand Archdruid’s article, The Failure of Reason is longish, but excellent reading. Go check it out.
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Community
9 February 2007 Christine Gill
I was 6 during the miners’ strike of 1984. I lived in a small mining village
I guess the strike probably affected me differently than it did my friends, whose dads worked in the mines. My father had been unemployed my whole life anyway.
It was one of the happiest times of my childhood…
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