Are You In The Club?

This past week I changed vehicles with my youngest daughter to help her get some maintenance done. I own a 1992 Mustang and she  owns a 2006 Jeep Wrangler (which she saved and paid for herself...proud dad).  I took her Jeep to get new tires and then drove around to do my normal routine.  As I left the church that afternoon, some guy driving by waved at me. I was pretty sure I didn't know him but I waved politely. Then another woman waved at me. I was certain I didn't know her.  It was like I was in some strange movie.  Then I realized that the people waving to me were also in Jeeps. Aha! I recalled a similar time when I rode a motorcycle. Everyone on a motorcycle waved as you rode by. It was the low wave, where you put your hand out as if to give a low five (opposite of high five). You see, bikers can't be cool and wave, so it's not really a wave.
Anyway, it seems Jeep owners have this private waving club as well.  I looked in the owner's manual and it doesn't tell you anything about such a club or how to join. I also am pretty sure the dealer doesn't tell you about the club either, so it's like a secret club. I began to wonder who started this club and how does everyone that drives a Jeep know that you are supposed to wave?
I have a Mustang and I know there are car clubs for Mustangs where people get together and show off their cars, but there is no waving.  Why don't they wave? What about Nissan Altimas? My middle daughter has one of those and there are many on the road, but no waving. I tried it. We waved at another Altima owner and they drove away quickly with a worried look.
It made me think of the church. We have a club called Christianity.  Do you remember the old song that said "and they'll know we are Christians by our love"? It seems like that song should be re-written today with new lyrics. "And they'll know we are Christians by our judgmental attitude!" Of course that doesn't sound so good, but maybe it's more accurate.
We could take a lesson from Jeep owners. Jeep owners don't care what year you joined the club. If you have owned a Jeep since 1980, you get the same greeting as a 2012 Jeep owner. Actually it seems like the newer Jeep gets more attention. I remember when new Christians got the most attention.  In today's church it seems like the new Christians aren't really in the club until they have completed a few Bible Studies. Or spoken in tongues. Or participated in a Mission overseas, etc. You have to pay your dues! Of course, thats not MY church, but I know it happens.
Jeep owners don't care how old you are, or what color your Jeep is. They don't even care what condition your Jeep is in. (minus 5 points for ending in a preposition) They will wave at you if you are having a bad day, if you ran a red light, if you cut them off....  Well, actually for cutting them off you probably get a "special wave", but that's not the point here.
The truth is, this really is not what the church should be. This kind of club is superficial and requires no relationship, but the church can still learn a lesson here.
When will the church begin the club of waving to and welcoming other Christians? When will people identify Christians by their love again, and not by their judgmental attitudes?  If the church is not a building... if the church is really the people... then we will always have some broken pieces. But we shouldn't let the broken pieces hold up the building, and we don't put the broken parts up front for everyone to see. We can work with them, help them to be like new, and then let God fully restore them.
I say the problem lies with the church (people) removing God from the club He started. We stopped following His rules and began to try and fix things ourselves.  Things he originally made. That needs to stop. We should recognize God as the President of our club.  I bet God does the high-five and the wave.

Do This In Remembrance of Me

As we approach the week before Easter, called Holy Week, things get out of control in the church.  We have some sort of event happening every day from this Saturday's early egg hunt right through Easter Sunday eight days later.
Part of the preparation includes planning for the services we will have.  Some services have communion, others do not.  As the person in charge of communion supplies, I have been privy to some situations people could only imagine. It's why I write this blog!
Our church normally serves the little white wafers on Sunday. We experimented with bread for a while, but the bread has to be unleavened bread and so that means you can't just buy a loaf of Sunbeam bread from the grocery. You can buy Pita bread but it doesn't break nicely.  We had a volunteer make it for us. Well she didn't want to make the bread every week so she began to bake 4 loaves at a time. The first part of the month was great, but by the end of the month we were serving stale bread. The final straw was when we found mold. Wafers tasted great after that incident.

You should know that the wafers aren't exempt from staleness either. They will take on a "flexible" texture after some time. As a kid I thought this was the normal texture, but fresh wafers are crisp like a cracker.
Recently I was looking at our inventory and discovered a large supply of wafers. More than six months. Concerned for freshness, I asked about them.  I was told there were some from a store that had gone out of business. What? A store that sells the little communion wafers went out of business? Well lucky day for us. Or was it? Upon inspection of the wafers, they were two years old. Is that bad? We tasted them.
I think it's ok to eat them if they aren't blessed by a priest. Without the blessing it is just wine from the grocery store and little styrofoam wafers from a store that sells them. But after the priest says the blessing, they somehow become Holy. I am not making fun of that, it's true. Don't ask me how or why I believe that. "Do this in remembrance of me." Like Nike says, just do it. We threw out the stale wafers.
Wafers come in all sizes too. We have some that are so big they have perforations so they can be broken easily into 24 pieces. Nobody knows how we got them, but we decided to keep them and use them anyway.  We served those at our early service at 8am. Normally a crowd of 24 or less. Mostly older folks. They didn't like the broken wafers. Why? Because they had sharp edges. I can't make this stuff up. They preferred the round individual serving size wafers.
As a kid I used to play church with my grandfather. We ate Necco wafers for communion. I have often thought how great it would be to have those at church. But take out the pink ones that taste like Pepto Bismol and the black ones that are licorice. May as well remove the white ones too because they are a bit spicy.
I heard recently that churches that don't use real bread get made fun of by the ones that do. What do they call our little communion wafers that we serve? Jeezits. I suppose I should be offended, but my first thought was it's a little bit funny and kind of clever.  After all, we are a church that uses a small plate of wafers that has a tiny cup with the wine attached.  Very sanitary.  The person takes their own wafer and dips it in the wine.  I have heard this referred to as chips and dip. I am pretty sure this departs from the "do this in remembrance of me" command.
Almost to Easter, we re-tell the story of the crucifixion this week.  This is the time of year where we hear the words of Jesus say "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do".  I say ditto.   

The Anglican Mission Smorgasbord

Well, I finally jumped in. A bit late to the discussion, but after all, my blog is mostly dedicated to the musings of a Worship Leader working at a church. I have no clout or influence, but I do have an opinion and it is usually spiced with sarcasm so I figured I should weigh in. Many people have asked me if I would blog about the recent developments in the Anglican Mission. I didn't think I would until I couldn't stand the stuff I have been reading and decided to add to the smorgasbord of opinions.
I like the word smorgasbord. If I had some of those crazy fonts I could insert the proper characters in place of our "o" and "a" but since I don't...try to imagine I used them and now it is a Swedish word for buffet. Everyone loves Swedish stuff. Who doesn't like the Swedish Chef? Smorgasbord. The word is usually associated with food but we also use it as a description for something that has a large variety. Not just a large variety, but also when you think smorgasbord, you think of all things good. I'm not sure what you call a large variety of bad things, other than trash, but that really isn't important here.
So after reading all the articles on AMiA, I have determined that there is no simple summary so I will take a shot at it. By the way, "summary" means I left out a bunch of details. My blog; my prerogative on which details I leave out. The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) is an organization of churches Chuck Murphy created when he left the Episcopal Church. In order to be an official Anglican organization recognized in the world by other Anglicans, he needed an endorsement from a genuine Anglican province. Rwanda and Asia stepped in to fill that role and now Chuck is Bishop Murphy. What they didn't tell us (or at least what I didn't get)....apparently this organization is not part of the province of Rwanda, as I had thought. It is a business venture of Bishop Murphy. So when Bishop Murphy breaks ties with Rwanda and leaves, so does the Anglican Mission. And that is what has happened. Bishop Murphy has cut our relationship with the Province of Rwanda.
Editor's note here...I really don't know what happened to cause this and I certainly am not taking sides.
This is where it gets complicated. Our church is an AMiA church, but our priests were received as official missionary priests in the province of Rwanda. So it would seem our church is under the authority of Bishop Murphy, but our priests are under the authority of Rwanda, but not Bishop Murphy. What? Exactly.
As someone who works at a church, this is kind of like a buy-out, but I'm not sure who is buying what. As far as I know, I will still be paid every week by New Covenant Church. Where will we go for the special meetings? That is what all the important people will figure out. I'm okay to let them do it. I have a Christmas service to plan and many visitors to share wonderful music with. Why are there so many other people involved in speculating what is going to happen in church politics? I'm not sure, but I am sure every minute they are doing that is one minute less they are doing ministry of the church.
Smorgasbord. A variety of good things. Maybe there are bad things to eat, but we try to eat the good stuff. If we get something bad, we usually recognize it as bad and don't eat the whole thing. We leave it for waste. Then when we return to the buffet, we choose only the things that were good. God made us like that. We have the ability to choose the good from the bad. Sure we can be tricked, but we are fast learners. It didn't work out so well for Adam and Eve, but God expects that. And He still has our back. Christmas will still come. What will you do to tell the Christmas story this year?

Apologetics

Because of working at a church, I learned many new Christian words to increase my vocabulary. Some would argue that these new words are in fact "academic" words, but then those people obviously don't get out much. My new word of the day is apologetics. It really isn't new to me today or even this week. I think I first heard it six or seven years ago. It seemed pretty self explanatory. You are saying you are sorry for whatever you have done. Sort of. The church uses the word to explain what it does. More of an excuse actually. So really the word should be more of an excusagetic. That word sounds even better. In Christian circles, when you want to explain what your faith is about or the doctrine (rules) associated with your church, they explain it in a heading labeled apologetics. The funny thing is, nobody seems to be apologizing for anything.  I guess the church is saying "I'm sorry you didn't know what we do." Not much of an apology, is it?
I recently took a seven day vacation on a cruise ship.  This is a totally different way to look at life that needs it's own posting. But that will be another time. At dinner time, you are usually assigned to a table with a few other couples and will share a meal with these people for seven nights in a row. Our table conversation one night took a turn to discuss the "Bible Belt". This is the area of the southern United States where many Charismatic churches are located.  A quick summary of U.S. churches goes here with some stereotypes.

The southern United States is home to many Charismatic churches. The northeast is home to both liberal and conservative churches, but more of an institutional church or political club than a place of religious practice. The midwest has the lion's share of fundamentalist churches and cults, and the west....well the west doesn't really do church unless it is trendy somehow.
Back to my dinner table discussion. It becomes obvious that none of our table guests are regular church goers. In fact, one couple is Jewish, but not practicing (in their own words).  They all observed that in spite of a down economy, there are still hundreds of churches in their neighborhoods. Unlike businesses that we pass by every day and are struggling to survive, apparently if your church building still stands, the church must be doing quite well.
I thought of apologetics. Nobody has asked me what I do for work yet. That is day four conversation stuff and we were only on day three which clearly is demographic discussion night. There really are no assigned dinner topics, but my experience with small groups gathered for dinner has led me to observe this natural progression of dinner table sharing. Day three conversation is limited to where we live and have come from. It's when people really want to tell you how big their house is but drop hints so you get the idea, because that is more polite.  I thought of how to drop a hint to tell them I work at a church, but figured that would kill the church conversation.  I waited for the next night, and was not disappointed.
"So David, what do you do for work?" came the question.  "I work at a church" came the answer.  Silence followed. The Jewish guy broke the silence with "that sounds great!" Others chimed in asking questions about what type of church I work at.
Maybe it was just me, but I felt a hint of "hope you didn't take offense to our conversation last night" in each of the statements. I suppose that is the other side of apologetics. People make excuses for why they don't attend a church. They aren't really apologizing for not coming. They explain what their faith is and their own beliefs which don't match the church. Excusagetics. It's not just for churches anymore.
The church labels it's explanations to people as apologetics which sounds nice and non-confrontational. The church also labels people who don't come to church as "lost" and their reasons for not coming are excuses. God never offered up excuses. Floods, plagues, Jesus. No excuse. None needed. Something about His ways are higher than ours. The church seems to be in the business of apologizing for God.  Does He really need our "help"?

Making It Up As We Go

I know the importance of translation.  Messages can be mixed up so easily with incorrect words that are only one letter off.  I learned that lesson in Uganda which I talked about in a post last year "Are You Talkin' to Me?" It is still one of my favorite missions stories. But this post isn't about that story.
There is a song called "Wonderful" that I liked when I first heard it. The song is written by Malcolm Baxter who comes from our friends in the Vineyard church. I don't actually have any friends in Vineyard churches but I know some people who used to be.  Anyway, it has a great feel to the song and the lyrics in the verses are great. The chorus, however, contains a word I had never heard of.  The word is Humbai.  The phrase goes "Humbai Jesus, Humbai Yahweh" and repeats several times.
I knew that when I brought the song to the congregation they would want to know the meaning of this foreign word.  And of course I wanted to know as well. I started with Google. It brought many references to India, although no translation.  I spent many weeks investigating the origin of the word. It became my pet project.
I looked up the author of the song, Mr. Baxter, and decided to try and contact him. After several weeks I found an email address, sent my question, and received a response. I know the suspense is getting to you and you probably already looked ahead to see what it means, and now have come back to read this part. Welcome back.
If I had to guess, I would have said it means something like worship, or holy, or some dignified church word. Nope. The response I got back was it is not a real word. He made it up.  Why?  Because he needed a word or phrase to go there and it sounded cool.  Okay, the sounded cool part was my paraphrasing of his response, but basically that was it. Not a real word. Seriously? We can do that? I guess when I hear songs that have la-la-la-la in them this creation of Humbai is somewhat genius.
So many times we use words that are unfamiliar. Even unfamiliar to us. But because we know the context we use it by guessing the general meaning of it.  And besides, if it is used in a song, it must be a real word.
I wondered how many churches use that song without knowing the meaning of the word, or insert their own definition.  I say "I wondered", but really it was more of a passing thought. "Wondered" sounds like I spent time on it and I didn't.  I was just happy to get a response from Mr. Baxter.
By the way, I substitute the kinyarwandan word "Imanashimwe" for Humbai Jesus.  Yes, it is one crazy word for another, but I know the translation.  The meaning is "Praise God".