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I’m spending this week in the hospital with my Dad through his open-heart surgery to replace a valve and do a double bypass and his recovery. I appreciate deeply those of you who have held my family in prayer during this time. His recovery is progressing well. As I’ve sat with my father I’ve been reading an out-of-print book by John Beaumont, entitled God in my Dreams. In it he tells a story of God telling him to lead out in singing in the Spirit among a congregation of people of which he was a co-pastor. He didn’t do it, concerned that they had never done it before and that the elders wouldn’t approve.

The next day he told his co-pastor and his wife what he’d been through that night. His co-pastor responded:

I hesitate to retell the story because we all know people who are so self-focused that they would use such encouragement to be over their pet theologies and agendas, and swear God had told them to do so. But that danger notwithstanding, I am convinced that it is more important to encourage people who do listen to Jesus to follow him, even if the consequences might be painful for them. It also points out that our religious systems have created environments where obeying God is far less important than having the approval of others by fitting into their expectations. How quickly we blame the person whose actions expose our division than deal honestly and compassionately with the division among us. We love the security of fitting in more than we do following the Lamb wherever he goes. I think that’s why our systems continue to harden over time and why people caught in them end up spiritually stagnant even though they are hungry for him.

We experience the life of God, however, by following him wherever he might lead us. John continues his comments in the book:

Amen! Follow him wherever he leads you and don’t talk yourself out of it just because other brothers and sisters won’t understand. A few hours after reading this story, one of the people who came to visit my dad in the hospital surprised me by telling me she had left a congregation three years ago that she had been a part of over 25 years. She loved it and had always been one of the most committed people there. But God told her that her allegiance to the group was becoming a substitute for her life in him. Few folks in that congregation have understood or affirmed her choice, and she hasn’t tried to explain it to them beyond, “This is something God asked me to do.” She also said she has never found such freedom in God’s life and such incredible connections with her family and friends. And she would be just as ready to go back or go anywhere else God would ask her to do.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that we are called to live by “every word that comes from God,” not by pleasing even well-meaning brothers and sisters.

Last weekend Sara and I spent four days with a wonderful group of believers around Youngstown, Ohio. That’s them above at or Saturday night barbeque. They are two years on a journey of discovering relational life together. They gather weekly in various homes to share God’s life and also have a Wednesday night Bible study for those interested. We hung around a retreat center together for the weekend and were joined at various times from some folks further north near Lake Erie and some from the Pittsburgh area. What a weekend!

We talked through something you’ll be reading more about on this website in coming months. There is a block on my website reserved for The Journey and The Story, . I’ve just begun to post some things there to help people see God’s working in their own life to move them closer to him and prepare them more effective participation in the life of his body and in living out their mission in the earth. In my own life and in others I’ve connected with in recent years I am recognizing a progression of God’s work in growing us up and setting us free. They are not steps but simply things we need to ‘get’ to learn to live relationally with God, other believers and the world.

By growing daily in the reality and depth of Father’s affection for you you will find yourself growing to trust him and his purpose sorting out in the experiences of your life. As you grow to trust him you’ll find yourself embracing true freedom and knowing what it is to live free of guilt and condemnation, free of other people’s expectations, and free of your own agenda for your life. This growing freedom will allow you to discover how the Body of Christ can share God’s life together, freely without trying to make others provide for you what you’re not finding in him. Body life can now be a place for people to grow in Christ and encourage each other without manipulating or judging each other. As we learn to share life among the body we’ll also find our hearts spilling over with God’s love for the word and we’ll find ourselves incarnating that love quite naturally as we live simply in God’s reality in events around us.

This is an amazing process and there is progression here that is quite helpful. In other words people who aren’t growing confident in Father’s affection will never know what real trust or freedom is. People who aren’t growing in God’s freedom will only see the body as a place to manipulate others with their own need, ‘theology’ or agenda. But these are not steps of achievement. I see them more as an ascending spiral. We’ll continue to discover more of each of these areas as we grow up in him and will not complete any one of them before moving on to the next. In that sense, we’ll grow in them together.

For each of these five areas I will be providing some of the lessons God’s taught me in sorting out each of these areas in my own life. I’ll also include resources from Lifestream that will help you work through these specific areas to greater life him.

Also, let me add an unrelated postscript here. If you would like to see the incredible beauty of New Zealand, I’ve posted some of our favorite New Zealand Pictures, . It really is a magnificent country as you will see!

I have been reading Richard John Neuhaus’ Death on a Friday Afternoon about the seven statements Jesus made on the cross. I was so encouraged by his perspective on what is to live in the real world. Here he tells us how easily we mistake the real world where God dwells for the false world that occupies so much of our attention.

It is so easy to mistake the distractions of this world for reality itself, when it is only an illusion. The real world is in Father’s heart, where we’ve been invited to be at home in him in everything we do and in every circumstance that confronts us. There is no greater reality than our life in him, and his life in us. We do well to keep that in focus every day, or else the distractions and chores of living in this world will define or reality and diminish our awareness of him in all of life.

Toward the end of the book he reminds us again that when we live in God’s reality it permeates all that we do. It is just as spiritual to work on your car or decorate your house as it is to pray, gather with other believers or share his life with someone who is lost. When we live as his, his glory shines through our lives no matter what we might be doing at any given moment.

I’m convinced we best demonstrate God’s life when we are least aware of it. When we are trying too hard we are only acting and the world sees it instantly even if we don’t. They are not looking for actors on a stage, but people who live God’s reality in the simplicity of their lives. When we live deeply in him throughout each day he makes himself known in ways that will even surprise us. And it won’t be fake or artificial because it comes from reality not pretense.

This was too good to pass up! Shortly after I posted the latest blog, a friend from New Zealand sent me this quote from one of John’s books:

Funny. Very funny. I’ve been there, how about you?:

Over the last few days I keep thinking of one more tidbit from our conversation with John and Mary Beaumont in Christchurch, New Zealand. This has really been an encouragement to me as I’m freshly evaluating some of the things I feel like God is doing in my own life right now.

John said that once you’ve said ‘Yes’ to Jesus, it needs to count for the whole of our lives. We need not ever wrestle again with whether or not we’ll do what he wants. Once that is decided the only question that remains in everything we consider is simply this, "Is this what he wants?" And if he does, why would we want anything else?

I clutter my journey in Christ with way too many questions. Does this make sense to me? What would be the ramifcations? What will other people think? Does it make financial sense? What principle should guide me here? Answering all of those questions can be cumbersome indeed and many of them will lead me opposite of the way he would want.

We are loved by a Father whose ways are so much higher than ours and whose thoughts go way beyond anything we could ask or ever imagine. Why would we ever think that we could reason out his ways? All we’re really doing is reasoning out an excuse to do what we think is best.

Now when I find myself caught up in an internal argument, I’m pretty certain that’s because one of Jesus’ thoughts is rolling around in there. How do I know? Because I rarely argue with me. I like my thoughts. It’s his thoughts that are so different from the way I would naturally think.

I am finding great rest in recent days simply asking, "Is this what you’re saying?" Or, "Is this what you want?" If I am certain of that, then the other questions that offer such a wearying wrestling match become moot.

I don’t know about you, but I find one question much easier to deal with than an entire checklist of them!

[As an aside, I’ve just added an article of John’ Beaumont’s that comes from a previous book of his that is now out of print. It is entitled the Jetty and the Raft.]

I attended a local consultation over the last two days regarding community transformation. The promotional material said it was “a roundtable gathering of Christian leaders looking at church outside the walls.” I didn’t really expect them to mean it. But one of the questions we sorted through on the first day was, “What is the problem with church as we know it?”

We were given some interesting statistics to ponder. This from a book By Reggie McNeal titled The Present Future

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

This kind of information is coming from all over. I received this quote in a letter from an institutional bunch:

So what are we to make of all of this? At least a number of people are seeing the irrelevance of institutional Christianity as it as evolved into this century. Of course most of these studies hope to encourage Christian institutions to reform the box so that those who’ve left will come back in.

In the end, that’s where our discussion ended after two days. People trapped in the box just cannot see outside it long enough to know that there are some incredible ways to live out this Christian experience without wasting so much time, energy and resources on the machinery our culture has come to equate with Christianity?

For the most part, I am convinced the box is a deterrent not only to growing in intimacy with Christ but also in engaging the culture with the reality of who Christ is rather than the baggage of Christianity. But I was also reminded that there are a lot of people who really love Jesus and are seeking to follow him who are still in that box. They are trying to make the most of it, not realizing, that it is getting the best of them.

At the same time, I know some who would quote the statistics above as proof of a world-wide movement of people seeing through the frailties of the box and are abandoning it for a greater relationship with God and with other believers. They point to this information as proof that they are right and others caught up in the system are wrong. That would be a mistake. People coming to be part of a movement will only create another box in time and still miss the relationship Jesus wants most with them.

Wouldn’t it be better if we got our eyes off of systems and hope about movements and fix them squarely on Jesus? Do what he tells you to do. Follow where he tells you to go and encourage others to do the same. Then we’ll simply be the church in our day, with a variety of expressions as God shows us how to share his life together and how to make his love known in the world.

Except for the stupid spam proliferating on the Internet like rats, nothing more fun than opening my email every day. Here are two back-to-back emails that I opened this afternoon. I get many emails like the first one. There is great angst out there about how organized religion thwarts people’s attempts to know the living God. I understand it. It used to make me so angry and I wanted to do something to show it up.

But in the end that is God’s job, not ours. In the second email you’ll notice the freedom that comes from getting our eyes off the failures of others and onto the life of Jesus flowing through us. The man who wrote the second, wrote me one much like the first a few weeks before.:

What do we do when organized religion gets us down? Get our eyes back on Jesus and the life he’s asked us to live. There’s nothing better we can do, even for those captured in religion, than to sort out in our own life what it means to live free. Then they might see in us something worth seeking. They are like kangaroos born in the zoo. They think they’re free, because they just don’t know better. They have no idea what life in Jesus is really all about. You can scream at them until you’re blue in the face, but the security of the status quo will win over the uncertainty of the unknown.

But what would happen if a mob of free kangaroos came bounding by in the open fields, chasing up the hill in the glory for which God made kangaroos. Then it just might do what all the words in the world won’t do…

[Stuart and George, I appreciated what you both added to this to clarify my remarks. Thanks!]

Lucy,

Obviously you’ve seen people deeply hurt by the religious sytems of our day. As have most of us who hang out here. I am so sorry for that, and sorry someone wasn’t around to provide the help her or she might have needed. And I agree that is an important part of what God asks us to do.

But I can’t help but thinking you misunderstood what I wrote.

No one said to leave anyone in bondage.

No one said not to help.

No one said to stay sileint.

My goodness, how can you read this blog and think I’d ever encourage people to be silent? The point of the story was to help people learn to live free, not try to push them into it by our own strength. You cannot force someone into freedom, but you can stand alongside them, hold their hand and cheer them on in the struggle. I have also seen people badgered into leaving the religious system and ended up on the outside hurt and bitter. They never seemed able to soar in the life of Jesus, because no one ever let them learn how to trust God for themselves.

That is the part we cannot do for others. We can talk to them about it, help them see the choices clearly and encourage them however we can, but we cannot trust for them. That’s what they will have to find in Jesus if they want to know the joy of his life.

And he has that for everyone!

One of the few lists I subscribe to on the Internet is the Daily Dig, from the Bruderhof communities. It offers a thought-provoking quote every day and most of them are incredible. I got this one a few days ago. I know it is an old illustration, but one worth repeating.

No where does this apply more clearly than it does with people breaking free of religious obligation to live freely in God’s life. You can’t badger people into it. You cannot drag them out on your own or you will damage them and God’s work in them. They’ll never learn to soar in God’s grace if they don’t embrace the struggle themselves and learn to rely on God as he frees them. That’s the only way out.

There is a huge difference between encouraging someone as God leads them on the journey, and taking over the journey for them. If we can’t remember that we’ll find our best intentions to help other will only be destructive to them. Cheer them on, don’t push them ahead.

Sara and I are home from New Zealand after two incredible weeks traveling throughout the country and meeting with brothers and sisters. (Oh yes, Sara got to see penguins too!) If you haven’t read the blogs of our conversations and the incredible story of a group of in Fairlie, you might want to read up below.

We were blessed by the number of believers we found thriving outside the box. Many were former leaders in the congregations they attended—pastors, elders, deacons and the like. Some left at God’s leading to find him outside the religious institutions of the day, others were left out when the groups they were part of embraced priorities they could no longer follow. Some walked out alone, others with brothers and sisters who shared their passion. All experienced rejection from other well-intentioned believers that they couldn’t possibly be following God if they didn’t end up committed to a local congregation.

These are supposed to whither up and die without attending a regular service or being under the ‘covering’ of an institution. Remarkably, however, they not only thrive outside but have come to see that their time fulfilling religious obligations actually robbed them of the relationship with God they desired most.

Our two-week trip crystallized some observations I’ve had about similar folks I’ve met all over the world:

• Most didn’t leave the system because of hurt (though the process is often painful), but because God kept leading them toward something deeper and more spiritually vital. All weren’t failures in the system. Most were incredibly successful in it, but over time found conflict between the spiritual life they wanted and what they had to do to feed the system.
• People inside the system often seem to be less gracious to those outside than those outside are to those inside. Most folks thriving outside traditional congregations don’t look down on those who participate in them as lesser brothers or sisters. They will encourage others to draw life from Jesus wherever he leads them. However, those inside often accuse those who are not committed to such institutions as independent, rebellious and unsubmitted, when that is rarely true.
• An important part of the journey seems to be in laying down our reputations, former friendships and ministry dreams to follow God where he asks us to go. Others may not understand. It has cost many their income and security, but I’ve not met too many who ever regretted it.
• Those who live free of regular institutions seem to have more in depth fellowship with other Christians than those who wear themselves out with religious activities that rarely include the opportunity for real, honest and open fellowship.
• People thriving in Jesus outside of the religious systems are the easiest folks to fellowship with. There is an instant camaraderie, compassion and willingness to live their lives openly with other brothers or sisters.

Two of the brothers we met with in New Zealand have done a fair amount of writing and we are blessed to help make those available to you. Jack Gray (right) has allowed us to post three of his booklets that encourage people to live outside the bondage of religious obligation and embrace the fullness of his life. I think you’ll find his insights to be of great encouragement and help to you no matter where God is leading you to fellowship with others.

John Beaumont (left) has just released a new book entitled, A God-Filled Nobody, which Lifestream will help distribute in the states. Click on the link above to find a description, excerpts and order information. He felt called to tell his life’s story as an encouragement to other brothers and sisters who also desire to know God as he is.

There is nothing more important than all of us following God as best we sense him leading us and find exactly how he is placing us in the body and not simply going through the motions with a status quo that doesn’t serve all of God’s kids.