Missional Explorer

New Hobbies and Friends

As I reflect on the past few years, another way I now sense that changes are afoot is how/where I spend my time.  For a number of months, I have taken great joy in learning about wine, wine varietals, the countries where wine is produced, best value wines, etc.  My learning curve was steep but I sure enjoyed the ride.  Now that I have a basic understanding of wine, I am spending far less time on this hobby having settled on what we like and the locations where we can find the best wine for the best value.  

While I am spending less time on hobbies such as wine and book collecting, I am spending more time on a relatively new awareness that, with the end to our chapter on "raising kids" fast approaching, I now realize that I/we have relatively few peer friends to show for the past 20 years.  I know that our story is not unique and that "friends" often take a back seat to "family" in the child-raising years.  But as our kids are now older and leaving the home, I have a yearning for a community of friends that I did not feelin the hectic and whirlwind days of raising our kids.   As I truly believe that God puts "desires" in our heart, I will be most interested to see how he intends to meet our community and friendship desire in the days ahead.

Now and Then

As we begin our 19th year at Jim Elliot School, Linda and I have been reflecting on where we've been, where we are, and where God may be taking us in the next few years.  When I interviewed with JES in the summer of 1991, I would never in a million years have imagined that I would still be heavily involved in the school almost 20 years later.  What a fascinating chapter in my/our life story.  Yet we have also been facing the reality that, with Adam graduated in 2008, Robby now a senior and Michael a sophomore, we might be seeing the outlines of some entirely new chapters over the next 3 years.

Don't get me wrong.  I am still wildly fascinated with the "missions" to "missional" paradigm shift which continues to rock our world.  And I can't help but think that our journey in this direction will continue to impact our lives in the years ahead.  But beyond being missional explorers, Linda and I are wondering what else is going describe our lives "after kids". I can vaguely sense what may lie ahead but only in wonderings and shadows.

While much is very unknown and I still want to run the race fully engaged at JES, I do sense changes in where I find joy and what is important to me.  For example, after a lifetime of loving books and devouring whatever is the "cutting edge" of theological wanderings, I have realized in recent months that books are not nearly as important to me as they used to be. . . and I can see the day when I will be hopefully cutting my considerable book collection in half or more.  I still love books but my appetite for theory has been severely diminished in favor of books that are truly transformational in real-life practical ways.  If you have followed this blog since I began writing in 2006, you might be able to sense this shift in recent months as well. . . which I am only now beginning to "name" myself.  For a long time, I couldn't put my finger on why I had little interest in blogging.  Now I think its because of this gradual change in my tolerances and appetites for more real-life engagement and less theory if/when there seems to be no practical point. 

I think I'll blog on this a bit over the next few days.  I'm sure that many of you have already found that there is no cookbook approach to life and no classes one can take to prepare for new chapters ahead. Linda and I have been wondering why we feel so strangely unsettled these days and I think this is part of it.  Our lives are changing.  Things we used to think were important are certainly becoming less important yet what is going to be important in the future is not yet fully known.   20 years is a long time in one's life.  How invigorating and mysterious it is to realize that the next 20 years may look very different than the past 20 years have been.    

New Adventures

Last week I started my 18th year of teaching at Jim Elliot School.    As we like to say at JES, "the train never stops" which forces most of us to take a leap onto a moving train trusting that we will land somewhere in one piece.  I want to mention two recent developments however.  One is that ACSI has just released the curriculum entitled Missio Dei which I researched for a year while in living New Zealand in 2006.  After carefully reviewing the final product, I think that ACSI did a masterful job of capturing the spirit and creativity of what God is doing in our world.  You can check it out at http://www.purposefuldesign.com/Textbooks/tabid/54/List/0/CategoryID/0/Level/a/Language/en-US/Default.aspx?SortField=EAN%2cProductNumber&txtSearch=Missio+Dei

The other conversation which I find myself tiptoeing back into is the whole issue of nationalism in the United States, an incredibly controversial topic to unpack in the U.S. Christian community.  Like missionality, I find myself drawn to this conversation because, even after 18 years, I still don't know how to dance this dance without getting fired.  I still use bits of Lee Camp but am at a loss to know anything else that will take the issue on and still leave me standing.  Any suggestions? 

Success and Failure

I've been sorting through 18 years of teaching stuff and came across this quote from an administrator's conference:

"I don't fear failure as much as being wildly successful at things that don't matter!"

Pretty well sums up my thoughts these days.

Middle Age Doldrums

I haven't been blogging much in recent days due, in part, to the busy-ness of my summertime schedule which has included travel (Canada), painting (with Coach Dave), the mountains of Colorado (Buena Vista), and prepping for school in the fall.  But the major reason is that, quite honestly, I just feel pretty tapped out in many ways.  The only reading I've enjoyed in recent days is pure pleasure reading. . . the last two Harry Potter books which I blitzed through after my sons recommended them so highly. Everything else feels like a re-hash of what I've already explored.  And I am lacking the passion to prove the previous sentence untrue.  I have tweaked my two classes at school with some new missional resources which I will comment on later but I have no idea if they will take with my kids at school.  We'll see.  I am very eager to unpack the new Missio Dei curriculum which my contact at ACSI just emailed is set to be released in the next week or so.  This is the curriculum which I helped research in 2006-2007.  So that will be a nice kick in the pants when I see that next week.  But otherwise, I'm feeling just a sense of malaise probably due to a number of life situations.  If I had to title this "chapter" in my life, I would probably call it "The Middle Age Doldrums".

In the midst of it all, I am facing some relationship challenges with friends and family.  I gotta say that sometimes life just sucks. . . there is no other way to put it. . . when one feels trapped in choices that feel profoundly lose-lose in the results.  In light of the above, the one question which has been posed to me in recent days which I have found somewhat challenging is a self-reflective question tracing who I am today back to the basic messages I internalized as fact from my family-of-origin.  This was not posed as a question of "blame" so much as a question of "what kinds of information about myself and the world around us did I accept as fact from my earliest days which may not be fact at all" but are still governing my feelings and responses?  This is a meditative question which I am somewhat curious to explore. 

My initial take on this ponder is a phrase I've blogged on before: "If it's to be, it's up to me", a significant lie which I have nevertheless lived as a default philosophy of life for many years.  In other words, if I don't continually stare this one down, I live it out without even knowing it.  No matter that this obviously denies any sense of God's presence, direction, and inspiration in my life, I have still lived this without question or distraction.  Beyond this message which I internalized for whatever reasons, I am not quite sure what other messages I have lived.  But it may be helpful and fun to explore this in the days ahead.  Who knows. . . maybe getting to the bottom of this question may help lift the sense of doldrums that presently describes my story.

Where Kids Are Still Strugging

While I have been so incredibly impressed with this past year's class as demonstrated in my previous post, there are still four significant "markers" to which I must return next year before plunging more deeply into Joining God's Mission.  My theory is that these "markers" are all related to the pervasive influence of Christendom which has so completely dominated the landscape that the vast majority of kids (and adults) do not even realize the blindness we have embraced.  

The first marker continues to be God's Story which has suffered unparalleled damage from mis-reading the Bible as a dis-integrated collection of children's stories, each with it's own moral at the end seemingly wrapping each story up with a "happy ending"  without realizing that, in so doing, we have distorted God's Story beyond all recognition.  Reading the Bible with the right contextual lens tells a Story that is neither child-friendly nor spiritually harmless.

The other three markers are directly related to the first as kids (and adults) are strugging with God's Mission in the world, the nature and purpose of His "kingdom", and not surprisingly, the "missions-to-missional" paradigm shift which is continuing to rock our worlds.  I am not sure how I will help kids deconstruct the above but we must re-address these issues before we go much further down the road.

Looking Back and Ahead

We have now completed my second and, by far, most enjoyable Joining God''s Mission class at Jim Elliot School.  The class was so successful with student "buy in" (spiritually, intellectually, and experiencially) that I have decided to help the class drink more deeply from the missional well next semester.   The trick is what and how do we proceed?  My initial title for the Senior Seminar class is "Faith, Culture, and Mission After High School" which is sufficiently broad enough to integrate all three areas into this full year class.  First quarter I plan to use the new Tangible Kingdom Primer by High Halter and Matt Smay which is highly user-and-experiential-friendly which I have found is especially important for high school students.  Second quarter I want to drink more deeply from culture and mission including the whole "believing, belonging, and behaving" model which is transforming so much of our cultural engagement.  

I haven't blogged much recently because I have been so caught up in the missional process of Joining God's Mission with students at JECS but I did want to document this recent most enjoyable success. . . which is really only the tip of the iceberg of Joining God's Mission beyond high school.   

Christian Troublemakers?

Ryan Taylor, a friend and companion on the missional trail just posted an awesome quote on his Facebook site: "Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents of a dimension incompatible with society." -Jacques Ellul.  I wish we could live this out more often as we are all called to be counter-cultural subversives bearing witness to a radicalized Kingdom in whatever culture we are placed. 

Out of the Desert

I have been living in a very dry time period with regard to reading as nothing in recent months has truly captured my fancy.  That is until I began N.T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church.  I am only about 80 pages into the book and I already find myself interacting with Wright on almost every page. . . in some cases with huge "ah-hahs" of new discoveries and delights.  I'll blog about a few of them over the next few postings but, among all the new wonders, is that I have finally found someone who takes on the question of "death: friend or foe" head on!  I have pondered the issue of death for years including talking with older friends who may be close to this experience.  Answers to the question of death range all over the map loosely characterized on comfort end by "death is my friend and is easy to embrace. . . it is just crossing over from one life to another" to the very opposite opinion that "death is my mortal enemy. . . one to to fought to the bitter end".  So which is it?   There is no question that death was not part of God's original plan but what are we to make of it now?  Is death a friend to be embraced or a foe to be fought?

Of so many things I like about Wright's book, Wright take on death is not mushy embrace but also not a fearful defeatism.  Wright insists that death is, in fact, our enemy but is a beaten enemy who is not to be feared after Jesus showed our future by His Resurrection into a newly transformed body that is, at once, physical yet also physical in a way completely unlike our own.  Now that is something I can buy into with enthusiasm!  Just as Dallas Willard puzzled me for over a year with his stray comment (in person) that "the Cross of Jesus is the Achilles heel of evangelical theology" so to have I struggled with the reality of death, friend or foe.  And I haven't even begun to unpack the depth of Wright's work.

Ahh, it feels good to be reading something that captures my imagination again after a long dry spell.

Highs & Lows

Midway through this year's Joining God's Mission class, I would say the "highs" have been helping kids (1) see that God's Story asthey have known/experienced it is incredibly lame (2) struggle with the "Kingdom" of God (3) see that salvation is not primarily about heaven but about life in the here and now (4) understand the huge connection between culture and mission, culture and God's Story, culture and . . . well, everything!  Like most kids in my experience, my present class has been captured by issues of culture and I am eager to take it as far as I can go.

The "lows" of class this year have been the continuing drama surrounding (1) tests as a measure of learning (2) lack of "buy in" on the part of some students which is reflected by poor attendance and/or work habits outside ofclass (3) an occasional unwillingnesss to think/reflect deeply about God beyond Sunday School answers and church dogma and (4) outright resistance by a few who feel (sometimes like their parents) that my out-of-the-box wonderings and wanderings, asking questions and encouraging (not cultivating) honest doubt to be expressed is too faith-risky and perhaps even heretical. 

At least this year, most of the kids care.  If you search back to last year's class in the confines of this blog, you will find that most kids from last year didn't honestly care about God so why in the world (literally) would they care about God's mission?  A fact that I didn't realize until late in the game.  This year has been refreshingly different in that regard which re-energizes me daily.