On the recommendation of a friend, I purchased Hope for the Flowers and read it Saturday night with my ten-year-old granddaughter. No, it isn’t a children’s book, though it is easy enough for them to understand. It is a book about life and freedom and our failed attempts to find it by human effort. A friend recommended it to me a few weeks ago, surprised I’d never read it or heard of it.  It was originally published in 1972 after all.  

It’s the story of two catepillars trying to find the meaning of life and being sucked into a pillar of catepillars who are climbing all over each other to try to get to the top of the heap, because of an insatiable drive for to be high up in the sky. They don’t know realize the desire can only be fulfilled by flying, so they climb all over each other trying to get as high as the can.  The form a catepillar pillar.  Even though those at the top feel superior to those below, they are not really flying after all. Catepillar effort can’t fulfill its own destiny. Only those who give up their life as a captepillar to find its way into a cocoon can the transformation take place. 

Hope for the Flowers is an amazing story of the failure of human effort and how all our attempts only manipulate others to try to find what we seek so desperately. It’s about learning to die to ourselves to embrace the insatiable desire Go dhas placed deep within us. It’s a story of transformation that comes only as we come to the end of ourselves and embrace a reality far bigger than any of us. It’s a simple but powerful look into the world of butterflies to once again realize that God has put before us every day the most amazing image of how he wants to work in us.

Read it with or without a ten-year-old at your side and you will be invited again into a world of transformation, where our deepest desires invite us to a greater reality than human effort can ever achieve. Instead of disappointed hopes, you’ll find the path where flight is possible and where freedom and joy become a part of every day life.  

No one thought it was even possible. For years popular wisdom assured Christians that they couldn’t leave their traditional congregation and survive spiritually. So when researchers discovered a large pool of people who done exactly that and were not only thriving in their faith but engaged with other believers as well as the world, they were surprised. It has been called The Rise of the Dones, an incresing pool of passionate followers of Jesus who no longer participate in a traditional congregation and yet are still deeply involved in the life of Jesus’ church as it takes shape in the world.

The research doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been living among those kind of people for the past twenty years and tell that story it in my newest book, Finding Church:  What If There Really Is Something More.  

Last week in Loveland, CO I got to sit down with one of the researchers on this project, Josh Packard, and talk about his new book, Church Refugees, which will be released June 1.  You can pre-order it from Amazon, or read the first chapter here.  Let me give you just a taste of it here, though.  One of the stories he tells in the book is from Ethan, who grew up in a congregation, was active in campus ministry when he went to college and then was making a career in ministry bevore finally concluding that the he had to look elsewhere.  This is part of his story:

We kept showing up and colunteering because we felt the church was God’s home.  I don’t think that’s the case anymore.  The church is wherever God’s work is being done, and too often the way we were treated and the things I saw happen in the institutional church to other people just weren’t in alliance with what we thought God wanted. 

But here’s the thing:  I don’t think the institutional church is filled with bad people.  It hink the church in America is an inherently flawed structre that comepls people to make poor decisions.  You’re basically judged on how well you can preach and the numbers you bring in.  I realise the church isn’t perfect, and it’s made up of people who aren’t perfect, and I’m not perfect either, but the church needs to see that there are things that are broken about the structure, not the people.

Here’s what the researcher concluded about Ethan’s experience:  “He and his wife didn’t give up on God; they gave up on the instittuioanl expression fo the church. They didn’t stop doing things to advance the work of God; they stopped doing things to advance the work of the church. Their substantial energies and skills are now poured daily into activities and structures that happen completely outside the purview of organized religion. They’ve opted for relationship over structure, doing over dogma, and creating with rather than creating for. In short, they’ve created a new religious home.”    

Ethan isn’t alone. My travels and my email continue to show me just how many people there are looking for other expressions of Jesus’ church in the world, and finding them. Tomorrow I play the first part of my interview with Josh on my podcast at The God Journey. It’s a fascinating study that will encourage many who have not found the traditional congregation a helpful place to be.  Hopefully it will open a dialog that will allow us all to discover the church in her greatest splendor.  

I’m at the airport this morning getting ready for my trip to Denver, and then continuing next week to Richmond, VA.  This is an amazing trip with lots of meetings for reasons as diverse as sharing the journey, consulting with a publishing company that is looking for an appreciation for the “Dones”, to meeting with some people from Kenya who might be able to help us formulate a development strategy for Pokot, and finally to helping a friend with his novel.  It will be 12 days with a host of meetings and connections that I hope will advance God’s kingdom in the world.

As I go, I thought I’d leave you with this exchange that explains why I’ve never liked the term, “unconditional love.” 

Eileen: I enjoyed your books He Loves Me and Finding Church so much and can’t wait to get the latter one on audio book. Well the question I have that I struggle with a little bit us is Gods Love unconditional? My husband and I listened to a message titled “choose life” in which he suggests that there is no such thing as an unconditional love. Even Gods love for us is conditional. Some of the examples he gives are, “ask and you shall receive, knock and it will be opened, you are my friends If you keep my commandments. Those are all conditions he claims. He loves us despite of how we are, which I do agree with, God is love but not unconditional I struggle with. At least that’s what I heard from his message. Wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

My response:  When you hear someone teach and it doesn’t sit right with you, there’s usually a good reason—his Spirit within you. When your yuck meter goes off, trust it!  In this case it is well-set.  

To take Jesus’ invitation for us to engage his Father and turn it into a condition for us to earn his love is poor scholarship at best and manipulative at worst.  Seeking him is not a condition for us love, it’s an invitation to draw near to him so we can see how he’s making himself known to us.
You’ll notice that I don’t use the term “unconditional love.”  I know a lot of people like that term, and though I like what they often mean by it, I don’t like using it because it gives the impression that something called “conditional love” actually exists.  It does not. You either love someone or you don’t. If you can stop loving them because they do something wrong, stupid or hurtful, then you didn’t love them in the first place. God’s love is not conditional, he loves us all the time, even at our most lost and broken.  His love never changes.  The drama of our story shifts when we begin to discover how loved we are and then respond to him in a way that allows our engagement with that love to grow.  
But that doesn’t mean that our actions don’t have consequences. We reap what we sow, but that isn’t God ceasing to love us, it’s the way he made the world work so that we would learn from our mistakes and that our brokenness would invite us back to him. He keeps loving us through the consequences of our own choices, always making a way for us back to his heart.  

Eileen:    I just wanted you to know that what you said makes perfect sense…that’s the way I’ve carried out my life, but when you’re repeatedly told you have to be in church, you start to believe that your the one doing something wrong. I’m so grateful that God has put you in my path, if for no other reason than to confirm what I’ve always believed—you can win people to the lord by just loving them.

Amen to that! 

It is more than a little frustrating to click on an interesting link and begin to read the article it links to only to be interrupted five seconds by a blacked-out web page and a pop-up box asking for my email address or to send money. That’s especially true if the box moves so it’s harder to close it, or how to close it is cleverly disguised so it takes awhile to find it.  I will not go back to a website like that nor will I pass the link along to others because the owners of that site have made it clear to me that their real product is me! They want to sell my eyes to advertisers or my email address to purveyors of junk mail.  

Isn’t it enough to provide compelling content and know that if people want to follow you they will find a link for email updates or alerts?  Why do you think your obnoxiousness will endear me to you or your advertisers? It does not. I’m sure the research shows more people will sign up if you’re obnoxious about it, but is it really worth it when you lose so much crediblity about your concern for your customer?   

I do not have a problem with people selling their products or services on a website, or even advertising the goods and services of others to help offset their costs of providing content. That can all be done in a comeplling, responsible, and appropriate way, where you guide people to your services, rather than manipulate them so overtly. The need to maximize the monetary value of a website or its statistics by manipulating unnecessary “clicks” has reached such ridiculous proportions, that I’ve decided I will no longer vist websites that…

• Confront me with a pop-up window to block their page, either to show me an ad or try to harvest my email address.  
• Automtically start video or audio without my selecting it. 
• Have so many ads around the content they they remind me of NASCAR.
• Have a flashing “donate now” button prominently on the front page, unless they are a charity raising funds for other people.
• Promise something for free, but then require my email address to get it.  
• Require multiple clicks to view simple information
• Use false or misleading titles that don’t actually reflect the content of the article. 
• Intentionally confuse the “continue reading” button with buttons that link me to their adverisers.    

All of these set my Yuck Meter off, and even more so when these are found on websites that present themselves as helping people find their way in God’s kingdom.  Don’t they trust that God will provide for them and if not why do I want to partake of their teachings?  

Provide me with great content that is relevant to life and I will beat a path to your door, subscribe where I want to and even make a contribution if that’s how you roll.   But websites that use the above tactics clearly demonstrate that instead of providing valuable content that are exploiting me for their own gain. Visit them if you want, but I don’t have the time to navigate through all the garbage unless the content is truly stellar, and it usually isn’t or they wouldn’t have to resort to such tactics.  

Yes, I feel a bit like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, so call it my one-man rebellion against inappropriate exploitation of the Internet for commercial purposes. But if others adopted the same policy those websites would have to change.  If you instantly leave any website that is overly manipulative and they will see it.  I click away as soon as they block my view of the site for an ad or email sign-up.  If I have a hard time finding the content I want for all the ads that surround it, I leave too.  Those kinds of websites track such things and they will change when they discover people are taking offense to them.  It’s a bottom-line industry and it’s not your bottom line that they care about. Refuse to be manipulated by these tactics and your world will grow simpler even if they never change. And what’s more, you won’t miss their content anyway.  

In fact, we can do that with lots of things. When you feel manipulated vote with your feet and whether or not that changes the world, it will change your world. Life is too short and time too precious to let others demand more of you than you are willing to give. 

When your ten-year old granddaughter asks if we take have communion with our Easter dinner, the only reasonable answer is, “Of course!”

I love that she’s had it enough here to think about it.  I love that her mom and her had discussed Jesus serving it to his disciples as they were working through the events of Easter week.  This is a child who has never been in a Sunday school or attended a Sunday morning service.  She has grown up with Jesus as a part of her daily life and in the community of friends and family who are seeking to follow him.

So after the meal, we took bread and broke it.  We took grape choice and toasted the One who have up so much so that we could have life and freedom in him. And we focused on Jesus and that we would one day be re-united in eternity with some special people we’ve lost recently to this age.  It was the high point of the day!

Later I was reading an article someone sent me that only an approved clergy member can “sanctify” the bread and juice and only in approved locations, where people truly worship.  Yes, my Yuck Meter pegged.  Jesus celebrated a meal with his disciples and told us to remember him every time we partake of that meal.  We did a horrible thing when our “religious leaders” made the meal something that could only be celebrated when the “right person” consecrated it.   That made the Lord’s Supper a contest of power to decide who can serve it and who can take it, and have argued for centuries argued over its meaning and substance.

Such is what man does when he takes a simple gift of Jesus and turns it into a religious ritual fraught with fear.  Contrast that with the early church, who for the first 300 years of its existence would not have conceived of celebrating the Lord’s Supper at any place other than the family dining room table.  Imagine what it did for that woman who made the bread and poured the wine as Jesus made himself known at her table that evening as the church gathered to celebrate his life in them.

Isn’t it time to reclaim the simple things Jesus gave to his church and celebrate them in the midst of our lives?  “This is my body.  This is my blood.  As often as you do it, remember me!”

If this isn’t the strangest trip I’ve ever booked, I don’t know what is.  I’m going to Colorado for a week, then out to Richmond, VA for a week.  This isn’t just about visiting with people, on this journey.  I will also meet with a couple from Kenya doing some incredible development work in Kenya in counties next to Pokot and may help us with the need in Pokot as well.  I’ll also meet with the people behind TheDones.com website to see if our resources might be applicable in that venue.  And I’ll be meeting with someone who wants my help on a novel that may be one of the most innovative things I’ve ever read.  

So, yes, this will be a crazy trip.  But it does allow me some opportunities to connect with readers and listeners in this areas as well. 

• I’ll be in downtown Denver, CO the weekend of April 18-19. We’re planning a Sunday get-together at 1:00 for those that want to come.  Space is limited so check in with Michael if you’re interested.  I’ll also be around on Saturday and Sunday morning if people want to connect in a more personal way.  You can email me if you’re interested.  
• On Monday I have to go to Loveland, CO. If anyone is in that area that would like to open up a place for folks to connect, please let me know.
• And, on April 24-25 I’ll be in Richmond, VA in some open times for people to connect there. Contact Richard if you’re interested in joining us there. 

I’m sorry there isn’t more time on this trip to just hang out with people who want to come, but we can make best use of the times we do have…