Without a doubt my favorite U2 album of all time remains Achtung Baby. It’s gritty layers went really well with my early teenage angst years.

A completely underrated song in the Album is Acrobat.

Here’s a snippet:

No, nothing makes sense
Nothing seems to fit
I know you’d hit out
If you only knew who to hit
And I’d join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah I’d break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in
‘Cause I need it now

To take the cup
To fill it up
To drink it slow
I can’t let you go
I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that
And you can dream
So dream out loud
And don’t let the bastards grind you down

As a teenager it had everything to do with hating ‘the system’, and oscillating between not wanting to exist while wanting to belong.

These days the problem’s a bit more internal.

Now I’m part of the church, that has problems receiving people.

Worst yet, I’ve got a preaching gig. And no one talks one way and acts another way more than the preacher. Yes, preacher’s aren’t perfect, and we share our struggles. But that dreaded Book keeps making us call people to Christ-likeness.

Every day I’m confronted by my own hypocrisy. Grace just rubs it in further.

How do I dream out loud when I’m such a mess?

It seems I still haven’t been able to shake my love/hate relationship with speaking and preaching. I’m definitely my worst critic, but I feel bad when it leaks into the critique of others sometimes.

Some people speak just to say something (the blabbers),

And as the saying goes, some people speak because they have something to say (which is nice)

Some people have something to say, but it’s irrelevant to who they’re speaking to (the guy with the megaphone on the street)

Some people speak just to be heard (folks with passion and great stuff to say, but rush through it thinking that getting it off their chest will make a difference)

And then there’s people who speak to transform (and they leave a mark on your soul you can’t seem to get rid of)

I try to be the last. It doesn’t always work out, but I’m committed to the art.

How do you go about speaking to change?

Photo by cromacom

I’ve got lots of questions, here’s a series of questions I’ve been pondering lately on church gatherings – and by that I mean that thing folks do in the New Testament when they get together.

What do you call yours?  I was going to say Sunday gathering, but lots of folks don’t meet on Sundays. Worship service came to mind, but ain’t all life worship? and are we really being serviced?

Last sunday I did a collaborative message in silence (You can read about when I did it last before here).  If you brought me into your church to ‘preach’ and all I did was help Christ be formed in them one of the best ways I know how, would you be disappointed?

With the centrality of Scripture, and it being text, content, information (and yes, Story for you emergent folks, and the Living Word of God for you fundies), I wonder if we’ve overemphasized it’s generally unidirectional mode of communication in our own practices?

Does ‘the gospel’ need to be proclaimed with every gathering?

Could the full weight of the gospel ever be transmitted this side of life?

Could we compress the gospel to a 140-character tweet and spend the rest of our time living it out?

How much literal reading of the Scripture do you do?  Things vary for us, but typically we collectively read a mix of passages following a lectionary, and I tend to expound on a short text.  Some folks want full exposure to the breadth of the Bible, others don’t want to gloss over it and hone in.

Does the Pareto principle of 20% of the people doing 80% of the ‘work’ apply to your gathering?

Do we really need to gather weekly?  versus daily or monthly?

What does God desire for us collectively as we gather?  And are there elements in our worship gathering that don’t contribute towards that?

Love him or hate him, Driscoll’s quite the preacher.

Josh Harris did a series of posts on preaching notes and managed to get Driscoll to share a bit of what he does.  Below is a scan of his notes.

I actually do the same thing with the sticky notes.  Sometimes I have a small page with a typed outline inserted, sometimes nothing at all.

I never have a problem with content, but it’s the transitions if there’s multiple passages or ideas being conveyed that I need supporting notes for.  I have no idea how guys like Erwin McManus or Rob Bell go for hours without peeking.

Yesterday was a preaching bomb.

Ever have everything prepared, really know your material, and still fail to deliver?

I wanted it over as soon as I got up… and I just pushed through it.

I love preaching, even though I question it’s role, I’m thrilled whenever I can engage hearts and minds with the Scriptures and the Spirit of God is working… but this was my most uncomfortable preaching moment by far.

I’m still processing through what happened.  I know I’ve been going through some spiritual unsteadiness.  There has been family-oriented strains and lots of mixed feelings lately.  I had not slept much and I woke up just feeling weak.

I was tasked with sharing about my own personal visions in life.  This is important stuff, for myself personally and our lives going forward of course.  But, I felt like I was talking more about me, than Jesus.  Something about that felt powerless.

I need to crawl somewhere and hide for awhile.

It’s Monday morning, do you recall what you heard at church on Sunday?

I’ve been inspired by many great speakers and preachers, but I wonder how often we really engage God through the Scriptures during our church gatherings?

I’m sure I’ve heard Scripture, at least audibly, in every church that I’ve attended, but I wonder how often people truly encounter God through the Scriptures.

From what I can tell of what Scripture says of itself is that it was worth meditating upon day and night.  It was often engaged as a community.  The Scriptures led to revival and transformation.

Yet I wonder how often ‘preachers’ get in the way of allowing the Scriptures to speak?  How often do we deny people the opportunity to wrestle with God’s words personally, for themselves, with one another?  How often do we allow people to use their own imagination, to question and doubt, and to emotionally invest themselves into the Story of the Scriptures?

Do you have a particular spot you like to sit?

I rarely went to class in university because without fail, I would fall asleep in every single one of them.  I’d wake up to some strange pen trail of gibberish and wonder what on earth it was all for.

I tried sitting at the front in hopes the guilt would force me awake, but it turned out guilt just wasn’t enough.

I found that if I kept munching on snacks all through the lecture while carving “I love Lon” on the back of every seat I had a fighting chance (You’ll find hundreds of these if you look hard at McMaster university – many of them were upgraded to I love Don, or I love London, or I love Condoms over time).

Once I bought a hot dog right before class with all the works, but still managed to fall asleep midway through eating it.  I woke up to find messy street meat sliding down my jacket!

I’m totally envious of kids these days who can now surf the web throughout class to stay awake.

What does all this say about our modern lectures and learning environments???

I’ve written a number of posts on my concerns and issues with preaching, but I’ve got to admit there are a some pluses to ‘old school’ preaching…

The community has the opportunity to live an ongoing narrative through a certain person. The story always picks up where it left off, and as long as the preacher is growing, the congregation can easily follow along.

Having a primary voice speaking each week, makes the community easy to define. Listeners will often describe their church by the lead-voice, which in turn, can create a distinct culture that community members strive to live towards.

Maybe I’m insecure, but when I’m speaking in new places I often feel the need to give it all, partially because I don’t want people to think “that’s all he’s got?”. As an ongoing communicator in the community, there’s less of a need to go at things from all sides and angles, trusting that people know better or you’ll have plenty of opportunities to flesh out what’s on your heart.

If one of your primary tasks is speaking, it really gets easier and better the more you do it.

Having said all that, the above can also lead to unhealthy, narrow-minded, lemming-like communities with uni-dimensional, performance-based, preachers.

(Original photo here)

I’ve posted many times questioning the effectiveness of preaching before, however this past Sunday was definitely an example of working more creatively, not harder, while creating a deeply meaningful experience.

I’ve been wanting to experiment with this for quite a while now, and with my voice blown from speaking the night before, this was the perfect opportunity (also great when you’re in a time crunch)

All we did was set up the projector and I typed on the screen in silence. Stacks of paper squares were handed out and the community was invited to write whatever the Spirit of God was putting on their hearts – Scripture, questions, prayers, struggles, insights, confessions, commitments, etc. … that’s it.

It was a great collective and collaborative experience. I didn’t filter anything, and what was shared was so much more profound than anything I would have preached. The more ‘quiet’ members of the community also felt encouraged and liberated to voice what God had been speaking into their souls through this venue.

Sometimes we just need to get out of the way.

This past Sunday I introduced our church to r.e.a.l. disciplines. This is something I adapted from Michael Frost’s BELLS and Neil Cole’s LTG‘s.

r.e.a.l. is an acronym for Reflect, Eat, Act, and Listen. Our goal is not simply to be a community of faith, but a community of practice.

What does it mean to incarnate (flesh out) Jesus in our daily lives?

What does it mean to begin living a life of spiritual discipline that leads to wholeness and greater freedom?

Below was the message powerpoint as well as the handout

Mosaic R.E.A.L. Disciplines

Key ideas from my talk this Christmas at Mosaic

We wait and anticipate – Our coming King

Though we wait, we celebrate – God who stepped into human history as Jesus

And as we celebrate, we incarnate – We follow Jesus in being his hands, feet, and voice in this world

In our seminary, expository narrative preaching is emphasized quite a bit.

Where traditional sermons have multiple points that are supported in a variety of ways, in narrative preaching the stories and metaphors are the points. The key is that with any good ‘story’ tension is created and held for impact until nearly the end of the sermon.

I’ve been thinking about this ‘methodology’ and I think it can be taken a step further.

There is… umm… a sexual art-form known as tantric (I had to look it up to verify) that is known to be a spiritual encounter involving a prolonged engagement where tension is held to the end, but there may also be ‘releases’ throughout the experience as well.

I think this form of preaching might be more helpful in our culture of short attention spans while weaving a captivating story till the grand finale… Tantric Preaching. You heard it here first.