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Food Drop 2010
We joined in with 45 churches and 14 community agencies in the Lansing Area to raise $110,859.96 and distribute around 3000 boxes of food to those in need in the Lansing Area, feeding over 10,000 people with the help of 1,229 volunteers. Read the Lansing State Journal’s story. Click here to watch video and read stories about the Food Drop.
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Barefoot Photos
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Capital Gains Magazine Article on Barefoot
Capital Gains Magazine wrote a great article on Barefoot. Read it here.
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Isaiah 1:11-17 Paraphrase
In a sermon series we did called “God of the Oppressed”, we discussed Isaiah 1:11-17 and how easy it is for us to gloss over this Old Testament passage that deals with sacrifices of fattened animals, burnt offerings, and the blood of bulls and goats. We assume these odd mental images have no relation to the Church today, so we quickly move on, missing one of the most powerful passages of Scripture revealing what God is truly passionate about. How would you describe the average American Christian’s “church activities”? If we applied this passage with contemporary language, I think our “church activities” would be very different than how we typically live them out week to week.
Below is my paraphrase of this text (which is a combination of the NIV, The Message, and my words) in an effort to show how this text powerfully applies to the Church today in real time. You can listen to the full sermon surrounding this text here.
Isaiah1:11 “The multitude of your Barefoot church meetings—
what are they to me?” says the LORD.
“I have heard more than enough of Here I Am To Worship,
Amazing Grace and Blessed Be Your Name;
I have no pleasure
in you lifting your hands and closing your eyes in worship, in your piano, drums, or guitar.
I have not pleasure in the money that you give, or in the bread and wine you
receive during communion.12 When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
Running here and there, doing this and that—
all this sheer commotion?13 “Quit your worship charades.
I can’t stand your trivial religious games: it’s all so fake.
Community group Bible studies, Sunday morning preaching, special meetings—
meetings, meetings, meetings—I can’t stand one more!Community Groups, Sunday morning singing and preaching, worship song words on a screen —
I cannot bear your evil assemblies.14 Your Christmas, Lent, & Easter celebrations and your appointed feasts
my soul hates.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.15 When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even if you offer many prayers, & you pray & you pray & you pray
I will not listen.
And do you know why? Because the blood of those you
have neglected is on your hands.16 wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds
out of my sight!
Stop doing wrong,17 learn to do right!
Seek justice,
encourage the oppressed.
Defend the cause of the orphan,
plead the case of the defenseless. -
The Elusiveness of Social Justice
10.2.08
I often feel like ‘social justice’ is a topic that certain Christians love to talk about, but it seems like we don’t often put our money where our mouth is. It can be a topic that we will talk about at coffee shops, join Facebook groups for, and maybe even watch a documentary on. While I think awareness is better than nothing at all, I think the Body of Christ is called to action. Which is where the problem arises. Besides writing an occasional check to a nonprofit, what are ways that we can really be involved in social justice as Christians living in Lansing, MI? I think a major way is to be perceptive to the brokenness on our block. To see the widows and orphans that surround us and to actively love them with the love of Christ, which I hope is something that characterizes Barefoot. This still leaves a great global need. There is a conference I’ll be going to at the end of October, which I’m very excited about: www.worldrelief.org/umoja . One of the topics being discussed at the conference is microfinance. I’ve been really challenged recently in some reading I’m doing about sweatshops and about the oppression of global workers, whose work supplies many of the low cost and/or high fashion products that we purchase in America. At this point, I’m not ready to get on a soapbox and tell everyone what stores they should boycott or support, as I have such limited information. But I know that I want to be a part of the solution rather than a contributor to the problem. I’m excited to learn more about microfinance and hope to come back with some tools that we as a church can begin to apply, promote, and support to bring more of God’s light to dark places.
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Prayer: Assumed or Essential?
8.21.08
God has recently challenged me to pray. There is a small group of us that meet at 8am on Sundays to pray for our ministry. During this time, I felt God’s conviction that I was once again trying to make things work on my own, rather than going to him in prayer. In this Sunday morning time, I began praying for individuals to come into a relationship with Jesus, then realized my methods for trying to make this happen: sermons, community groups, kids’ ministries, etc., yet I was hardly praying. And realizing (once again) that it is not sermons, programs, or even conversations that soften people’s heart to Jesus, but is through the Holy Spirit, through prayer. My prayer life had dwindled to a few minutes of prayer at night that I fell asleep to. I realized I set time aside to work out, to study, and even to watch television, yet not to pray. I’ve now committed to a daily prayer time in the mornings that has thus far been a rich blessing to me. I believe Luke 11:5-13; that prayer really does change things. God is not a genie in the sky or a Santa Clause to grant all of our specific wishes, but he wants us to seek him and ask him to bring his Kingdom into this world. I’ve been greatly encouraged this week as I’ve seen the effects of prayer playing out before me in my life and in my heart. I hope that you pray with me for his Kingdom to come and his will to be done, here in Lansing, as it is in heaven.
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Thirst Deception
8.13.08
Last week, I spoke on Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). My emphasis was on thirst – how the woman was thirsty for intimacy and deep satisfaction and was looking for it through her multiple relationships with men. As I reflect on this passage this week, and struggle in my own sin, I think about how deceptive Satan is in his temptations. It is easy to portray the Samaritan woman like she is stupid in how she keeps going back to her sixth “husband” as if he is going to satisfy her, when Jesus is right there offering her living water… The one thing that will truly quench her thirst for intimacy: God himself. I don’t think the Samaritan woman is stupid, just deceived. I myself am deceived to think that Satan would ever tell the truth. When he tempts me to be selfish. If it were a matter of stupidity, as soon as I learned of the truth, I would never be tempted again. This is not the case. This week God is showing me the only way to truly combat thirst temptations is to willingly submit to him. The woman at the well had a transformational experience with Jesus, but if she was truly going to live this new life in him, it would take active submission. She’d have to trust that Jesus’ ways were better than her ways. She’d have to give up her sexually immoral lifestyle for a lifestyle of love and obedience to God, which I’m sure didn’t always come easy or naturally to her. Submission grinds against the way I am made. I want to do it my way. I want to do it the easy way. I want the quick pleasures. God is waiting for me, with his arms open, “Noah, when will you learn and finally start doing it my way? When will you stop drinking the saltwater?” I’m continuing to learn that submission is an active choice I make every day to God. To call out the lies that Satan sends me. To say ‘no’ to myself and ‘yes’ to God and his Word. So I ask you to pray for me as I continue to learn to submit. And I pray that the Holy Spirit will lead you down the same path of life, the path of submission to him, to drink the water where you’ll never thirst again.
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Relearning Sex
7.21.08
I spoke on “Relearning Sex” on July 13th. Sex is a topic that churches have treated as taboo for far too long, yet it’s something that we all deal with. Culture is constantly bombarding us with lies about sex. These lies have contorted God’s original design for sex. The fact is God is the creator of sex and is very pro-sex. It’s time that the Church reclaim (and relearn) what is God’s. I am encouraged with the resources that have been put out in the past few years that have opened the door on this hidden struggle that so many deal with. I want Barefoot to be a real place where people can find help with real issues. We tend to go one of two ways with sins of sexual immorality: we classify these sins into their own category of shamefulness, so that people are never willing to open up and seek accountability; or we become apathetic, living as Bible-believing Christians who conveniently rationalize what the Bible says about God’s design for sex. I hope that this sermon encourages you that there is hope in Christ and within his Church for any issue of sexuality that you might be struggling with.
-Noah
Previous Sermons of Mine: Pornography (Nov. 18, 2006), Whiting Out The Bible: Sex (Feb. 9, 2008)
Helpful Books: Every Man’s Battle, His Needs Her Needs, Sheet Music, Real Sex, Inside of Me, Sex God, Dirty Little Secret
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What should the Church be doing?
7.2.08
Two weeks ago, we talked about community and the Church, and it has left me feeling a little unsettled. (download June 22, 2008 sermon) We began the morning by asking the question, “What should the Church be doing?”
I wonder if we think of church as a place to go, or as something we are. Is Church merely a place to go once a week, to worship God…or is worship something we never stop doing? That when you walk out the front doors of the church building, you haven’t left church because we are the Church. If you ask a child (or an adult for that matter) to draw you a picture of a church, they undoubtedly will draw a building with a steeple on it. If this is our definition of Church, it may be time to throw the word out completely, and use words that better exemplify what Jesus had in mind for us.
Paul says in 1 Cor 12:27 Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. It astonishes me that the Church is called the Body of Christ. What types of things do we see Christ doing in his life? Healing, loving unconditionally, befriending sinners, serving, praying, etc. And we, the Church, are to be his body?! We are to be his hands and feet, those who are continuing his work and mission? When Jesus ascended into heaven, his work did not end. In fact it had just begun. He left us with the Holy Spirit and sent us out as “little-Christs (where the word Christian is derived)” to continue his ongoing mission. To love the unloved, to heal the broken, to paint the unpainted, to care for the poor, to bring God’s shalom to our lost and dying world.
I don’t want us to sell ourselves short. I think many of us have become disillusioned with “playing church” and going through the various motions of a church routine. I think that the attractional model of church is a broken machine. By attractional, I am referring to a Sunday morning gathering that we try to make as polished and as entertaining as possible, so that when people step in the doors, they want to come back to the doors the next week. Where the Christians’ job is to try to find ways to get people into those doors. Once they get in the doors, we let the pastors and worship band work their magic, hoping people will like the show enough to come back. The problem with this approach is that it leaves out key elements of Church: relationship building, accountability, social justice and service projects, caring for needs, to name a few. And what about all of the people who will step into the doors of a church building no matter how many mailers they receive or billboards they read? Did Jesus want us to bring people to church, or to bring Church to people? I don’t want to simply put a prettier dress on the machine, which is easy to do. We try to be hip, trendy, and contemporary, still hoping people like us enough to come back. It’s not that this approach to Church has been a failure, because God certainly has and is still using it. It’s important that we notice how our postmodern culture is changing though, and how this approach does not embody the “sending” mission that Jesus gave us. Instead of taking the church routine that’s been handed down to us and rubber stamping it for today’s culture, we need to carefully take apart the machine, keep the parts that are good, throw out the parts that aren’t, and attempt to rebuild it together to embody Jesus’ mission. I don’t mean to say that we’ll ever get it perfect, but hopefully we’ll always be humble enough and willing enough to be a part of this process.
If we are all pastors, as Scripture tells us in 1 Peter 2:5, 9, what does it look like to live on mission with Jesus? Has the current model of Church allowed us to become passive spectators rather than active participants in Jesus’ mission?
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I appreciate being part of a community where I can ask these honest questions. I am also grateful for my Sunday morning worship experience, but I pray that it is only a part of who a church is, and not the definition.
Further questions to consider…
-In what ways can we bring Church to people rather than people to church?
-How does being a Christian affect the way we build relationships in our everyday lives?
-I am called by Jesus to love my neighbor…what does this look like? Is this active or passiveOn the journey…
-Noah