It is becoming more and more clear to me lately how we are created for community, and how much we need that community to live our lives. When we announced a month ago (though it seems like it has been much longer) that we were leaving Imago Christi Church, the primary reasons were a need to recalibrate and reprioritize. What I have started to see in the past month is how much the need for community played into our busyness and weariness.

Let me back up just a bit. While it was by no means the beginning of the issue, Becky and I had a long discussion on the way home from an Andy Osenga concert earlier this summer. (I’m stunned that I didn’t blog about it at the time, but I did post pictures to Flickr.) Andy introduced his song “Hold the Light”, as usual, by telling the story about his small group. They have gathered in somebody’s backyard every week for a couple of years, sharing life stories, praying, encouraging, and living life together. It’s a powerful song, and a powerful story. On the long drive home I found myself getting jealous of my friend Andy. How I would love to have a group of folks like that.

Over the past several years as a church leader I’ve been a part of dozens of discussions where we’ve talked about building community. How do we build community? We know we need it. How do we make it happen? Too often the solution seemed to be another program. Things like “let’s organize a small group book study” or “let’s start a group based around this particular interest”. We’d try to find leaders for the group, put out a signup list, and then get frustrated because the same people who were asking for community weren’t signing up for stuff.

Here’s where I think we, and many churches, have made the mistake: we focus so much time and energy on church programs that we rob ourselves of the time to just live life together. The best friendships and most supportive community I’ve experienced in my life haven’t come out of any church program; they’ve come from people deciding to get together around meals and activities to just live life. Meeting up at someone’s home to play basketball, eat a meal, watch football on TV. Taking off on the spur of the moment to help someone move a piece of furniture. Taking a Saturday to help someone move to a new house. What saddens me is how many times we’ve not done things like this because we were too busy - and usually too busy with church stuff.

This is easy to lament, but harder to correct. We’ve taken the first step by the only method we could see that would work. Now we’re looking for another church, and the place we’re looking for will need to place a high priority on this sort of community. I’m praying every day that God helps us find it.

After making the decision to leave Imago Christi at the end of the month, we find ourselves in an unfamiliar position: starting the church search. My church history is fairly short and doesn’t include much searching: while growing up we attended a C&MA church, a small Berean church, and then a small Bible church. When I went to college I floated around for my first semester until Becky invited me to her medium-sized Bible church, which we then attended for the next 3.5 years. When we moved to Iowa, we were recommended to a church up here, and after about three weeks of visiting other churches decided to stick there where we had been recommended, at Noelridge. We were at Noelridge for 8.5 years before leaving to plant Imago, and we were at Imago for the better part of a year. So my total church searching experience is a few months of aimless wandering in college and a few weeks after moving to Iowa. That ain’t much.

Church searching has changed a lot since 9 years ago when we were looking around here in Cedar Rapids. Back then your main resources were the yellow pages and the religion section of the newspaper. Today, though, it’s all about the websites. You can find out a lot about a church’s beliefs and ministries with just a few clicks of the mouse. You can even listen to recent sermons. I think I’ll have to be careful not to do too much pre-judging by the websites.

Several things I am anticipating will make this church search tough:

• Theological pickiness. I don’t expect that I’m gonna agree with everything at any church I attend, (heck, I didn’t at Noelridge or Imago, either), but I’d like it to be close. And I’ll need to have the freedom at a church to hold some views that don’t quite line up and not be ostracized for those. For example: one of the churches we’ve been considering has a rather long excursis in their doctrinal statement concerning the exact sequence of a premillenial end times. I’m OK with them believing that, but I won’t be able to handle it if they’re dogmatic about it.
• Leadership Expectations. Now, I have no desire to be in leadership again for a while. But I’m going to want to have the pastor and elders of a church I attend be men who enjoy reading and discussing theological topics. I almost feel sorry for the pastor and/or elders who will have the typical so-you’re-interested-in-our-church meeting with me. I have a feeling I’ll have far more questions for them than they will have for me. Bonus points for anybody that’s read any N. T. Wright.
• Limited Choices. Now, while some of my friends will step in and suggest a bigger denominational change, I just can’t see us moving to a more mainline denomination, even a conservative branch of one. We’re not gonna end up Catholic, Lutheran, or Methodist, and we don’t even have conservative Anglican or Presbyterian options in Cedar Rapids. Which pretty well leaves us Baptist, Bible, maybe E Free, and, well, not much else. Even in as big a town as Cedar Rapids.
• The Struggle for Contentment. I am acknowledging here up front that we may not find someplace that I’m completely happy with. And that will have to be OK. I would dearly love to have Steve McCoy’s church or Joe Thorn’s church or Rae Whitlock’s church nearby. I would totally go for an Acts29 church, and would take a very long hard look at one of the new breed of PCA churches. (We have one PCA church here about 30 minutes away, and it appears to be the old, stodgy flavor of the PCA.) But given that those aren’t available, we will have to be content with what we have available here. We’re praying that God will be clear in His leading.

We get a pass this weekend - we’re leaving in a couple of hours to head to Wisconsin to visit my folks. But next weekend we’ll have to bite the bullet, pick one of our options, and give it a try. I’m planning on blogging our adventures, so check back. If you’ve got any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Tonight after the service at Imago Christi, I read this brief letter to the congregation:

It has been a blessing to be at Imago Christi this year, to serve as an elder and as worship leader, and to help plan and organize a church in its very first days of existence. It is therefore with sadness tonight that I come to tell you that my family and I will be leaving Imago Christi Church as of the end of this month.

Why are we leaving? Like any decision, there are a multitude of reasons each having a small part in the big decision. Primarily, though, it comes down to personal and family needs, and the conviction that I need to reprioritize my life with family in mind first. Some have already asked “well, can’t you stay at Imago and just reduce your responsibilities?” and believe me, we have wrestled long and hard with that question. I have had something of a pattern of this my past several years in ministry - needing to recalibrate, trying to reduce, finding it impossible to effect permanent change. It is that history, as much as anything, that has convinced me (and Becky, too) that bigger change is necessary.

In case I haven’t been clear about it already, this isn’t a case of anyone being forced to leave or asked to leave or pushed out - quite the opposite, I have been pleaded with at length to stay. We are still very much behind the mission of Imago Christi, and our prayers go with you. I know that some of you do not or will not understand quite why we made this decision. And that’s OK. If you have questions feel free to talk to me afterwards. But please know that we have prayed much about this, and really feel like we are following God’s leading here. So we go. And so we trust, and pray that you will, too, that God is at work in this, both for our family, and for Imago Christi as a church body.

This has been a very difficult decision for us over the past couple of months. In the end, though, we feel like this is where God is leading us - to make a break and try and re-form things in a way that works better for our family. We don’t know where we’ll end up for church, but we’ll be looking around. That’ll feel weird after nearly 10 years with mostly the same folks at Noelridge and Imago.

One day at a time.

I had the opportunity to do the Easter “program” (if you want to call it that) twice this year: once in a slightly-odd (celebrating Easter on Saturday?) Saturday night service at Imago; the other on Sunday morning at Noelridge. It was a nice change to not have to plan the service this year; I really enjoy just being the pianist and playing behind someone else. Of course, not planning the service means that you get whatever the leader plans. My only real comment in that regard: I am not a fan of Gaither tour DVDs. In fact, I think pretty much any sort of live person-led activity, even of lower technical quality, is preferable to playing a DVD of a song. Your mileage may vary.

My larger observation, though, is that I think we at Noelridge, and likely the greater evangelical church, miss something by not observing all of Holy Week. Maundy Thursday? What’s that? Good Friday? Well, there’s a community Good Friday service that we could’ve attended, I guess. But it’s not really pushed as a priority. We just have an Easter morning service.

What happens, then, is that the Easter morning service turns into an observance of all of Holy Week, and, in our case, turned into 80% (or more) reflections on Christ’s death and the cross, and only about 20% (or less) about His resurrection. And the natural result of that is that the message (sandwiched in after all the special music at the end of the service) ends up being a call to unbelievers to believe, with nothing really targeted at believers, other than a reminder of the hope that we have that death is not the end.

Now the influence of N. T. Wright’s recent Surprised By Hope on my thinking is going to show. Wright argues strongly that we don’t celebrate the Resurrection enough, and I think he’s right. He says, and I loosely paraphrase since I don’t have the book with me at the moment, that we spend 40 days in sacrifice for Lent (oh, something else we don’t do as Baptists) but then Easter is maybe 2 hours on Sunday morning. Instead, Wright says, Easter should be the kickoff day for a full week of celebration. And the message of the Resurrection isn’t just for hope that we will go someplace better when we die, but that God is working to redeem and restore the whole of creation, and that we look forward to participating in Christ’s kingdom.

So much still to think through…

Few writers have gained the attention of, and made waves in, the Christian blogosphere in recent memory in quite the way that N. T. Wright has. (The other that immediately comes to mind is Mark Driscoll, but his similarity with Wright probably ends about right there.) A “Lord Bishop” (ach, a hierarchical title!) in the Anglican (aren’t they all liberals?) Church, Wright is a brilliant yet down-to-earth scholar of the New Testament. He has written a thick three-volume set on Jesus (one volume of which I received as a Christmas gift and am still wading through), a defense and apologetic of Christian beliefs (Simply Christian), and a little book that went off like a bomb in the Reformed world called What St. Paul Really Said. (As a non-Reformed evangelical, I don’t really get what the huge deal is about, though I do appreciate the insights that Wright has to Paul.)

I have been listening to as many of Wright’s messages as I could get my hands on over the past year (check out ntwrightpage.com - a great resource!) and have heard much that seemed to make sense, though it seemed different than what I’ve learned in the evangelical church, regarding the resurrection, heaven, and the end times. So when I heard that Wright was writing a book to sum up those arguments, I put it on my to-buy list and grabbed it as soon as it was released.

Surprised By Hope runs just over 300 pages (not counting the copious end notes) and is full of the reminder of the hope of Christians not for some ethereal existence in some far-off “heaven”, but for a resurrected body (similar to Jesus’ prototype) and eternal existence as a part of a redeemed and restored creation on the “new earth”. Wright makes powerful arguments that this hope of resurrection is consistent with the belief of Israelites before Christ, with the belief of the early church, and that it makes much more sense of the gospels and of Paul than do some of today’s more popular views of heaven.

I have completed one pass through Surprised By Hope and have managed to mark up almost every page. What I have found has been eye-opening; not so much that it is a hugely different doctrine than what my denomination holds to, but more that it sets out so clearly beliefs that we tend to get muddled up and then just gloss over. Wright hits it on the head in Chapter 2:

It comes as something of a shock, in fact, when people are told what is in fact the case: that there is very little in the Bible about “going to heaven when you die” and not a lot about a postmortem hell either. The medieval pictures of heaven and hell, boosted though not created by Dante’s classic work, have exercised a huge influence on Western Christian imagination.

And a bit later:

Most Christians today… remain satisfied with what is at best a truncated and distorted version of the great biblical hope. Indeed, the popular picture is reinforced again and again in hymns, prayers, monuments, and even quite serious works of theology and history. It is simply assumed that the word heaven is the appropriate term for the ultimate destination, the final home, and that the language of resurrection, and of the new earth as well as the new heavens, must somehow be fitted into that.

Yeah, that’s me. That’s what I’ve been taught… though not so much taught it, because other than a requisite Sunday School class teaching the standard dispensational view of the book of Revelation, we don’t teach it much more than the usual thumbnail sketch: heaven is where Christians go when they die. They are there forever in God’s presence. It’s pretty much an eternal conversation with the saints of old who you want to get to know, and there’s some idea of worshiping God, though we’re not quite sure what that’ll look like, and then the glassy sea, and crowns, and well, yeah, it’s a bit muddled. We don’t teach it much because we don’t have a coherent framework that incorporates the gospel with the resurrection and then applies it to our mission today. Sure, if we’re current we’ll talk about things like contextualization, of paying attention to the culture and being in the community, but we see it with just the end goal of being “normal” people so we’ll have an in with the non-Christians who we want to tell about Jesus. Wright is saying throughout the book that there’s more to it than that, and he makes a powerful argument.

I’m planning on chewing on the book with multiple blog posts over the next week or two; I also now need to make another pass through the New Testament with this new understanding in mind and see how it fits. Oh, and to Dad and to Richard: I have ordered you copies and they’re on the way.
[You can buy Surprised by Hope from Amazon.com.]

This past weekend I had the pleasure of leading music both at Imago Christi on Saturday night and at Noelridge on Sunday morning. It was the first time in a month that I’ve been to Noelridge, and with a month of Imago under our belts it was a good chance to draw some comparisons.

Look and Feel
At Imago we’re meeting at night in a 100-year-old sanctuary with lots of stained glass and insufficient lighting. At Noelridge we’re meeting on Sunday morning in a smaller 50-year-old sanctuary. Noelridge has a smaller, intimate, friendly feel to it; Imago has a deeper, more awe-inspiring feel. I think I prefer the relative expanse of Imago. We do need to do something about the lighting, though. (Plans are in process.)

Music
OK, the music was basically the same. At Imago I led on an electric keyboard with Dave playing guitar behind me. At Noelridge I led from a baby grand with another Dave playing bass and Tapuwa on the congas. I’m much more comfortable sitting down leading at the piano rather than standing up - partly I need a mic stand with a longer boom so I can situate the stand better; partly I’ve just mostly led while sitting down, and it’s a bit of an adjustment to stand up. Both congregations knew the songs pretty well. There was a bunch of sound generated by each congregation with the singing. I am struck, though, by how much more live the sanctuary at Imago is. Hardwood floors and a big high ceiling let the sound rattle around in a way that creates some presence. Noelridge with its low ceilings and carpet is dead by comparison.

Preaching
Same pastor, same sermon, pretty much. I don’t have recordings of either of them, and I was semi-distracted during the Imago service during the sermon (trying to decide what song to sing for a closing meditation), so I’m going on middling memories here. The Imago version was more concise and seemed targeted a bit more toward unbelievers in the audience. At Noelridge it went kind of long (which seemed OK, though). Still, quality stuff from John 1 both times.

Attitude
This is where there are two very distinct feelings between the two churches. At Imago, since we’re so new, everyone seems focused on finding the visitors/new people, greeting them, pulling them in. At Noelridge we have an established congregation, so it’s much more of a family feel - people have established relationships, and it shows. Noelridge is still very friendly to visitors, but it’s a slightly different feel. What I gather from this is that we at Imago really need to work on developing relationships among the core team and volunteers, getting us feeling more like a warm family and less like a band of volunteers.

Conclusions? There are good things going on both places. We both have work to do. We both have things we can learn. In both, the gospel is proclaimed, and so I rejoice.

OK, so there aren’t too many hazards living in Iowa as compared to anywhere else in the USA, but one, for sure, is that every four years we get some ridiculous media attention leading up to the caucuses. They’re coming up this Thursday, and then, please God, maybe we can be done with the attention and the advertising for a while.

A couple of weeks ago a reporter from Newsweek contacted an elder at Noelridge and wanted to know if she could come interview some of our folks to do an online piece on Iowans in preparation for the caucuses. The end result is a three-minute video that most prominently features our pastor, Richard Marsceau. You can also hear me plunking away at the piano and singing through the last minute or so. Pretty cool stuff.

Watch the video here. Sorry, Mom and Dad, it’ll probably be impossible to watch via dial-up. I’ve got it saved, though, so remind me next time you come visit.

Yes, the title is overly-long Google linkbait. But one thing I have been astonished with is just how many details there are that need remembered to plan for the first (or for that matter, any) worship service at a church plant. So, without any further ado, here’s my running list. I’ll update it as I remember more things.

Music-related

• Worship leader & musicians
• Sound equipment
• Sound technician
• Recording gear to record sermon
• CD for playing before/after service
• Words for the songs (either song sheets, hymnals, or overhead projection)
• Lapel/wireless microphone for pastor

Giving-related

• Collection plates/buckets/box/whatever
• Ushers
• Counters
• Treasurer
• Budget
• Receipts (donors will want receipts!)

Service-related

• Bulletin
• Communion service

Children’s ministries

• Nursery workers
• Children’s church workers (if you have it)
• Sunday school teachers (ditto)

Etc

• Security
• Clean-up crew
• Set-up crew (if you’re packing in/out)

What items do you have to add?

We’re going to have our first worship team practice for Imago tonight, which means I need to have music selected for our first service. Selecting church music is normally a bit of a challenge, but selecting music to kick off a whole new church? Intimidating. I’ll need to pick a mix of old hymns and some more modern stuff; I’m thinking of some Chris Tomlin and maybe Praise to the Lord, the Almighty. Any ideas? Feel free to leave them in the comments. I’ll post the list when I get it finalized.

• I’ve stuck you, my blog readers, with far too many links this week and not enough other stuff. Now, that being said, they are all good links. You’ll find good stuff if you visit them.
• Finally thinking about Christmas shopping. I think it’s gonna be a Amazon year. I have some good book ideas for almost everybody.
• Chatted with Ryan for a while yesterday and it’s interesting to see us progressing remarkably parallel paths of theological thought and reading. Makes me wonder what it was in our common upbringing that’s moving us that way.
• In the same chat conversation there were enough ideas come up to give me an outline for one of those books that I’d love to write but keep lamenting I never have the time for. I really should make an effort.
• Tonight we’re doing Texas Roadhouse for dinner. Becky’s been looking forward to steak all week. Hooray for Christmas bonuses!
• Church plant update: the lease agreement for the building was signed yesterday. Assuming the other party signs it (which they should), we’re officially in the building and will be starting January 5. Awesome and scary at the same time.
• You know, if you go back to the real definition of awesome, something that inspires “an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like”, then the scary part I juxtaposed in the previous bullet is pretty much redundant.