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In the preface A.W. Tozer’s classic “The Pursuit of God” one finds the following:

“In this hour of all-but-universal darkness on cheering gleam appears: within the fold of conservative Christianity there are to be found increasing numbers of persons whose religious lives are marked by a growing hunger after God Himself.  They are eager for spiritual realities and will not be put off with words, nor will they be content with correct “interpretations” of truth.  They are athirst for God, and they will not be satisfied till they have drunk deep at the Fountain of Living Water.”

Tozer’s sentiment, penned over 50 years ago,  is still a popular one today.  There seems to be an massive shift towards pragmatic or experiential Christianity.  It is easy to understand.  A great many theologians find incredible richness in pursuing an ever better understanding of God, His church and salvation.  Unfortunately Christianity that is primarily the pursuit of correct belief is dry for many.  Our make up leads us to connect with God in different ways, and sometimes we personally favour one well ahead of others.  There are some incredibly dry theologians, but there are also those who have become completely unhinged from the truth of the gospel in their experiential pursuits.  The church is trouble if any one way completely dominates the others.

I understand the desire to go beyond the theological wars and petty squabbles that mark the history of the church.  It is very easy to come away from this saying “why can’t just be about Jesus.”  What happens when those who just want to be about Jesus have redefined Jesus and salvation to the point where it is barely recognizable as historic Christianity.

That is the problem I encounter more and more these days.  In the desire to move towards a more spiritual version of Christianity, we have left the safety of the yellow lines on the road and found ourselves in a ditch.  Dry overly theological Christianity is like driving a car while being obsessed with staying perfectly between the lines, so obsessed that the accelerator never gets the car above 10mph for fear of losing control.  The pendulum has swung the other way.  It is all gas, with one hand on the wheel and the other is texting away on a busy street.

Good theology is empty by itself. It is like a home that is merely framed at top a foundation.  Just wood, no carpet, no paint, no drywall, no fixtures.  Is it absolutely essential, but completely inadequate by itself.  If we try to live out our faith without a basic framework of good theology, it is likely making a home where some rooms don’t sit on top of the foundation, what foundation there is, is sagging and walls are crooked and doors are not square.  That is what has happened in evangelicalism.

Years ago I would have wholeheartedly endorsed Tozer’s sentiment.  Now that I’ve spent the last couple trying to address just one false teaching in the church, I can see how this has gone too far.

Even Tozer might have predicted this problem.  He was just sitting on the other edge of the pendulum.

“Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in The Church of the Living God.  Without it no church can be a New Testament church in any strict meaning of that term.  But exposition may be carried in such a way as to leave the hearers devoice of any true spiritual nourishment whatever.  For it is not mere words that nourish the soul but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth.”

If he were alive today he might write.

Spiritual experience is an imperative must in the life of every believer in the church.  Without it no one has cultivated a life giving relationship with God.  But spiritual experience can be pursued in such a way that leads people in to strange doctrines and spurious experiences that fill our souls, not with nourishment, but additives and containments that pollute our spiritual lives.  For true nourishment comes from knowing the one true God, not the gods we fashion to pander to our insecurities or covetous desires.  For our life comes from knowing the true Christ and the true gospel.

The solution to the massive movement of people out of the church is simply to ask them to come back to church.

Oh look, your church can blow hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for all manner of banners and campaign kits.

My idea for something simple to make a difference in the lives of your friends and your community.  Invite people to your house, have a meal and build a genuine relationship.

Jana Bishop tells her story of leadership in a church that has bought in to Covering Theology. 

I am loving my Google Nexus One running the latest version of Android.  To be honest I’m running everything on it but the phone, I’ll have to wait until Sasktel launches its new 3G+ network in August before I can hook it up.  Well I could go with Rogers (shudder). 

Sadly Google stopped selling this phone directly.  In Canada you will be able to pick up the Nexus One’s cousin, the HTC Desire.  Telus should be carrying it soon. 

I’m half way through my summer vacation.  I like to think it is the pinnacle of my existence during the year.  It is the time I enjoy the most anyway.  This summer has definitely been better than the previous two.  Last summer I didn’t get a real holiday.  We tried to staycation but I ended up working almost every day.  The year before that we tried a road trip to through BC.  After that little adventure we made a mental note.  If one of your kids has three diagnosed mental health conditions, perhaps it is best not to push things too much.

At the cabin the boys are starving for their lack of Internet and computer entertainment but for all their complaining about being bored, it has been a much more enjoyable experience than previous trips.  I can tell their minds are resting as well.

Anyways, I’ve found myself sleeping.  Naps in the morning, afternoon, and night.  It feels like my body and mind have been catching up on sleep it has been missing for years.  It might mean a bit more blogging in the future.

Yesterday I gave someone a ride home from the bar.  The bar up here is the only place I can get high speed internet.  Most days I go in and order a coke and try not too look too out of place.  Yesterday one of the patrons asked my wife and I if he could join us.  He was quite obviously inebriated.  He said something about being ditched by his friends and needing a ride home.  I offered him a ride.  The First Nation borders the resort village so it wasn’t a long drive.  We got to talking and it didn’t take much to connect.  I sensed a sadness in his heart and a lot of insecurity.  When he asked why I was being so nice to him I said that the Creator made everything good, and that He was worth something because the Creator made him. 

My words of encouragement stayed within the realm of overlap between my faith and my new friend’s traditional faith.  I didn’t go beyond that and I didn’t feel I needed to. 

Was I being missional?  Well I was sitting in place of a different culture.  It certainly isn’t my natural habitat.  I listened, and I helped, and I very genuinely cared. 

In some ways I think this stuff is a lot easier than we realize.  We are just scared and we don’t know where to start.  It is funny how it takes my daily addiction to the Internet to tempt me to in to go to some place that makes me uncomfortable. 

Check it out here. Don’t it just make you want to forget about the 80s.

I just spend a couple of days at an annual denominational conference.  I spoke in two workshops and spent plenty of time chatting with new people and making new friends.  Without a doubt I have been warmly welcomed by this new tribe.  The people are very nice and supportive.  They seem to genuinely like each other.  In the past I’ve been at meetings where the pleasantries displayed on the conference floor sharply contrasted the conversations occurring in back rooms and hallways.  

I believe in being part of a broader community but this journey towards finding one hasn’t been easy.  The sad reality is there is kind of a huge cultural gap between many of us on the margins and those in the center.  It came out in the questions I fielded.  At times I felt like quoting the architect from the Matrix.

Me: “I am the architect. I helped start this house church. I’ve been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although this workshop has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably conventional. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.”

Interested Person: “How many people are in your church?”

I know of some denominations that split over Sunday School…I’d have to say there is a bigger gap between house church people and conventional church people. 

I’m staring at the screens in the cafeteria area of Ambrose University College trumpeting all the great green initiatives.

I just read “There is a green thread connecting everything we do.”  Later on we see “We don’t just talk about sustainability.”

If you were like me you might see the irony in using a computer and 5 40” monitors to display a menu and to trumpet green initiatives.  I looked up the specs on this monitor, it uses 240 watts of power.  Lump in the computer and we are looking at 1.25Kw.  Depending on how often they have these things are on (3 seem to be on only when the cafeteria is open, 2 seem to be on all the time) they could easily be using more than 1/2 the power of my entire household.  They are using a ton of energy to do something that was once accomplished with a whiteboard and dry erase marker. 

The meals here have been really good.  They have also been served on paper plates with plastic cups and cutlery.  The juice is in aluminum cans.  The paper and plastic are thrown in the garbage. 

This stuff makes me really mad.  More and more I run in to people who tell me “being green” is just a gimmick for people to gain some status and feel better about themselves.  There is a lot of truth to that right now but not everyone who believes in sustainable living is like that.  I am not like that, I’ve worked really hard to insulate my house, start a garden, drive less miles in smaller vehicles and reduce water consumption.

I’m feeling kind of grumpy…perhaps sleeping in a campground wasn’t the best option for me emotionally.  It gets cold in Calgary at night.

There is a cycle of life on this planet.  A simple cycle might be the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants an animals.  Animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.  Planets take in carbon dioxide and give back oxygen.  If you put a bunch of animals and planets in a sealed room everything will be ok as long as these to sides of the equation stay in balance.  If there are too many plants the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide would get out of whack and the plants would suffer until equilibrium is restored.  If in this sealed room something else upset the cycle and leaked out one or two of our necessary gasses.  Eventually both the plants and animals would suffer because there is a limit to the amount of resources available to sustain the cycle of life. If both plants and animals continue to multiply eventually they will hit a limit where they can no longer sustainably grow. 

The whole earth ecosystem is much like this room, except that it is much more complicated and much larger but the same rules apply.  Humanity takes a lot of things out of the lifecycle, or at the very least we misallocate it.  In the wilderness animals eat plants, animals take some of those nutrients and grow and leave the rest behind as waste.  The waste goes in to the soil replenishing it.  Other plants can grow.  In some cases insects eat the plants and animals eat the insects and some animals eat other animals but all the essential resources keep cycling through the whole system.  If the conditions change so that one type of animal becomes too dominate eventually the life cycle will curb its growth and things return to a natural equilibrium. 

Humanity takes resources and builds a lot of things don’t break down well and thus aren’t returned in this life cycle.  Sometimes we poison it, sometimes we just stick in big pile where it doesn’t do any good, sometimes it just finds its way to a great big floating garbage dump in the middle of the pacific ocean.  The more we misallocate these resources the less efficient the system works and the less able the system is to support life.

Everything is recycled and nothing comes without a cost except for the energy from the sun.  While it too is a finite source of energy, there is so much energy in the sun that it in our limited  life span it is essentially free.  Up until the industrial revolution humanity lived off the energy the sun gave us each year.  The energy of the sun would spur the growth of food, and animals, some which provided us concentrated sources of energy like oils and wood.  We used this oil and wood to create heat and light.

Then we discovered massive repositories of solar energy in the form of coal, oil and natural gas.  We harnessed this energy to create complicated energy intensive systems.  They made our lives so much easier that most of us could shift from chopping wood and growing food to things as specialized as fixing computers and brokering mortgages.  As we used this stored energy our population exploded.  We became worried in the 60’s and 70’s that we would quickly get out of equilibrium with the ecosystem.  However we found ways to use that massive storehouse of energy in the production of food.  We took these finite storehouses of natural gas and other fertilizers to increase the yield of our farms. 

Eventually there will come a time when we hit the maximum amount of energy we can extract from these fine stores of energy at a given time.  After this point the amount of energy we can extract from our resources of oil, natural gas and coal will begin an unyielding decline.  It appears we are getting very close to this point.  Currently we have a  few viable options we should have one main goal.  We must restructure our lives and our systems so they we can live within the allotment of energy we receive each year from the sun.  It would be best if we used our “bonus energy” to help us transition to that state.  What happens if we wait until our “bonus energy” has so completely run down to begin the transition?  Things will be very very tough.

The hard reality is, our way of life is too energy intensive to sustain if all we had was the energy the sun gave us each year.  We are out of equilibrium in terms of our relationship with the environment, the economy and energy.   The only way we can get back to equilibrium, to live within our means, is downsize, simplify and localize.

I believe the biblical imperatives of working towards justice and following the principles of stewardship compel us to change, and to lead change in our communities.  The voracious consumerism that marks our generation is sin, and a sin that impacts more than just ourselves.  For every resource that we waste it needlessly decreases the supply and makes it that much less accessible to the poor. 

These issues have weighed on me heavily.  They have compelled me to insulate my house, recycle what we can, move closer to potential work, plant a garden, and operate small vehicles.  While I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress it still have a long way to go.  This spring we expanded our garden and added a greenhouse.  We are looking at more home upgrades including solar air heating and a wood stove.  Moving steadily towards a sustainable life is hard but rewarding.