Starting Over Again

The past year has been a most interesting one for myself and our family. We have watched our once-great church home of some 17 years go through mismanagement, confusion, and an emotional and painful split, followed by a loss of some members, a period of wondering and wandering, and finally, now, a chance to start over.

For some odd and serendipitous reason, I have become involved in the begining of something new. A new birth, if you will. On Sunday mornings, I am meeting with a small group of younger (definition of young which I hope might include me!) couples, who desire a safe place to grow and nuture their faith. A welcoming community. A new beginning. And even as I write these words, I realize they are actually a form of a plea unto God; may this be so with us. With our little beginning band of believers.

I have come to reflect on how precious this new thing is. How important this little collection of people can be. And ironically, how this links directly and personally to the things that Tod Bolsinger has been talking about the past several days. Just look at the words of Acts 2:41-47:

41That day about three thousand took him at his word, were baptized and were signed up. 42They committed themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the life together, the common meal, and the prayers. 43Everyone around was in awe--all those wonders and signs done through the apostles! 44And all the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. 45They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person's need was met. 46They followed a daily discipline of worship in the Temple followed by meals at home, every meal a celebration, exuberant and joyful, 47as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw. Every day their number grew as God added those who were saved.

Baptized. Signed up (not: went out on their own to Starbucks). Committed (not: showed up when they felt like it, or the mood hit them). Life together (not: Bowling Alone). Common meals, prayers, people in awe, wonders and signs, wonderful harmony, holding everything in common (not: my OWN stuff).

Meals at home, every meal a celebration. Joyful. And people liked what they saw.

A church. Imagine that!

A Different Side of Hollywood

In the fall of 1987, a group of my friends from Hollywood Presbyterian Church finally realized a dream that was years in the making. But it was not the typical Hollywood dream that is glamorized in film and television for all the world to see. Not a dream of fame and fortune, or of public recognition.

There is another side to Hollywood, a far less glamorous side. A side of Hollywood that few see, and fewer care about. Just blocks south of the storied corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street is the heart of this "other side" - the barrios of Hollywood, near the far less famous corner of Carlos & Gower Streets. In this neighborhood live the individuals and families that clean the tables, cook the fast food, clean the hotel rooms, and pick up after those of us who are more fortunate in this life. Theirs is often a life of survival from paycheck to paycheck and the struggle of coping with a neighborhood troubled by crime and gangs.

The dream we began to realize all those years ago was the purchase of a Community House for the ministry of HUP - Hollywood Urban Project - Now named DOOR. The house was purchased, additions made, and nearly every year since, there has been a physical presence of the followers of Christ in this neighborhood.

This presence continues today. Shown above is the current leadership team of HUP. On the right is Mandy Updegraff, a remarkable young lady you now have the opportunity to get to know much better. Mandy has just completed her first book "A Different Side of Hollywood" which chronicles the joyous, painful, difficult, and remarkable journey in a fast-paced, fresh, and fascinating account of a young woman leaving college behind - and becoming a missionary in the inner city. Mandy's book offers us the first-hand reflections of a remarkable young woman, as she transitions from the insulated world of a small Midwestern college to the harsh streets of Hollywood.

I admit bias, but I think that this book might become required reading for undergraduate and seminary courses on cross cultural studies and urban missions. Prepare to have your preconceived notions of inner city life challenged, as you journey alongside Mandy as she confronts her own fears, personal demons, and ideals in a completely new world. This book is candid and sometimes raw in its description of inner city life, and tragically, in violent death. Prepare to meet remarkable people, doing courageous things for the cause of Christ. This is the body of Christ. Buy this book!

No Church, No Problem

Here is a great review of a controversial book, by a church layperson. This is in keeping with my previous thoughts, and those ongoing of Brother Tod.

Perhaps the church is not yet a goner. Good news!

Happy Birthday, Wolfie

Happy 250th, big guy. The world is so much richer because of your music.

James Taylor, Baby Jesus, and Kanye West

Does this picture bother you?

My good friend, Mark Roberts and I were walking back from the beach several months ago, our families in tow. Mark mentioned to me that he had a friend who he respected greatly, who had just started a blog. Mark said I should check it out.

I have been, and I am glad I did. Go. Read. Learn. Thanks Ben, for clearing up my head.

I Have These Friends....

I have these friends. Actually, several of them. They love Jesus, and want to serve him. They are serious about their faith, but they are also fun, and funny, and very loving. They are among the most generous people I know. They lead transformed lives, full of joy. I am very glad I know them, for they provide for me great evidence that Christ is alive and well, and changing lives on a daily basis. These are good people.

But these friends also think the church is, well, dumb, not worthy of their time or money. They think the church is largely irrelevant. Its a mess, a 50 car pile up. Forget it. So, they do their own thing on Sunday; some are in home churches, some not. Some just go hang with their Christian friends. Some have been church shopping, for years.

I think this is just plain wrong. And sad. Really. And it misses the point, the point that I think Jesus was talking about when he spoke of the abundant life, and the stuff that guy who wrote Hebrews mentioned about meeting together. Please remember, not a Bible scholar here.

Tod Bolsinger has taken up this issue over the past several days, and you need to read his thoughts in response to the most recent book of George Barna. If I understand Tod right, Mr. Barna, who I have followed and admired for many years, has given up on the church completely, and is now advocating for a form of "Individu-Christianity", or just being faithful to Jesus and doing your own thing. This sounds very much like some of my friends. And it sounds very much like the decline of our culture in general - and follows from the concepts described in Bowling Alone.

So, it seems to me that if you and your friends form your own "Individu-Church", or "Church of What We Think Is Cool" here is what you typically get: anywhere from a gaggle to a gang of people who are, in varying forms, a lot like you. Same age groupings, same income class, same ages of kids, same job strata. Same. Similar. Neat and clean. No mess. Read: boring.

And if you join a more traditional organized church, of the type Barna seems to think is a goner, you get different things. You get old people, senior citizens, grey hairs. You get some odd people, who don't normally fit in, and other needy folks who find much solace in a place where Jesus is very important. You find some unlovely people, and some unshapely people. You find people who might not be welcome in other places. You also get some rather silly people, that really get a charge out of being in committee meetings to discuss the color of flowers for the Spring Social event. These are the kinds of meetings that make you think about oral surgery as a viable option, if that would get you out of going to the committee meeting.

But you get other things. You get a glimpse of the Kingdom of God. All shapes, sizes, colors, kinds, and types. Its like Creation. Big, and wild, and amazing, wonderful and messy and in your face. You get to meet some of the most interesting, loving, maddening, remarkable people you will ever spend time with. This is what you get when you say yes to organized church. As for me, I like this option far better.

By the way, I don't have to be right. These are just my ideas. What are yours?

And to top it all off, what are we church people going to do on Super Bowl Sunday?

A Tragic Loss, A grateful Memory, and A Silent Epidemic

A couple of days each work week, I take off at lunch by myself. Its my time to catch up on reading, usually back issues of the Wall Street Journal that I have missed. Last Friday, I never thought I would eat lunch and read the paper through tears. But I did.

The little fellow raking leaves to the left is Simon Sparrow, who, tragically, passed away in April of 2004, at 17 months old, less than a day after his parents were even aware he was sick, from a sudden and deadly form of staph infection. From the Wall Street Journal:

What killed Simon Sparrow is a new form of an old foe: the staph infection. Identified as a lethal threat in 1999, this new strain is resistant to drugs and is highly virulent, responsible for 60% of all skin and soft-tissue infections treated in the nation's ERs. Infections can recur and ping-pong through families. The germ can penetrate bones and lungs, and the abscesses it causes often require surgery. In severe cases, up to a quarter of patients die.

Public-health officials see a silent epidemic on the rise. Almost 1% of the population, or more than two million people, carry drug-resistant staph without symptoms, according to an article in this month's Journal of Infectious Diseases by Matthew Kuehnert, a medical epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Carriers can spread the disease and suddenly become acutely ill themselves. In a separate study based on data from 1999 and 2000, Dr. Kuehnert estimates there are 292,000 hospitalizations a year for staph, of which 126,000 are for the resistant kind.

So why am I sitting at lunch and tearing up over the newspaper. I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. The tragic loss of this sweet little boy strikes very close to my own heart. Our own 12 year old daughter Heather very likely had an early form of this very same infection about 11 years ago, when she was only 7 months old. Without a fast-acting doctor, and a wonderful hospital staff, I wonder what might have happened. We might still be living in the difficult places that the Sparrow family must face each day. I have prayed more than once for the Sparrows over the past couple of days, their loss must feel overwhelming. May God grant them courage and grace to face each day.

Heather woke up one September morning with a fever and acting very lethargic, and my wife Nancy noticed a red bump on her thigh. Something told Nancy she should get Heather into the pediatritian. That afternoon, my wife called from the doctor's office to say that our Heather was being admitted to the hospital immediately. I was shocked, but hurried to meet them in the pediatric admitting area. I remember holding a saggy, sweating, and feverish baby Heather in my arms in the admitting room, and silently praying to God for help, for guidance, and for healing. This was a real prayer, nothing pious, just a desperate plea for help. Help! For some odd reason, I knew in my soul this was the place God wanted me to be, right at this point in time. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff...

We were there for a week, through a hard fever, sleeping in the hospital, constant IV lines, surgery, and recovery. Friends and family came to visit, and Heather returned home after a week. The staph came back, in lesser forms, several times over the next several years, requiring more antibiotic shots. To this day, Heather does not like the doctor one bit. We are living proof that this disease is for real. I still, on occasion, have little boughts with this disease myself. Its lurking, in our own family.

This is indeed a mysterious journey, this life. Perhaps by calling attention to this, I might do a small amount of good.

For those of you with kids in the house, you need to look here to learn more.

Jesus, Warren Zevon, and Sandwiches

First remember that I am not planning on becoming a Catholic, although the mysteries of the Catholic church are sometimes appealing to me.

In her book John Paul the Great, Peggy Noonan offers some fascinating thoughts about life in the Kingdom of God, as she reflects on the Mysteries of the Rosary, specifically the Sorrowful Mystery of Christ's suffering. She reflects upon all the things that must have been going in the mind of Christ on the night he was betrayed.

"And he must have loved life. He must have been in love with life on earth. He must have wanted to grow old. He knew of heaven, and yet he wanted to stay here. Did he love the taste of bread, the sound of the animals on the hills? He must have liked being a carpenter's apprentice. In woodworking you can see the results of your labor, you can touch it, you can feel its smooth finish."

"I can't stop thinking about Christ, and his desire to live. What I think of when I think about it is the composer and performer Warren Zevon. Like the pope, he was a philosopher, though I don't suppose he would have thought of himself that way. He said something very true about like on earth though, and it is worth more than gold or diamonds.

When he was dying of lung cancer, in the autumn of 2002, Zevon did an hour-long interview with David Letterman. Letterman asked, "From your perspective now, do you know something about life and death that maybe I don't know?" And Zevon famously replied, "I know how much your supposed to enjoy every sandwich."

He knew how wonderful and delicious that smallest parts of daily life are. He knew wonderful and delicious a day in your life, or an hour of that day, or this minute is.

We're lucky to be here. And now when I think of friends and family and those I love, or those I'm just getting to know, I think, "He knows how good the sandwich is." Or "She doesn't know how good the sandwich is yet". But its good to know. More fun too."

As I read these words, I thought to myself, "YES! Peggy Noonan gets it - she understands a bit of the Kingdom of God as I have experienced it too!"

I say, lets make a really big sandwich, with all the trimmings, and lets share it - with the whole world!

Is It a False "Revolution"?

Ok people, there is a controversy a' brewin! It seems that George Barna, the renowned Christian culture research guru, has penned a new book, "Revolution". The basic premise is that the organized church is a goner - and will someone please turn out the lights on the way out? Sad news, if its true. Is it? I wonder.

Disclaimer - I have not read ithis book yet.

But, my friend Tod Bolsinger certainly has read it, and has some thoughts he will be sharing over the next several days. Most worthy of our attention.

Onward, Brother Tod!

Understanding My Parents, Myself, and Others

To the left is my father, a captain in the Army Air Force, during World War II. Dad was about 23 years old when this photo was taken. Sixty years have come and gone; Dad is now 86 (this past week was his birthday). He forgets things you told him 10 minutes ago, but he can wax on for up to an hour on flight school, supervising training at Chanute Field in Illinois, and air sea rescue missions in the South Pacific.

Peggy Noonan, in her most recent book, John Paul the Great, has a very helpful insight on what Tom Brokaw has called The Greatest Generation, and, if we are paying attention, to ourselves and others. In lots of ways, this generation was not so different from mine, and in some ways similar in the way they viewed things of faith. We are connected together with our parents more than we think. From Peggy Noonan:

"My mother, too, associated Catholicism with unhappy things, though she was not clear as to why. They married in 1947, my father just home from the war, and one belief they seemed to hold in common was that organized religion was for the old-fashioned, for hypocrites and creeps who would hit you on the head for wearing the wrong shoes.

They wanted to be modern, They wanted to leave their not-adequately lit apartments behind and enter the American sunlight. And while the church held little for them, other areas of life, which might even be called competing areas, seem more alluring. My parents were born at roughly the same time as the American movie industry, in the mid-1920s, and during their most impressionable years, in the late thirties and forties, when the world was most vividly imprinting itself on their young brains, the images the absorbed were not those of statues or religious art but celluloid images, cinematic pictures. And they developed, I think, an imaginative reverence for the images they saw. Their icons were not the Blessed Virgin or the Infant of Padua but Joan Blondel, and Bogie and Gable and Cagney and Bette Davis. We did not as a family go to church, but we never missed the Academy Awards."

And so, is there anything new under the sun? I am not so different. I want to be modern. I want to be in the sunlight of hipness, looking right, being accepted by others. For those of my generation and younger, we want to fit in, to be liked, to be popular, to be able to have things, to love, and be loved. This is a universal human thing.

Peggy Noonan goes on in the chapter entitled "Closer" to describe the process by which she returned to her Catholic faith, and her understanding of the Lordship of Jesus. What made the difference for her? Not religious ceremony, or art, or rules (although there is merit in these things). Relationships - these are what made the tipping point of faith difference for her.

And here we continue to stand, as the church, shoulder to shoulder over the generations, trying to find our way since Christ walked among us. And what do we have to offer of lasting significance? Again, relationships - with the Savior, and as evidence of his continuing presence here - with each other. Listening, caring, encouraging, building others up, laughing with them in the joys of life, and crying when the rain and disappointments come. This is what we have to offer, we are representatives of Christ; building relationships that are real, and make a difference for The Kingdom's sake.

Lost Video Of Jesus

At long last, a rare lost video of Jesus has been recovered.

Like, Totally Fight On, Muffy!

For my good friend, Rob Asghar:

- Cheerleading, tumbling lessons and camps since age 3: $30,000

- Annual cost of attending USC: $ 50,000

- Annual cost for staying just the right shade of blonde: $10,000

- Cheering when the other team scores: Priceless

The defense rests.

Good Thought, Dr. Mouw

Just heard this on the radio.

Dr. Richard Mouw President of Fuller Seminary was recently being interviewed by a newspaper reporter. The reporter asked Dr. Mouw what "would be your one wish for American Evangelicals; the one thing you want to see happen in the American church?"

Dr. Mouw's reply:

"I would just wish that Pat Robertson would shut up."

Dad! I Got a Goal.....!

If you look for them, life can be full of little moments of blessing.

This fall, our oldest daughter Kelly has started high school - rather a shock for her Dad, who still seems to see her in his minds-eye as that little girl who comes rushing for a knee-hug when he arrived home from work. Also this fall, Kelly has decided that she wants to play girls JV water polo for South Pasadena High School. She is dedicated, rising early in the morning for practice, and swimming miles in the pool. But, being a freshman also means you spend quite a bit of time on the bench. And its cold sitting there! So, Kelly's playing time has been limited. Not a lot of shots-on-goal, either.

Last night, I returned home around 9 PM, after a rather long day of work, freeway travel, meetings, and more freeway travel. As I came in the door, my daughter greeted me at the kitchen counter. I was a bit frazzled, and annoyed that my work schedule had cause me to miss her water polo game that day.

She had a smile on her face, and a glimmer in her eye I will not soon forget. I am writing about it here, because I do not ever want to forget moments like these.

Her greeting? "Dad, I made a goal today!"

I will not soon forget this moment. Thank you, Lord, for my daughter Kelly, and for the woman she is becoming.

A Day to Remember Where We Have Been....

....and where we need to go.