Installation Address
Given at the First Baptist Church of Warren, Ohio as a part of the installation as Pastor

Brothers and Sisters: It is with great joy that I receive your welcome into First Baptist Church and to Warren, Ohio. I believe it is the call of God that has placed us in this situation. The welcome has been warm, the love has been generous, and the response to the new and different has been gracious.

Two weeks ago, I invited this congregation to dream God-sized dreams for what the life of the congregation could look like. We heard from quite a number of people during the service as they shared with us what they thought God could do here. I promised that I would share with you some God-sized dreams of my own this afternoon. Now, I intend to make good on that promise.

Two thousand years ago, the Son of God, before whose cross we now stand today, died and was raised from the dead, destroying the power of sin, evil and death and beginning the process of new creation to bring eternal life to all who believe. This good news – this Gospel – has come as a beacon of hope to countless millions across two millennia, kings and criminals, rich and resourceless, sick and sinful. This good news is the Emancipation Proclamation to all who live in the slavery of sin and death that we may have new life.
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Sermon 31 July 2005
11 Pentecost Proper 13, Year A
Isaiah 55:1 – 5

Refugee Hope

A refugee camp must not be a very pleasant place to live. Displaced from their homes, living under temporary roofs, sweltering in desert heat in a country not their own, longing to return home and to life as normal, refugees live a desperate existence.

There are thousands and thousands of refugees worldwide. These are the war-weary displaced persons of conflict, strife, revolt, revolution and oppression. Some flee genocide. Some flee famine. Most flee war and the armies that bring it. The U.N. estimates that over 19 million live as refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons. http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/statistics

The images we see of such situations are appalling. We’ve all seen them. Many of us try not to look. When we are moved to pity and act, we often discover that much-needed aid never reaches them due to the insidious evil and corruption perpetrated by so-called governments in refugee areas.
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Today my parents took me shopping for a new table for my house. Now I have a table in my breakfast nook, and it’s like I’ve gained a whole new room for my house. I can see myself spending a lot more time in here in the near future!

It’s been fun! Tomorrow morning Robin’s making (some) of us get up at 6:00 to go running with her for two hours so she can continue to train for a marathon.

Should be fun!

This Sunday, I will become a member of the First Baptist Church of Warren, Ohio, USA.

Following the principle of “lex orandi lex credendi est” (how you pray, or what rituals you use, describe what you believe; or, how you worship describes what you believe about God), I’ve developed a “rite” for membership in a local congregation that describes what I think is going on in membership.

As a Baptist, I believe that when one is baptized, that person becomes a member of the entire church: past, present and future, all around the world. At the same time, that person becomes a member of a local body of believers. The church is always expressed locally; whether as a single congregation or the commonwealth of several congregations in one locale (crossing all denominational lines, of course), the local body of Christ is the true expression of the church.

This is not, as many Baptists would believe, to the detriment of any coordinating hierarchy and association between congregations. Rather, it is founded on two basic principles: “where two or more are gathered” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” The church exists where believers are gathered. Thus, a scattered association, while still “the church” is not “a church.” Secondly, it is only possible to truly love our neighbors if we actually are able to love those who are physically proximate to us. They are the only ones who are truly able to get under our skin; therefore, they are the only ones we can truly love as neighbors at a depth that is regularly fruitful.

Thus, since when one is baptized - that is, initiated into the life of the body of Christ - one joins with a local fellowship of believers, whether formally or informally, enduring or ephemeral.

So when someone begins to associate with a body of believers other than the one into which they were baptized, and desires to formalize those ties for the sake of accountability, commitment and common ministry, it seems right that this process is a renewal of the vows made in baptism. Once again, these vows may be made formally or informally initially; at the process of new membership they may also be formal or informal. Nevertheless, the joining of a local fellowship of believers is truly a renewal of our baptism, since baptism is the only rite of initiation into the body of Christ.

In these days when so much of what we do has become ritualized - that is, since it has been routinized to the extent that it has lost its meaning and depth of understanding, it seems important to find a way to state explicitly what is going on in our worship to bring meaning back into the actions that are, to many, meaningless.

Therefore, Sunday, with the support of a congregational sponsor, before the entire congregation, I will be asked if I have been baptized, and if I want to become a member of First Baptist Church. The sponsor will affirm that I live out the faith of Jesus Christ and have been taught what is necessary for faithful Christian life. I will then be asked to renew my baptismal vows: setting aside allegiance to sin, evil and death; putting on new life, following Jesus Christ as Lord. I will then be asked if I believe in God. I will recite a basic formulation of faith. Then the congregation and the sponsor will be asked if they will support me in my continued development as a follower of Jesus Christ.

Finally, I will be given the right hand of fellowship and the congregation will formally welcome me into membership.

Why is this so elaborate? It is elaborate because membership has meaning. Membership has meaning beyond the rite - a formality of passage from one state to another. Nevertheless, this rite encourages us to consider what membership means, and the mystery in the meaning. The meaning does not have to be taught in essay format: rather, it is demonstrated.

Peace to all—

Mom and Dad are coming tomorrow! Woo Hoo!

Grant and Traci are coming Friday and bringing Robin! Woo Hoo!

You scored as Sacrament model. Your model of the church is Sacrament. The church is the effective sign of the revelation that is the person of Jesus Christ. Christians are transformed by Christ and then become a beacon of Christ wherever they go. This model has a remarkable capacity for integrating other models of the church. Sacrament model 89% Herald Model 78% Servant Model 78% Mystical Communion Model 72% Institutional Model 28%

What is your model of the church? [Dulles]
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Hmmmm…

There’s a profound difference between a formal change, i.e., a change of style or presentation, and a substantive change, i.e., a change of the nature of the thing itself into something new.

The fact is that when we change the instrumentation of the music in a church worship service, we have not made anything other than a change in form. The substance of the service hasn’t changed. Only one aspect has, and in that, it is a very minor surface change in the grand scheme of things.

While this surface change can raise a hullabaloo, it’s not really where our “change energy” needs to be focused. Only by making true substantive changes can we really address the core issues involved in a situation. These core issues are often much more difficult to deal with, since they deal with people’s deep-seated values and ways of operating. It is really only when the substantive changes are made and core issues addressed that true transformation comes about.

As a part of the ordination process in the American Baptist Churches, USA, (otherwise known as the Department of Redundancy Department, yes, forgive me Canadians, Brazilians, et al…), I have to write an ordination paper.

My ordination paper’s not really a very good one. I found out on Friday that the state committee needed it this week, so I hastily assembled it from the contents of another paper, with a few additions.

I had originally written a paper stating my theology back in seminary in the spring of 2004. That paper was a good one, I believe, stating what I believed concisely, clearly, and articulately in 16 pages. While the format for that paper mandated 12, 16 worked better to explain where I was coming from. I based that paper’s format on the Nicene Creed - not a particularly Baptist thing to do, but I was trying to make a point: we are a part of the whole church going back at least that far, and the basics of the faith are outlined in that document formulated in the context of the Arian controversy.

So, given the haste with which my paper had to be written, I took this original document and rearranged it to fit the rigorous outline mandated by the ordination committee. The outline is intended to cover all the necessary bases, and I can appreciate having all the papers show up in the same format. Nevertheless, it turns a paper into a series of disconnected paragraphs. So that’s what they’re getting.

I’m not happy with the paper. But what else can you do in two days’ time?

Sermon 24 July 2005
10 Pentecost Proper 12, Year A
I Kings 3:5 – 12

Discernment in Changing Times

Every generation faces change. Change is so much a part of the human experience that the early church fathers declared that one of the most essential differences between humans and God was that God did not change and humans did.

Change is built in to the human experience. Sometimes we call it “growth.� Other times we call it “grief.� Sometimes we call it “disaster.� Other times we call it “opportunity.� Birth and death, maturity and old age, adolescence and young adulthood, marriage and divorce – all these things speak of the changes that occur in our lives.

Each generation faces unique challenges. These challenges often are based on how the world around them is changing and how they adapt to those changes. Sometimes seemingly minor things have consequences that reach far beyond the significance we think they deserve.
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I played around with the future look of the M Squared T site for most of the day today. It was a fun, relaxing, frustrating, repetative adventure in PHP, HTML and CSS.

I own no web-publishing software or photo-manipulation software, such as COREL Graphics Suite 12 or Adobe Photoshop CS2. (wishlist, hint, hint…) This complicates matters as I have to do everything pretty much by hand in a plain-text editor and do a lot of trial and error with colors before I get something halfway decent. Actually, I found a copy of Corel Graphics Suite 12 on the cheap here, but I’m not sure I trust the site. I’m hoping the company sees this post and can give me some reassurance.

Long and the short of it is that the new M Squared T is coming along quite nicely. I have a couple of projects before I can launch it, though:

1. Content display: playing around with Mambo is fun, but it’s still not displaying my content in the way I want it to. It’s still a mite unsatisfactory for navigation. I think I have some solutions that’ll solve that one. Just a matter of fussing with it.
2. Integrating www.msquaredt.com/blog/ into the main site: This is a heckofalot more complicated. Basically, I have to write a program (or two, or three) to do this. In PHP. Basically, I have to make wordpress talk to Mambo and vice versa and make that conversation amiable. Something on the order of writing a Mambo mambot/module/component combination AND a wordpress plugin. But hey, I like a challenge, don’t you?
3. Rearranging the directory structure: I don’t want to lose my clean URLs, especially /blog/. That might get tricky.

Well, I do this ’cause I like to, not because it’s easy. I enjoy a challenge.

Grant offers us a gentle, personal paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer today:

The LORD’S Prayer:
Daddy, who is all around me in the spiritual and physical world,
[Hallowed be Your name]
Bring me into an understanding of Your world in which you pervade my will so much that I do things the way You would do them and thus do Your will here on earth just as Your angels do it in Your presence, with joy and without question.
I trust that You will care for my needs such as putting food on my table, a roof over my head, and people to share community with.
Forgive me for not loving You enough and for not loving my neighbor who was made in Your image.
Keep my way from harm, but if harm should happen, help me to rely on You for my strength to endure it.
You gave me life and I offer it back up to You this day with joy.

He says he welcomes comments, etc. on his blog, here.

Today is the three-year anniversary of a two-day event that caused me to experience how rumors can develop firsthand.

About four days prior to this, I had helped another missionary grill sausage over an open fire. That night, he was up all night with stomach flu.

I didn’t think anything of that, though - he’d caught it from his kids, he said.

Well.

That was Thursday, this was Monday. In the interim, we’d moved from Vilaka back to Riga and then by bus up to Tallinn, Estonia. We stayed at a beautiful little church in one of the suburbs, around the bay from the city. I started to notice nausea after trying to chase a bus to hold it so we could get on. But I figured it was just the greasy local food disagreeing with my exertion.

Until, in the middle of the square in Old Town Tallinn, the stomach flu hit me. Hard. Now, gruesome details aside, I was up all night. Nevertheless, in the mode of the Xtreme Team, the next day, we were on the road again.

Actually, we weren’t “on the road”, per se: we were “on the hydrofoil” - to Helsinki, Finland.

There were no incidents on getting to Helsinki as far as I was concerned. Once we got there, they gave me the day off so I could recover. I was exhausted.

And really, that was the end of the story - a couple of others got sick, but not nearly as seriously, and that might have been motion sickness on the ferry.

However, when I got back home to Illinois, my mother told me an interesting story: some people had managed to mangle the details of my brief illness to say that I had been airlifted to Hong Kong for treatment of some life-threatening illness. This led to some rather confusing conversations with people when I visited them, until I found out about the rumor.

The truth is that I still live with some periodic stress-induced discomfort following the incident, but it was not nearly unsettling enough to be airlifted from Finland to the People’s Republic of China.

My, oh, my, what rumors can do!

Well, Google Earth is Cool. Yep, cool with a capital “C”.

Check this out:

Medium:

Large:

There wasn’t enough detail to do stuff from Champaign or Warren like this… but doubtless soon they will, right?

Let’s hope…

Three Years Ago Today Xtreme Team Latvia returned to Riga from the village of Vilaka, in Eastern Latvia (Latgale) 4 km from Russia. In Vilaka the team had been the guests of honor at a church camp run by some missionaries from a couple of churches in Riga.

This camp in Vilaka was the destination of the infamous “bike trip” for which Xtreme Team Latvia will go down in history. The team wrote about it here, here and here.

There are two Xtreme Teams in the field right now, one in the Republic of Georgia (no, not the one with Atlanta, the one with Tblisi) and one in the Dominican Republic.

Pray for them as they experience their adventures and discover God along the way. This is a great opportunity, not to be missed!