a beautiful mess

disclaimer: this philosophy of ministry has been years in the making and is not a result of any single experience whether positive or negative, professional or platonic, vocational ministry or corporate america, one person or another. think more along the lines of, the butterfly effect.

making moonshine is surely not something i usually recommend. okay, never do i recommend it. but the process by which our ole bootleggers and coalminers and banjo-pluckers made moonshine does offer a parallel to the process through which i have undergone for the last year plus. the process of distillation.

the last thousand hours could be/has been historically described as a number of things, really – dark night of the soul, renaissance of grace, reformation by way of deconstruction, brokenness, pathway to healing, a journey… but what i want to isolate in these two, or maybe three, posts is how this process/experience/days/months has led me to, like moonshine, a distilled version of what i began with: specifically as it relates to my “philosophy of ministry.”

so here’s the deal, a lot of people offer different philosophies of ministry, books on the subject, conferences on the subject, etc. ad infinitum – and that’s all well and good. i offer this, not as the only orthodox way, but as a testament, again, to the process of distillation and purification that i have undergone: thus producing a “few drops” of what’s important (our mountain friends would say this is the “good stuff from the mash!”). i BEG your comments, questions, encouragement, insight, and thoughts…

this is addressed first and foremost to myself. also those nearest me. and then to any servant of the kingdom who has a passion for being in the middle of vocational ministry and within any platform – children, youth, family – they’re all made up of a people…

so here’s a few drops (with more to come tomorrow/later this week),

be about filling every wineskin instead of spilling a lot of wine.

from the barna group and in light of a revealing 2006 study,

A new standard for viable youth ministry should be – not the number of attenders, the sophistication of the events, or the ‘cool’ factor of the youth group – but whether teens have the commitment, passion and resources to pursue Christ intentionally and whole- heartedly after they leave the youth ministry…

discipleship against this background is concerned with filling every wineskin – filling each one, to the brim, with wine (a symbol of life) to the fullest; it’s not about spilling wine all over the place, getting a little bit in to a vast amount of wineskins…

we can not convince ourselves that bigger is better: better is always better: and one full wineskin with deep, rich red wine is always better than a few skins with few drops of watered-down, premature wine.

look not to the fastest growing local churches but to the longest living local churches.

this is my soapbox evangelism speech about fast food versus real food opposite the discipleship-winefilling-speech.

strictly fast food chains offer value meals typically high in preservatives, sugar, flour, and salt…commonly resulting in a lot of trans fat; likewise, a fast food approach to local church ministry and service typically results in quick attraction and growth – but in unhealthy, negatively-reinforced ways.

real food takes time to grow, prepare, and serve. besides, what are we in a hurry for, anyway? do we really think the bridegroom wants to rush down the aisle to an unhealthy bride with an immature attitude and dying heart?

of course, maybe this is connected to watered-down, premature wine…?

praying for communitas, not only community.

alan hirsch brings us an epic and beautiful reminder of what, i believe, GOD has in mind for us,

Then there is the idea of communitas. This should be interesting to small groups because communitas represents a kind of community that develops in the context of a shared ordeal or challenge that calls people out of a normal understanding of themselves. They are centered around the kind of experiences that turns friends into comrades. Often our sense of connection and reliance on each other is minimal, and what a communitas will do is restructure the relationships between people and help them experience and interact with each other in a fundamentally new way. In essence it means putting the adventure back into the venture.

if this type of prayer – the one for communitas – begins to break in to our unrelenting conversations with GOD – i believe GOD will begin to break out of our prayers and transform our conversations and local churches which will always transform our locales.

[more tomorrow/later this week]