This is just getting sad. Steve Pickett BRYAN (CBS 11 News)

Prestonwood Minister Arrested In Online Sex Bust

“A minister at one of the largest churches in North Texas has been arrested in a sex sting operation in Bryan.

Police confirm that Joe Barron was taken into custody after driving more than three hours to have sex with what he thought was a 13-year-old girl.

Barron serves as a minister at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano. The 52-year-old is a senior minister who works with adults at the church that has some 26,000 members. Barron had only been with the church for the past 18 months.”

How many pastors are going to have to go down before we recognize there is a significant problem with the pedestal we place pastors on and expect them to be perfect. The culture that creates this is as broken as what he’s done.

Pastor John Frye shares his move from social scientist to Jesus Pastor. His insight into what it is like to be a traditional pastor are worth gold.

“In my early years a lingering value still suggested that pastors shouldn’t get too close to people because the pastor might not be able to maintain his “objectivity.” All of this created a low church liturgy where the Sunday sermon was what mattered most. Preaching was the big thing in the service. Getting to know the Book was more important than getting to know God. Mistakenly in the minds of most, the one equaled the other. I became a theological technician, not a pastor. Put me in a white lab coat and I would have been mistaken for a social scientist.” (ht)

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“Today, I am more convinced of inerrancy than at any time in my Christian life, but the charge of bibliolatry, or at least a near, if not kissing cousin, is one I fear is hard to rebut. To be more specific, in the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ.” Apologist JP Moreland (ht)

Skilled Incompetence: An individual who is highly skilled at protecting oneself from pain and threat posed by learning situations (Chris Argyris, Harvard)

I finally got to see Iron Man last night. And it surprised me how good the movie was for several different reasons. One, it was really funny. I thought Robert Downey Jr was hilarious in his quest to create the Iron Man suit. He was somewhat the anti-hero. Sure it stretched bounds at times but who cares. Two, the movie creates a really good sense of jeopardy that seems to be missing from so many films. I loved it.

But what I found fascinating was the underlining social commentary about war and terrorism. This was the first movie that really painted the United States in a darker hue. We were the war mongers as much as anyone. Iron Man’s quest was against people from the United States. Even the terrorists were supplied by us. This movie would have been considered communist if created in the 50’s.

I loved that it really looked at the cost of war on humans. It essentially asks, “What are we doing?” The scenes with the refugee families being separated was strikingly deep. This movie really took the popcorn action flick and turned it on its ear.

I was wondering today if we are creating baby factory churches. Let me explain.

When my wife and I first got married we felt called to provide a home for a girl lost in the foster system. It was a deeply rewarding but very challenging look into the life of a seventeen year old girl who had been abused in more ways than one. My wife met her through Young Life and we chose to take the risk and invest in her in a significant way. The risk we took gave me a first hand look into how our foster system abandons kids at eighteen when they are least prepared for life. It’s really sad.

To be honest it was hard watching her destroy herself. The drama was huge. She had little capacity to make a mature decision outside of what was her immediate need. Most of her relationships were abusive in some respect. Inside our home we got to see first hand the traditional ways people search for love in all the wrong places. Her defense mechanisms were extremely high, as you would assume. At eighteen she chose to leave our home and venture out into the world. Within one year she was pregnant with her boyfriend. Her venture into motherhood was daunting to say the least. It was easy to see how the same brokenness would perpetuate itself in the awesome task of being a parent.

It was also easy to see how being a mother really gave her a sense of validation, even though she had little skill, compassion or maturity. The allure of mothering eventually led her to have a second child almost immediately. The last time we saw her she was struggling to put her kids in the car, screaming at them.

But in reality, she was doing exactly what she had learned all of her life. She was perpetuating the very same life her mother had given her. The cycle would continue for another generation.

And her story got me thinking about the way we do churches. There’s a tremendous allure in numerical growth. Numbers look cool. We look cool when the roster says, “600″ or “6,000″. We must be doing something right, right? But I would ask the question, “Are we creating baby factories?” Does our numerical growth come at the expense of the real responsibility of parenting that leads to maturity? Getting people in the door is the easy part. Leading them through the spiritual formation to maturity is the hard part. Are we parenting them in a way that leads to perpetual immaturity?

And I get the allure of new converts. Having a baby is a really cool experience. The day my daughter was born radically changed my life. It’s new and wonderful and awe inspiring to see new person just arrive. But that moment in the hospital is the beginning, not the end. Birth is the beginning of a long journey that ends when my children can reproduce maturity, not a baby. Making babies can take six minutes. Making healthy adults takes a lifetime.

My wife and I have three children of our own and parenting is hard but it’s worth it. It reminds us constantly of our need for our own Heavenly Father. And my wonder over the last ten years is have we abandoned the parenting process in our practice of spiritual formation. Have we forgotten the need to create elders and instead chosen to have lots of babies, only to create a world that is deeply immature and incapable of mature reproduction.

Jesus spent three years with twelve people, an astounding thought in today’s church models. He was not interested in the crowds who were interesting in cheap thrills. He refused to play their games and was deeply interested in spiritual maturity, not numerical growth. He got parenting because he himself was deeply connected to His Father and had reached spiritual maturity.

What I would also offer is that by abandoning the spiritual formation process, we abandon our own growth. Much of my own maturity comes from living in and through the parenting process, choosing to love when we really don’t want to. It would always be easier to just say to my kids, do what you want. But I would miss the journey of parenting and discovering what I the fullness of what I am created to be. I don’t always like parenting, but it’s has shaped me and been central to my spiritual journey.

Parenting validates the notion that we learn by what we practice and teach better than what we hear or read. Parenting requires me to put my thoughts and beliefs to practice and discover how wrong or right I was. It requires sleepless nights, lots of patience, and a willingness to get up every day and love.

My hope is that those who are in leadership in churches will engage what it means to create mature elders who can lead people not just to the feet of Jesus, but to practice following His footsteps.

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PS: A friend of mine sent this after I posted this.  It from Arcade Fire’s Wake Up.

“If the children don’t grow up, our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up
We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms turning every good thing to rust.
I guess we’ll just have to adjust.”

“Passion, on the other hand, is always fast moving, and if you have something extraordinary and there’s a cadre of believers, the passionate will find you.” Seth Godin

“Women can teach the children. Okay so let me get this straight. When people are the most susceptible, moldible and gullible…Let the women at them. But as soon as they can actually discern and resist.” Rob Bell on Women in Leadership

I was reading Walking With God by John Eldredge, and he pointed to a very interested idea. God’s creation doesn’t give us a sense of dated time. I thought this was stunning. Creation does give us night and day. It does give us seasons, all of which were present in the Garden. But it doesn’t give us a sense of dated time in our human sense, one that we can’t point to twenty years from now.

So much of our human architecture dates itself almost immediately. I was looking at a picture of the New York skyline and was impressed by how little was truly organic, or self regenerative. I love New York. Thought it was a great city but it was as the name suggests a concrete jungle.

About six months ago I went back to the neighborhood that I grew up in. I was surprised (or maybe not surprised) to see how dated our track home neighborhood felt. It was rows of small homes that all looked the same.

I look around at my own neighborhood and in twenty years, they will likely point to it as the track home of the early twenty-first century. It too will become dated, if not already. Even great cities like Florence, San Francisco, London, Chicago all became worn and dated. Much of Italy and Greece live off of this dated quality.

And yet when I stand in the middle of the forest, there is no sense of dated time. I don’t know why but I just find this fascinating.

Beloved Son Participating In Glorious Mission

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There you have it. My life in six words. I was tagged by Jeromy to participate in the Six Word Memoir meme. Here’s how it works:

1. Write your own memoir using only six words; 2. Post it on your blog; 3. Link to the person that tagged you; 4. Tag five more blog friends.

If you are reading this I tag you…participate…enjoy.

The coolest thing I heard this weekend.

- To follow the will of God is an act of wholeness. -

One of the things I’ve noticed recently is what I would call the non-religious spiritual affiliation. I’m sure that it’s not new but I’ve been noticing it a lot more lately. It feels like a backlash to the problem that we all have. In such a consumeristic, media driven society, not tag-line or distinction is safe.

The author Donald Miller was the first time I recognized someone tweaking the basic idea. I remember reading his now famous for tag line, “Nonreligious thoughts on Christian Spirituality,” and thinking, I like that.

And then I was reading the site dear-god.net recently and saw this at the end.

“Disclaimer: This website is totally independent and non-denominational. We are not a religious or spiritual/new-age organization. We have no affiliation or relationship to any church or religious or spiritual group or organization.” (From Dear-God.net)

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now and A New Earth, is famous for positioning his books in this manner. He says,

“Eckhart Tolle is a contemporary spiritual teacher who is not aligned with any particular religion or tradition.”

What do you make of this?

Len hits a grand slam on the roots of mission. This is a must read for anyone interested in missional conversations and discipleship.

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Absolutely one of the most stunning social metric sites I’ve seen. You can see the TED video of it here.

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Len from Next Reformation shares an issue of Friends Quarterly. It includes thoughts on the priesthood of all believers and nurturing the gifts within a body of believers. Awesome stuff.

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Tim Keller shares Reasons For God at Google. (ht)

Barack Obama on the role of faith in politics for Sojourners. Very interesting. (ht)

This post, at dear-god.net really hit me. I was that kid. I remember feeling that way and wondering how God could possibly love me. Forgiveness was not a likely scenario.

I now realize that I was deeply broken and searching for love in so many destructive ways. I was looking for something to heal my heart and found it in the intense sexual pleasure that is porn that was always followed by intense shame. To a great extent, that moment, the one deeply embedded in shame right after pleasure, was one of the closest things to hell on earth that I have experienced.

But what hit me about this post was not about porn, but about being on the outside and seeing that kid and knowing that God loves him no matter what he has done. I wish someone had told me that twenty years ago.

May we be love to those who live in this world and lift them out of shame.

If you would like to participate in this months Missional Synchroblog, let me know below. This months question is: Why Am I Missional?

Feel free to explore this question in your own way. One of the things I loved about the previous responses was the diversity. There is no right answer…just the real answer.

Updated Posting Date: May 19th

This is a four month project. You are welcome to participate as you can. The first round of posts was awesome. You can see the list here.

For a long time this was my favorite song.  It’s probably the song that started my whole journey.

Okay I finally got to watch this movie. Can someone please explain what all the ruckus was about. I don’t get it. It’s clearly fantasy. The Magisterium sounds more like Nazis than the church. Brain operations? And calling the soul “demons”? I just don’t get it.

I actually found the movie a little confusing. The demons are supposed to be souls but they seemed disconnected at times for story effect. They keep having conversations about what the other is thinking feeling. Aren’t they the same?

And the girl is ALWAYS in the right place at the right time to hear the right info. Come on. That’s cheesy storytelling at its finest.

And then the end. What?

I don’t usually say it that way. A friend of mine does. But I was reminded of that when I read his from the Message.

Romans 8:29-30 (The Message)
God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.

Eugene Peterson just gets it.

I don’t get it.

Obama wins North Carolina by 233,000 votes and 9 delegates. Clinton wins Indiana by 20,000 votes and 3 delegates. Net total…6 delegates and 2213,000 votes for Obama.

People lambasted Huckabee for staying in the race but Hillary gets a free pass?

I’m reading what I think will be one of the more important books written in the next ten years. My opinion. It’s Walking With God by John Eldredge. For those who haven or haven’t read John before, this is almost a complete departure from his previous works in masculinity and a return to his earlier works. Much broader in terms of spiritual formation. I’ll post a review when I’m done.

But in the Summer section he highlights an intriguing dialog on two traditional camps.

“The first is the the holiness or “righteous” crowd. They are the folks holding up the standard, preaching a message of moral purity. The results have been…mixed. Some morality, and a great deal of guilt and shame.”

This is the group I grew up on. Suck it up, dig in your heals and just do what is right. It was deeply shameful and full of a tremendous amount of hypocrisy. When someone falls (my pastor was caught in an affair) restoration is virtually impossible.

The other camp is the grace camp.

“Their message is that we can’t hope to satisfy a holy God, but we are forgiven. We are under grace. And praise the living God, we are under grace. But what about holiness? What about deep personal change?”

These two camps appear to mimic the fight or flight responses we see throughout humanity. One posits an unreasonable burden that we cannot possible accomplish on our own. The other simple abandons any responsibility for the self.

But as John points out, neither is wholistic. He points to a third way found in whole restoration that embraces grace but seeks wholeness. This is for me true spirituality, a grace that seeks restoration found in surrendering to His Spirit.

Which camp did you grow up in?

Okay this was weird. Craig Detweiler produced a documentary called Purple State of Mind, which looks like a conversation between he (a Christ follower) and his friend (who rejected Christianity). In this deleted scene (and I’d love to know why it was deleted) Craig explores the origins of fundamentalism.

Turns out fundamentalism was started by Lyman Stewart, who founded Biola University, my former school. Lyman was attempting to create a set of 12 fundamentals in response to Darwinism.

I appreciate what Craig “wants” to do. He says, “My job is to put the “fun” back in, to take the “da” out, and restore the mental.”

Good luck Craig.

One of the assumptions we make is that our relationships are defined by beliefs. And this is true to an extent. Much of the tension we experience in relationships is the idea that we must share the Gospel, which over time has been narrowly defined by a single moment of acceptance of faith in Jesus that secures their eternal salvation. And so when we meet someone new, we encounter moments that offer us an opportunity to share the Gospel.

I meet so many people who have such a sense of shame around these brief moments. “I didn’t share the Gospel with them. I’m not living my faith.” As though our relationships becomes defined by this ticket punch.

Much of the tension exists in the assumption that the person we encounter has little or even no knowledge of Jesus. But if we listen, we will likely find this is not true. Most people are aware of who Jesus is. Even in Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist cultures, Jesus is revered for being an Avatar or prophet. Some might even have an deep understanding of the Gospel.

And even when we share the Gospel story, we’re left with the real question. If this person says, “No,” for whatever reason, will we still choose to love them? Will we still share the Gospel with them? Will we still be love, which is the fullest reflection of Jesus and the call to mission? Or, will will simply treat the person as a transaction that is defined by our duty to get them into heaven? Because real evangelism happens after they say no.

In a postmodern world, they will likely say no until they see the reality of the Gospel in our lives. They are likely reject the Gospel because they want to see if it is “true” in our lives. We can’t hide behind a plastic, intellectual faith that ceases to produce fruit. We must share the Gospel by suffering with them, sharing in their pain, and brokenness. And this is only possible in love.