Excerpts.

Excerpts from Soul Tsunami
by Leonard Sweet

Every generation before now learned about the world directly from authority figures through seat-based learning. Parents, teachers, and priests, among others, were the credentialing gateways to knowledge: social and academic and religious. Now kids learn about the world on their own from people they don’t know, never see, and never touch. Authority figures have lost their authority. Authority increasingly is something earned, not learned. All traditional authority figures are toppling. This generation doesn’t want to “study under” any authority figure; they want to study the authority figure. They don’t need “authorities” to help them gain information. But ironically, they need “authorities” more than ever before to mentor them in how to use, perform, process, and model the information. – pages 186-187

Christianity is the first religion that was not temple based. Jesus decentralized the temple. He made every local expression of the church an expression of the temple (1 Cor. 3:16). To determine what degree your church is temple based, look at your budget and figure out what percentage of your money is spent on maintaining your temple. Nor was Christianity priest based. The decentralization of ministry in the glocal church means a decentralization of leadership and responsibility from one person (priest) to a collective community of “priests”. Modern versus postmodern ministry is the difference between creating a church that reaches out to the world and creating mature believers who team together to reach out to the world. The church must begin to wander outside its usual haunts. Can it go “over the wall”? – pages 170-171

Solitude.

In the solitude he spoke
In the silence:
I can’t lead until I learn to be led
I can’t teach until I am taught
I can’t be trusted, until I have been proven trustworthy
There is still much more to learn
A good heart though
You’ll see before its over
You’ll see and I’ll show you

Tired.

Man I’m tired. It seems like the days never end and when they do they just blur into the next day. At this point in my life it just all seems the same. So routine. So ordered. I mean its “where I’m supposed to be right now”. But it just gets old. I’d like a little adventure every now and then. A little danger. A little of something more than this. Its just all getting redundant. And I’m starting to get dissastisfied with it all. I don’t know if thats a good thing. But when I usually start to get restless, some transition usually opens up. So maybe thats whats going on. I don’t know whats around the corner and I guess I can wait here until I hear otherwise. But man its getting old. And fast. I just wish I could be so much farther along than I am. Financially, emotionally, spiritually. It just seems like such a rat race sometimes. I just wish God would hurry up and come back and get rid of all this in between stuff. But then again, if He’s not ready, then maybe I shouldn’t be either. Who knows, I may be in the place where I’m supposed to be and I imagine that would make my perspective all the more better. I don’t think that is grammatically correct but I like it.

Snowballs.

The Gospel

Growing up and living in the south, there is a phenomenon that I get to experience very rarely. It�s the beautiful occurrence of snow. The only problem is that if and when it actually snows, the amount that falls is very minimal. So when you go to build a �southern� snowman, instead of getting a pure white snowman, your snowman gets a nice mix of leaves, sticks, grass, and mud blended together with the snow. The same is true if you try to make a snow ball. You scrape pure white snow off the car in the driveway. You pack it into a tight little ball and then you roll it down a hill and let it gather snow as it rolls. However, once it finishes rolling, what started off as a pure white snow ball has now met the same fate that the snow man met. The snow ball is now covered in leaves, sticks, grass, and mud. While its still a snow ball, its no longer in the pure form that it once was in.

Every now and then, we need to stop long enough to pick up our gospel snowball. Examine our version of it with God�s version of it and then begin to pick out our man-made leaves and sticks that have become mixed in and intertwined with it. We need to pick up our version of the gospel, shake it, dust it off and then roll it back down the hill again.

We got to be careful though, because there will be a temptation to just throw away the current snow ball and go make another one from the fresh snow laying on the dash of the car. There will also be a temptation to simply put some fresh snow over the leaves and sticks to cover up the ugly form the snow ball has taken.

We need to pick up our version of the gospel and lay it aside the gospel of the New Testament. Then pick out the junk that has been added on to our version of the gospel. Often times this same fate falls upon the gospel of the New Testament. What was once a pure gospel, has now been mixed with other things on its roll through time. It has become diluted over two thousand years and is essentially a hybrid form of the gospel. It has become like the snow ball. It has become combined with the surrounding culture of the world and the culture of the church, representing a shadow of the pure truth that it once had. Often times it has been replaced by man�s version of it. Other times it has sadly been exchanged by the church for their version of it.

So what is the gospel? It is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the beautiful story of a Savior who stepped off his eternal throne and descended to earth to bear my sins on a rugged cross. It is the love story of a God of grace who came to redeem the world from sin. That is the gospel. Nothing more and nothing less. Anything else is a add-on that dillutes the purity of the Truth.

King of It All.

King Of It All
Meditations on Romans 2:17-24

Enough of the deception I’ve created
Through with the falsity of it all
It makes me feel good to point out
To rail against all that I see wrong
My accusations come all day
My fingers never stop pointing
All my charges against them
Void of any validity because of my own junk
I judge everyone but myself
Point out the wrong
Only to go along in plastic pride
I know I’m wrong
But I’d rather ignore my sin, my problem, my lack of
Its much more fun to look at someone else
Their irrelevancy, their lack of love
Well look at me
I’m overflowing with love
With faith, hope, patience, a pure tongue
A holy mind, clean hands
Look at me, perfected saint
Choked to death on my own vain assumptions
Caught in my own net
Measured by my own standard of righteousness
Not to mention God’s
Guilty and busted
Of everything I saw as wrong