Tithing..........Really?

We have been reading a book called "Liberating Hope!" Daring to renew the Mainline Church by Michael S. Piazza and Cameron B. Trimble in our weekly Bible study at church. The chapter we just finished was on Stewardship. I had some enlightening moments while thinking about this chapter. I grew up with that whole idea of giving God our tithe faithfully would result in God blessing us tenfold. I don't know that it has ever really happened in my life, well at least not in a monetary way.

It seems to me that it was easier to write a check and pay tithes when I was more conservative/charismatic in belief. The more progressive I become in my theology and thinking, the less likely I am to pay tithes and write checks. I think the problem becomes one of belief…..the more liberal often means we apply more intellect than emotion to scripture. I think we also tend not to interpret the scripture quite as literal as those who are more fundamental in their theology. So for me I end up in a spot that doubts whether or not God really cares about money and how much I give. Does God really bless our giving? I would say we feel good about giving especially in things like food drives and such because we lean towards a more social gospel. But where does this leave the idea of tithing because God said so? Are we really going to give over 10% of our paycheck because there is a scripture that says God said to do it.

Finding What Was Lost

As I sat in church yesterday listening to our Pastor speak I began to realize that my spiritual life had taken another one of those turns in life. One of those turns that become a defining moment in your life. It seems God has led me back to a place spiritually that I have not been in the last 20 years of my life. Over the last several years I have mostly been at a place where I felt responsible for others spiritually. Going to church had become a chore in some ways for me and in other ways it had become a place of failure. Not just a place of failure that I felt personally but a place that I failed others and a place where often entire groups of people were failing in living out God's call on our lives. Not all of the past several years have been full of just failure. There have been great times of spiritual growth in my life personally and those around me. Times of true actual growth in the body I was a part of that could have led to a better place where people could flourish in their relationship with God and with others. These times of growth would always end up short lived. A lack of leadership often was a factor in watching the growth slowly die back to the place where it was before the growth began. Often I have felt responsible to at least a small group of those people for letting that death come and steal our growth. Leadership is not only a function of the highest seats of authority in our churches but leadership belongs to those of us sitting in regular pews as well. We all can be responsible at times for assisting the growth of a church just as we can be responsible for assisting the death of that growth.

So I sat in my pew and I thought something is different here, something is not as it has been in my life lately. The person in the pulpit was actually speaking a blessing over the congregation. He was telling the church that they "were doing it right". I hadn't heard that in a long time. I was used to being told how "wrong we were doing it." I realized his positive words that he was speaking over the congregation were not just the something different that I was trying to identify but rather it was just a small part of that difference. The biggest difference was leadership. When we begin to build something we start with the foundation and often the state of the foundation will also be the state of the rest of the building. Leadership and foundation are very similar for me. If the leadership is strong and balanced then the other layers will follow. I read a quote the other day about leadership that said
"Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen."
Something extraordinary is happening in our church. Leadership is making a way for others to give and use their gifts and people flourish when they are living out who God made them to be. We are at our best when we begin to realize that God gave us a purpose and gifts to pursue that purpose. We are at our best when leadership can affirm those gifts and can affirm who we are in God and then make a way and a place for the people to live that out. Leadership is making the way for this congregation to not only contribute to making something extraordinary happen but to live extraordinary lives in God.

So I had found what I lost…………someone to follow. Someone to say "you're doing it right". I can live out the calling on my life because others are living out the calling in theirs.

Communion

I have been working on a new song about communion. While I've been working on this song I have also been watching some "church" events unfold in the area. For me life is about a journey. It's not about where we are going so much as the going. Some of the churches I have been hearing about in the last few weeks were a part of my journey that has led me to where I am. I am thankful for those parts of my journey that allowed me to walk with some of those people. A depth was added to my life that could have only come from walking that path at that time. Sometimes we come to an end of a part of our journey but something happens that causes us to stop forward movement. I think for me it is often a fear of not knowing what is around that corner. We learn how to control a familiar path so it becomes predictable and we no longer fear turning a corner because we've been there before, we know what is coming. I would like to say that I willingly moved forward on my journey and embraced that new corner but I can't say that. In fact when I found myself on a different path than what I had traveled for the last 10 years or so I came to a stand still. I refused to move and I just knew that I would never turn a new corner. God has a way of giving us a push towards that corner. I'm sure God uses all sorts of things to nudge us but I think my nudge came in the form of desperation. A desperation for communion. Communion is just what I found around that corner in the form of a church that places value on the journey over the destination. Communion with others who share common things and yet bring such diversity to those who walk this common path. The one thing I didn't expect to find around that corner was the lighter side of faith. The last 10+ years church has more often than not been a battlefield of sorts. Every time I thought I had reached a place of peace and a place where growth was happening something ugly would appear and rob all of us of the beauty of where God had brought us too. All of those years I had thought we had to be serious about our faith and have a little fun but not too much. It was always about "where" we needed to get to. I came to a place where I judged my faith and my value on whether or not I could lead a group of people into a serious encounter with God and where often the heavier side of emotions would emerge as proof that we had delivered what we thought God had called us to. Communion and worship were suppose to lead us to repentance so that God could better use us. I know those things have a place and they certainly have been a part of my journey but maybe there is a different side to faith and God that I have missed. What I have seen around my new corner is healing that comes from joyful praise of a God who gives laughter instead of tears. Where worship flows from genuine relationships with God and one another. So when I stood a few weeks ago and asked this congregation to sing along with a few songs of worship and praise, I truly knew it was not about "getting somewhere" or evoking some emotion. It's about the steps we take and the paths we clear for those who may walk with us. It's about celebrating who God is and what God is doing right now right here in our lives that we share. It's about a 100+ people singing "love came down and rescued me" not because some movement of God suddenly evoked some deep emotional response but rather because it's how we live. We don't have to wait for prayers to break through to God or for some great and mighty wind to come along and blow us to a place closer to God. What we need is to love our neighbor and to love God. We need to walk with each other and share what God has done in our lives. We need to laugh and to pray and to sing joyful praises because God has filled our hearts and they are overflowing. We need to live as Jesus did, open and honest and available to those who walk close to us. We need to live in a way that our whole life, our whole selves become our reasonable act of worship. We need communion with each other and with God.




Communion

Here lies the bread
Here lies the wine
Pieces of a life we share
Come walk this path
Our common ground
Joining hope to lift the weak

Come and see the works of God
Taste the goodness of this love
Hear the Savior whispering
Remember Me
Remember Me

God of glory God of light
Come walk inside our brokenness
Raising us to life and love
Healing wounds with joyful praise

Worthy is the lamb of God
Who takes away our sin
Worthy is the lamb of God
Who takes away our sin

Come and see the works of God
Taste the goodness of this love
Hear the Savior whispering
Remember Me
Remember Me

Regressing In Order to Progress?

I found myself in a Bible study called "The Bible for Progressives" this evening and that has led me to think about the progression of my life over the last several years. The thought that keeps coming to me is that often we appear to go backwards in order to move forward. For the last 10 years or so I have led the Praise & Worship at a small church in the Charleston area. Before that I was a member of a larger praise band in a larger church. That would appear to be a progression of sorts to me... member of larger band to leader of smaller band. Now I find that I have progressed to being neither...this may be where the regression thought keeps coming from. Spiritually I had hit a dead stop in the road. Leading worship was the greatest gift I could be given but after 10 years of that God seemed to either call me away from that or maybe I just walked away from it. I learned from a friend in High School that God knows all of our choices and it may not really matter how we came to make that choice but in the end God will turn that choice to good if we just keep walking with God. Sometimes it's not about moving or progressing from one place to another but rather it's the journey in between the two places. Now I find myself fully in my period of regression or at least I have viewed it as regression only to find that maybe there has been progression after all. This coming Sunday I will pick up the guitar once again to lead a different congregation in what may only be a "special music" moment in the service or maybe it will be the beginning of yet another period of progression. I suspect it will look different from the small church I began teaching praise choruses to 10 years ago and it may not take a path that even remotely resembles the one I just left. Maybe it's progression out of regression or maybe it's just another step in a journey. Tonight I heard someone say during Bible study that progressive means living now and attending to this life rather than living in a way that is only looking at the end result of getting to Heaven. To me that sounded a whole lot like living that journey in between two places rather than just trying to get from one place to the other. So maybe progressive means moving and living in that moving and not so much about the direction we are going in.

For in him we live and move and have our being." Acts 17:28