In additon to the writing I do on this blog, I also do some occasional freelance work for various newspapers, magazines and ezines.

Click on this link to read a short article I wrote for the San Antonio Express-News. It was in this past Saturday’s (August 16) Religion Section.

At the bottom of the article is a Comments Section. Feel free to add your comments there - reader feedback will encourage the Express-News to feature more writing of this kind. But please, no comments about my mug shot that’s featured rather prominently.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

Tim Adams

My 73-year old mom is like a lot of parents from her generation. She still lives in the same house where she raised her kids, the only house she’s ever owned. It’s the same house she’s called home since October of 1964.

But, the neighborhood where my mom put down her roots is a very different place today than what it was 44 years ago. When I was growing up there, I don’t remember anyone who rented rather than owned their home – it’s always been a working class neighborhood, but during my formative years it was a stable and secure place to live.

Today the neighborhood is probably one third to one half renters – very few of the families that had kids who were my peers are still around and transience has become one of the defining characteristics of what was once a modest but solid neighborhood.

Back in the day my friends and I did engage in some occasional pranks that usually involved water balloons or eggs. But today there are the constant reminders of gang activity - the paved drainage ditch that divides her street and the street signs and yard fences in the area are regular targets for tagging – one of the ways gangs stake a claim to their turf.

A few weeks ago, my mom asked me to take a look at a spot on the side of her house where the paint was flaking off – she’d just had the house painted a little over a year ago, so that sort of wear seemed to be premature.

When I went over to look at the area she was concerned about, I wasn’t sure what to make of it, at first glance. The paint was coming off, but it was in small spots sprayed in a circular pattern and confined to a small area near one of the front windows. As I looked closer I could see small silver bb’s embedded in the spots on the siding where the paint was coming off.

Then I realized what had happened - my mom’s house had been hit by a shotgun blast, most likely fired from a passing car.

When I called the police the first officer who arrived confirmed my suspicions. A report was taken and later a crime scene team arrived to take photographs. As the team was doing its work I had a long conversation with one of the officers who stated they’d been closely monitoring the steady rise in gang activity in my mom’s neighborhood.

But, I’m not going to try to talk my mom into moving to a “safer” neighborhood – she values her independence and my older sister and I have had those conversations before and we know she’s happy where she is.

But, I’ll admit, my motives for wanting her to stay are also somewhat selfish. A big reason why I wouldn’t want my mom to move is that I don’t want to lose a great next door neighbor.

For the past three years my family and I have lived in the same neighborhood where I grew up. We own the house next door to mom, the house built by Norm Hastings, who was my Little League Baseball coach when I was in the fourth grade. There were five kids in the Hastings family and Norm added a second story to the house to accommodate his large clan, which makes it a great fit for our four kids.

Rare is the weekend night that we don’t have at least one and often two extra kids spending the night, testing their skills on Guitar Hero or Rock Band into the early morning hours or working on a script for a new video to upload to YouTube.

I like the fact that kids like to come to our house. When you live in a rough neighborhood, it’s important to have places to go that are safe – and fun.

But, regardless of where you live, there are choices to be made. I can’t tell you how many times people who live in more affluent, often gated communities, have confessed to me that they worry that they’re raising their kids in a cocoon – an artificial world of homogeneity and Stepford-esque conformity.

I tell them they should be concerned because not only is such an environment out of step with reality today, it will be even more of an aberration by the time our children reach our age.

By the year 2015, white people like me will no longer be in the majority in the State of Texas. By the middle of this century, that will be true of the entire U.S. population. Before the middle of the third decade of this century, the economy of China will be larger than that of the U.S. There are already more internet users in China than in the U.S.

The Christian Church will continue to shrink in Europe and North America while at the same time continuing its exponential growth in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The face and flavor of World Christianity is going to change in dramatic ways that will expose the ethnocentric biases that have too often been taken for granted – but had little or nothing to do with the Gospel.

Oh the times, they are a changin – and if Jesus were here today (physically), I just don’t think he’d be trying to run away from these realities. I don’t think he’d be very interested in churches that are little more than lifestyle enclaves – regardless of how big they are. I don’t believe that he would be impressed by a church or ministry that grew by taking the path of least resistance, or that could only measure its growth in numbers of bodies and the size of its budget.

We are moving into a time in history when the long overlooked - the last - will truly be first – and those who have been first for so long will be moving further down the line.

And if the Church of Jesus Christ doesn’t repent and truly become the new humanity that God intended it to be, where faith in Christ Jesus is what makes each of you equal with each other, whether you are a Jew or a Greek, a slave or a free person, a man or a woman (Galatians 3:28 CEV), then I do not believe that the ultimate outcome of such a demographic shift will be achieved with justice for everyone involved.

The Church’s obedience to its calling to be a house of prayer for all people will determine the course of history. We have gone down the path of comfort and conformity toward Babel, but God is calling us to the difficulty and diversity of Pentecost.

If we will take the road less traveled, it will make all the difference.

Above the fireplace in our home is this framed, three-panel print of the painting Lord, When Did We See You…? by San Antonio artist G. E. Mullan. The picture was a gift to my wife Jennifer and me on the occasion of our first anniversary from my lifetime friend Jeff Vollmer, who was the best man in our wedding.

It’s been a little over 17 years since Jeff gave us that gift, and in that time it’s always hung either in our bedroom or living room in the numerous residences we’ve occupied. Getting married while I was still in school and then trying to find a place of ministry where we could put down some roots has made for a vagabond existence, at times.

If you look very closely at the picture, starting in the upper left hand corner of the canvas, you can see the text of Matthew 25:34-40 running along the edge of the painting:

Then the King will speak to those on his right. He will say, ‘My Father has blessed you. Come and take what is yours. It is the kingdom prepared for you since the world was created. I was hungry. And you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty. And you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger. And you invited me in. I needed clothes. And you gave them to me. I was sick. And you took care of me. I was in prison. And you came to visit me.’ Then the people who have done what is right will answer him. ‘Lord,’ they will ask, ‘when did we see you hungry and feed you? When did we see you thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you as a stranger and invite you in? When did we see you needing clothes and give them to you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ The King will reply, ‘What I’m about to tell you is true. Anything you did for one of the least important of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

When you make the connection between the text and the painting, you understand Mullan intended it to be a calculated epiphany. Life should imitate art.

Lord, When Did We See You…? represents everything I know God has called me to do as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For anyone seeking to live a life of discipleship in obedience to the Gospel, the text that inspired this beautiful work is one of the Scriptures that form the biblical basis for such a life - as basic as John 3:16 or The 23rd Psalm.

But, there have been times when its presence in our home has been unsettling rather than inspiring. In particular I remember a time 13 years ago, as I was serving my first church as senior pastor, when I was tempted to relegate it to the attic.

My first church had been through 12 straight years of decline before my arrival. The steady decline in members, programs and giving was, for the most part, caused by several layers of deep-rooted systemic dysfunction. There had been at least three major splits with large numbers of families leaving each time - a familiarity with Systems Theory was a definite necessity for anyone who would serve there. Of course, none of the conflict revolved around anything of significance in terms of Christian doctrine or practice.

As the church was losing members, the neighborhood was also changing and had reached a critical tipping point, going from a 90/10 ratio of whites to blacks to a 60/40 split with African-Americans by then in the majority.

Crime was on the rise, property values were dropping, white flight was rampant and four churches, previously located in our community, had set the pace by selling their properties to African-American congregations and relocating to the more affluent more white and less black suburbs.

From my days in bus ministry as a high school kid in San Antonio and the inner city of Chicago as a college student, to the ways I’d been challenged by people like Tony Campolo, Jim Wallis and Ron Sider to read Scripture differently when I was doing youth ministry in my 20’s, answering the call to that church seemed like a natural step of obedience.

When I understood in greater detail the kind of demographic sea change that was going on in that community and how other churches had chosen to leave rather than change with the community, I saw it as a test of our willingness to be obedient to the Gospel rather than take the easy way out.

Unfortunately, a large portion of the church leadership didn’t see it that way.

A short time after our arrival, I convened a long range planning committee to study what options the church should consider. I spent hours on the phone with consultants and other experts from around the country, read the current literature, sought the counsel of other pastors in the area, visited churches that had relocated and some that had chosen to stay, looked at the ever-increasing needs of our community, had a thorough appraisal done of our church property, looked to the Scripture for guidance and did a lot of praying.

The conclusion reached by a majority of people on the long range planning committee was that the church should sell its property and use the proceeds from that sale to relocate the church to the suburbs. When the day came for the church to vote on whether to accept the committee’s recommendation, I presented it to the church and stated that I would not vote for it.

The measure failed to pass – not even getting a simple majority of the congregation’s votes, with the most common comment being “Come up with a better plan.” I was naïve enough to think we would.

When I went by my office one Saturday afternoon about four weeks later, I found several envelopes slipped under my office door. Inside each envelope was a letter of resignation from a key leader in the church, stating that they and their families would not be back.

I wish I could tell you that others stepped up to fill those leadership vacancies and that the church became a witness to the community through its willingness to stay rather than leave, that new members came and that the church grew, breaking out of the downward spiral it had been in for 12 years. It would be nice to be able to say that their departure removed obstacles that the church needed to get past in order to fulfill its mission and calling. But, before long, others left and some of those who stayed were convinced that I should be next.

We held on there for three long years - there were never enough votes to get rid of me, just enough to make me miserable. We made every sacrifice we could to try to make it work but never really developed any sort of traction in terms of ministry. That was one of the loneliest and most miserable times of my life.

Looking back, there are certainly things I would do differently, if given the chance to do them over. I was young and naïve and certainly didn’t walk on water – but there is nothing I could have done, other than compromising the convictions I had then and still have now – in order to create a different outcome. That’s what bothered me the most.

Wasn’t God supposed to grant us success in exchange for our willingness to be faithful? We did what was right, so why wasn’t God keeping up His end of the bargain?

Of course, life and ministry are much more complicated than some sort of simple exchange of sacrifice for success, because obedience isn’t always measured in sacrifice (I. Samuel 15:22). And there are no bargains to be made with God.

If you’re called to the kind of ministry described in Mullan’s painting and Matthew’s Gospel, don’t expect an immediate return on your investment. But don’t despair, either (Galatians 6:9), because the end of the story is full of surprises.

I believe “Lord, when did we see you…?” is a real question that will be asked by genuinely surprised people. Jesus wasn’t just using a rhetorical device to make a point, He was giving us the clearest account of the Last Judgment found anywhere in Scripture.

Be prepared to be surprised.

rel•e•vant \ˈre-lə-vənt\, adj. having some bearing on or importance for real-world issues, present-day events, or the current state of society

Relevant is a huge buzzword among North American Christians.

Traditional mainline denominations, most of which have been hemorrhaging in their memberships since the 1960’s, are desperate for ways to be relevant in order to attract new members.

Evangelical churches, whose memberships have grown considerably in that same time period, often credit their ability to thrive with their ability to be relevant – adopting strategies described as user-friendly, seeker-sensitive and contemporary.

The worship service has been the primary event that Evangelicals have placed their focus on in their attempts to be relevant. While almost all Mainline churches still follow a traditional order of worship with a few offering the option of one with a contemporary theme, many Evangelical churches have no traditional service but provide different services that appeal to different tastes – contemporary, praise & worship, hard rock, rap & hip-hop, etc.

Churches spend large amounts of money and time in the pursuit of using just the right theme, technology and talent to keep people coming back. Close attention is paid to market analysis, demographics, cultural trends and other parameters in order to insure that a church is getting it right in terms of the target audience they’re trying to reach. If you’ve ever read Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church, you’re familiar with “Saddleback Sam,” the poster child for lifestyle enclaves everywhere.

So, I have to wonder, what would happen if we put that much attention, energy, creativity and money into local missions and outreach?

Now, by local missions and outreach, I don’t mean a church’s TV ministry, radio ministry, website or anything else related to institutional promotion. I’m not even talking about evangelism, if by evangelism you mean strategies to get the unchurched into church.

What I’m thinking about is what churches often refer to as compassion ministries, benevolence ministries or community ministries - the ways we are willing to spend and be spent without any real prospect of a return for the institution. The food pantries and clothes closets we operate, the turkeys we give away Thanksgiving, the toys we collect at Christmas, and the occasional help we provide for someone behind on their rent.

The same things that churches were doing, in one form or another, 100 years ago.

I propose that it’s time to bring ministry to the poor into the 21st Century. I wonder what a cutting-edge community ministries program would look like?

What would happen if, rather than just trying to make the institutional church relevant, we tried to make the Kingdom of God relevant – if we poured our passion into rethinking what it means to minister to the poor?

With all of the emphasis we’ve given to being relevant in our presentation of the message, why are we so out of touch in terms of how we apply the message? In my lifetime, we’ve gone from the fuzzy felt of flannel graph to NOOMA videos. With all of the creativity, energy and money that continue to be poured into Sunday morning why haven’t we tried to rethink our strategies for the other days of the week?

Too much of our work in the area of ministry to the poor, as well-intentioned as it may be, is nothing more than a rip-off of failed government programs – poor imitations of a lot of bad ideas. Bob Lupton puts it this way:

Take people who are able and strong. Place them in the wealthiest land on earth. Surround them with unparalleled opportunity. Then pay them not to work, not to strive, not to achieve. Pay them to accept nonproductivity as a way of life. Agree to subsidize their families with food, shelter, health care, and money if the fathers will leave. Do this for two or three generations and see what you produce. (Theirs is the Kingdom: Celebrating the Gospel in Urban America, p. 72).

But, before any of my conservative brothers and sisters interpret Lupton’s words as a stab at my liberal brothers and sisters, please answer this question – What are you or church doing in the area of ministry to the poor, community outreach or anything else that resembles obedience to the Great Commandment that is any different than what Lupton has described?

Just as responsible evangelism demands follow up discipleship, responsible ministry to the poor has to be more than one-way charity. Jesus has called us to be fishers of men and He’s also called us to be fishing instructors – to the whole person – body, soul and spirit.

The Great Commandment should not be the red-headed step child of the Great Commission. Because without the Great Commandment, the Great Commission is only a fraction of the Gospel, a shell of the fullness God’s Grace replaced by the emptiness of cheap grace.

If we can agree that 40 years after the beginning of the Great Society programs of the 1960’s, many of those programs have become part of the problem - that the Left got it wrong, then we can also say that the Right still doesn’t get it.

Many of the people who abandoned traditional Mainline churches in favor of more conservative Evangelical churches (this migration accounts for some of the growth of conservative church groups) did so because they disagreed with the support that Mainline groups gave to liberal social causes.

But, rather than formulate an alternative vision for how to speak to our social ills, most conservative churches have ignored the least of these as if the Great Commandment had never been given. Those that have tried to develop a social ethic have tended to concentrate their efforts on a narrow range of issues and their approach has often looked more like a secular political agenda rather than a ministry of Spirit-filled justice and compassion.

But, there is cause for hope. There is a new reality emerging – one that is neither liberal nor conservative, one that represents what is best about each but transcends both. I believe that it’s time for the Church to proclaim the whole Gospel – that God’s ultimate act of self-disclosure has happened in the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ – and that through God’s action in Jesus He has initiated the redemption of not only our souls but of all of creation – that the Good News we proclaim in obedience to the Great Commission and the Good Works we do in obedience to the Great Commandment are two sides of the same coin.

I believe there is a new consensus emerging, one that will no longer emphasize charity over dignity, dependency over self-sufficiency, entitlement over empowerment. One that will place just as much passion, energy, creativity, resources and conviction into the Great Commandment as we have into the Great Commission. One that will not only bring healing and wholeness to the least of these, but to the Church of Jesus Christ as well.

$5.00 a gallon gas hasn’t made it to Texas yet, but all indicators say it’s on the way. How will that impact the way we “do church?”

If you’re like me and you grew up in the 1970’s, you remember the original Energy Crisis.

Following the Yom Kippur War of 1973, OPEC informed the supporters of Israel that the party was over. Almost overnight we were told that without the oil we’d been getting from OPEC we’d be running out of the natural resources that drove our economy and underwrote our lifestyle. We were completely caught off guard. Most Americans had no idea how dependent we had become on foreign oil.

Conservation became a buzzword. A popular bumper sticker of the time said it all – “Energy: Use It, But Use It Wisely.”

Within a short time the oversized cruising vessels made by Ford, GM and Chrysler were replaced by Pintos, Vegas and Gremlins (oh, the humanity!) – and they soon had serious competition from the much better made products of Toyota and Datsun.

None of this really made much of an impression on my 12-year old mind until one Saturday morning when I made my usual trek up to the corner Ice House (that’s what we call convenience stores in San Antonio) to buy a gallon of gas for the lawnmower and three pieces of Super Bubble to enjoy as I cut the grass.

But, much to my shock, the quarter (as in 25 cents) that had covered the cost of the gas and the gum in the past no longer would suffice. Suddenly gas was over 40 cents a gallon. It was the end of the world as I knew it. Certainly the Rapture was near.

Besides the drastic downsizing in the wheelbase of the cars rolling off of Detroit assembly lines, there were other obvious ways that life suddenly changed. From that point on, the 1970’s became a time of shortages and runaway inflation. Adding to that were the looming Watergate scandal and the slow, tortured end of the Vietnam War. It was like a fog had settled in.

And there’s a lot going on in our world right now that is eerily similar – and much more dangerous.

About the same time as gas was doubling and tripling in price in the 1970’s, churches all over America were using buses to bring people in. What seeker sensitivity, user friendliness, mission statements and praise choruses mean to today’s megachurches, the Bus Ministry meant to the 1970’s practitioners of church growth in America.

Long before there were rear screen projectors, auditoriums without crosses and Rock Band for the Wiis in the Student Center, there were bus workers swallowing goldfish, giving away colored baby chicks at Easter and hiding money under the bus seats (sometimes referred to as Baptist Bingo).

With the rise of gas prices in the 1970’s, Bus Ministry became a larger line item for churches but more feasible for the riders, most of whom came from low income neighborhoods and apartment complexes. For all of its superficiality and focus on entertainment, Bus Ministry was, for the most part, a good way for poor people to get to church - most of whom were kids whose parents were thankful for the weekly respite.

I was one of those bus workers in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. When I was 17, a good friend of mine and I started a bus route from scratch, making cold turkey door-to-door visits on the Southside of San Antonio. Within three weeks of our first visit we had 61 kids on the bus and headed for Sunday School at Huisache Ave. Baptist Church.

As a college student I worked in the largest Bus Ministry in America at First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana from 1980-1982. First Baptist leased over 150 buses every weekend to pick up riders throughout the Chicago area and bring them to downtown Hammond for a taste of the old-time religion.

Like most methods, Bus Ministry ran its course. It’s still used by some churches (First Baptist Hammond still operates on about the same scale) but has seen its popularity wane since the early 1980’s and the ascendancy of the commuter megachurch.

But, as we head toward $5.00 a gallon gas, I can’t help but wonder if the clock is ticking on the commuter megachurch as well.

The megachurches on the outlying edges of suburbia are a 15-30 minute Sunday morning drive for many of their commuter members. Add to that men’s groups, women’s groups, youth group and other functions that keep a family going back to the campus three to four times a week and all of a sudden they’ve gone through a full tank on the SUV – roughly $100 a week.

What if, rather than drive past 20 churches on the way to the church with the big screens American Christians decided it would be better stewardship of God’s money to find a church within a reasonable driving distance or even walking distance from where they live?

What if, as a result of the money they saved on gas they could contribute more to the previously struggling neighborhood churches they had been driving past? Not to mention how much healthier we would all be if we walked to church.

What if one of the unintended consequences of $5.00 a gallon gas was a greater emphasis on the communities where we live as the place where we minister in the name of Jesus rather than seeing a building or an institution as the focus of our devotion?

What if, through this surge in membership and resources, neighborhood churches shifted out of survival mode and became agents of community development and change?

What if, over time, a new paradigm of church emerged, one that emphasized Christians as givers rather than consumers? What would it be like for American Christians to choose a church on the basis of what they could do for it, rather than what it could do for them?

Imagine the possibilities.

Dream out loud.

At high volume.

A couple of years ago I was driving my daughter Elizabeth, the oldest of my four kids, to youth choir practice one Sunday afternoon. Youth choirs usually have really snappy names like New Song, Chosen Generation and Strike Force – names that communicate the optimism of youth fused with an upbeat view of the Christian faith.

The church we were attending at the time called theirs Mainstream.

I always thought that was appropriate – certainly every parent hopes their child will grow up to be part of the mainstream, in the flow of life and able to take advantage of opportunities to achieve and prosper, to see their dreams fulfilled.

But, as I drove Elizabeth to rehearsal that day, I had an epiphany.

A big percentage of the kids in our city, the seventh largest city in the most prosperous country in the world, will never sniff the mainstream. They were born in the margins and most of them are being socialized to stay there.

At the time, I was working as a case manager for the local housing authority, interacting on a daily basis with people thoroughly entrenched in the margins. But, I was making plans and laying the foundation for a new ministry that could impact people’s lives with the Gospel without the constraints of a government agency. That child was about to be born, but I needed to give it a name.

It would have to be a name that would reflect its heritage. In a city where 65% of the population is Hispanic, that means something in Spanish. Corriente principal is the Spanish term for mainstream, but Corriente – “stream or river” would suffice.

But, Corriente Ministries isn’t just about bringing people into the mainstream. It’s also about transforming the mainstream. Because when the marginalized have their lives transformed and come into the mainstream, the mainstream will look different.

Sort of like going from white bread to pico de gallo.

There are three basic principals that Corriente operates on – Connect, Empower, Transform - We connect people to Jesus Christ so that they will be empowered to transform themselves, their families and their communities. We connect churches and ministries to a wider network and needed resources that will empower their mission to transform the people and communities they minister to. We do this in a holistic way that sees the body and soul as important to God.

As an organization, Corriente will probably never be that big, because we’re not interested in reinventing the wheel – creating yet another ministry that duplicates services for the sake of raising money.

As an organism, the potential for growth is unlimited – because rather than reinvent the wheel, our calling is to connect the dots. Those dots are sometimes people, churches or ministries already serving in the trenches, but needing encouragement, resources, partners or opportunities that will enhance their work for the glory of God and the growth of His Kingdom.

At other times the purpose of Corriente will be to challenge the Church through this blog, preaching, teaching and writing – to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” and to expose communities with resources and felt needs to communities with few resources and real needs.

If you’ve read the previous posts on this blog, you’ve probably sensed a certain amount of passion that goes into these missives. Corriente is about passion, but not in a way that is irresponsible or careless. After 47 years, the majority of which have been spent in some sort of ministry, I can usually tell the difference between heat and light - usually.

But the fire still burns. Paul put it this way:

We do not preach about ourselves. We preach about Jesus Christ. We say that he is Lord. And we serve you because of him.
God said, “Let light shine out of darkness.”—(Genesis 1:3) He made his light shine in our hearts. It shows us the light of God’s glory in the face of Christ.
Treasure is kept in clay jars. In the same way, we have the treasure of the good news in these earthly bodies of ours. That shows that the mighty power of the good news comes from God. It doesn’t come from us.
We are pushed hard from all sides. But we are not beaten down. We are bewildered. But that doesn’t make us lose hope. Others make us suffer. But God does not desert us. We are knocked down. But we are not knocked out. 10 We always carry around the death of Jesus in our bodies. In that way, the life of Jesus can be shown in our bodies.
We who are alive are always in danger of death because we are serving Jesus. So his life can be shown in our earthly bodies. Death is at work in us. But life is at work in you.
It is written, “I believed, and so I have spoken.”—(Psalm 116:10) With that same spirit of faith we also believe. And we also speak. (I. Corinthians 4:5-18, The Message)

Occasionally I’ll write about ways that Corriente is working with other ministries, churches and individuals to help them Connect, Empower and Transform. I hope those experiences will broaden your own vision for doing Kingdom work in the place where you are or to find a place to do it and get there as soon as possible.

When I was in seminary I had a professor who asked this question – “If Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom, how did we end up with the Church?”

Of course, there are several ways you could unpack that question – several points of view from which it could be asked and answered. There’s a whole sub-discipline within Historical Theology often referred to as Jesus Studies that deals with those kinds of questions.

Just to set the record straight, let me say that I am thoroughly orthodox in that regard. My Christology is best summed up in the words of Thomas when he saw the resurrected Jesus – “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). Jesus is “the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.”

I do not in any way sympathize with or subscribe to the notion that the Deity of Christ was an invention of the church that came after Jesus and that to understand the true message of Jesus we must peel back the Creeds of the Church in order to get to the “real Jesus.” I’ve read Crossan, Spong, Funk, Mack, Borg and others and have found that I much more prefer the company of John, Paul, Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa.

The issue for me is not one of orthodoxy (right belief); it’s one of orthopraxy (right practice). Which raises the stakes considerably.

If Jesus is who He said He is, if the writers of the New Testament got it right, if the later Creeds of the Church did not invent but rather testify to God’s revelation in Jesus, then we have been charged with a great responsibility in rightly applying, living and following that Truth.

But, when one looks at the history of the Church, in terms of how it has or has not been the Body of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, the ongoing incarnation of Jesus for the past 2000 years, you have to admit that we’re not even hitting at the Mendoza Line in terms of the ways we’ve behaved relevant to the message that Jesus preached.

As I’ve tried to understand this dichotomy, I find myself going back to Luke 4:18-19, where Jesus begins his public ministry by reading from Isaiah 61 in the synagogue in Nazareth:

God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!” (The Message)

Think about it, Jesus chose as the starting point for His ministry this text from Isaiah, who is encouraging his fellow Jews who have been exiles but now are returning home to rebuild a city that had been destroyed. Isaiah proclaimed a message of spiritual renewal that would translate into bricks and mortar, because in Isaiah’s vision, a spiritually healthy community would be a community living in a secure and productive city.

But standing behind the Isaiah text is yet another one – Leviticus 25. Isaiah tells those returning from exile that this season of renewal the people are about to enter into is the “year when God will set his people free” (Isaiah 61:2 NIRV) – an allusion to the Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) when liberty would be proclaimed throughout the land, debts would be forgiven, slaves set free and the prisons emptied.

When Jesus stood before the people of his hometown and read Isaiah’s hope for the Jubilee to become reality, He announced that Isaiah’s hope was standing before them, that He was and is the flesh and blood fulfillment of God’s Jubilee Year.

That changes everything.

So, how did we get to where we are today? How did the tangible, culturally transforming, Spirit-filled Gospel of the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed become the individualized, compartmentalized very nearly Gnosticized concept of personal salvation that is so popular among Evangelicals?

Of course, salvation is personal. But it is also corporate. The Gospel of the Kingdom preached by Jesus is not in conflict the Gospel of Justification by Faith preached by Paul. The cross and resurrection were not events unforeseen by God that caused the Kingdom to be delayed and Jesus’ words to be relegated to some future age.

The Church was not an accident, something invented by Paul - it was simply meant to be the means through which the Kingdom that Jesus announced and over which he is Lord would reach from Jerusalem to Judea then to Samaria and ultimately to every nation and people group around the world.

So, how have we done? How has the Church kept up its responsibility to be the conduit of the Kingdom, to proclaim that the crucifixion has not disabled God’s purpose, that God raised Jesus from the dead, that He has “highly exalted him and given him a name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9) and that through Jesus there is forgiveness, rebirth, redemption and liberation – for individuals and communities?

If, as my seminary professor suggested, there is a disconnect between the realized Jubilee of the Kingdom of God and the Church, what can be done to repair the breech?

How would the Church have to change in order to become Kingdom oriented?

How would that sort of change in the Church change the world?

Imagine the possibilities.

Dream out loud – at high volume.

We American Christians are a strange breed.

Every year at Christmas time some from our tribe, even some of our nationally known leaders, get upset because they seem to think Christmas is being taken away from us.

According to some, using the greeting “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” is a sign of the moral collapse of America. The absence of a nativity scene in front of City Hall is interpreted as a sign of persecution – even if the church next to City Hall has a nativity scene with a live Baby Jesus.

I’m suspicious of these annual campaigns to take back Christmas. Like a secular political campaign, they appeal to our irrational fears. And one of the easiest ways to get someone to reach for their wallet is to make them think there’s something or someone to be afraid of. People will send money to preachers and politicians if they think it will make the fear go away.

Just as retail sales make a huge spike each year from Thanksgiving to Christmas, so does the giving to many ministries that create an annual fear fest over the supposedly soon-to-be lost freedom of American Christians.

Personally, I’m not concerned about Christmas. While I do believe America is in a state of moral decline, I don’t buy the idea that if the school choir at my kids’ elementary school doesn’t sing Joy to the World at the PTA meeting just before the “Winter Break” that our religious freedom is somehow threatened.

If Christians in America really want to get upset about a holiday being taken away, may I suggest that we take it to the streets because of the fact that millions of households across America have done away with the celebration of Father’s Day.

The demise of Father’s Day didn’t happen as the result of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Neither the ACLU nor the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have conspired to topple this once sacred day.

We’ve done it to ourselves.

37% of all US children born are born to single moms
60% of all US children will reach their 18th birthday without their biological parents still married
85% of those kids from broken homes will not live with their fathers
70% of African-American children are born out of wedlock
50% of Hispanic children are born out of wedlock
63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes
85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes
80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes
75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes
24.7 million US children live absent of their biological father

The city where I live, San Antonio, TX, leads the nation in girls between the ages of 13 and 17 giving birth. Citywide, we’re over twice the national average for out of wedlock births and in some zip codes we’re three to four times the national average.

But, I have to ask, where is the outrage? How is it that a snowman replacing a nativity scene gets more Christians upset than the fact that there are more African-American men in prison than there are in college and 90% of those incarcerated grew up in a fatherless household?

Fatherless children have a higher probability of infant mortality, premature births, low birth weight, learning disabilities, behavior problems, emotional problems, not finishing high school, drug and alcohol abuse, incarceration, living in subsidized housing and having children out of wedlock – which perpetuates the cycle for yet another generation.

That’s why there are over 40 directives given in scripture regarding the special care and protection for the fatherless. God understands that a fatherless child is at risk in ways that other children aren’t. But most of the words of scripture that instruct us to care for the fatherless were written with the idea that children without fathers would be the rare exception, not the norm that it is for millions of US children. According to scripture, rampant fatherlessness is a sign that society is on the brink of chaos (Exodus 22:24; Lamentations 5:3).

We’re in the midst of a downward spiral, a pandemic of fatherlessness that threatens the social fabric. We’re getting ready to reap the whirlwind and we won’t even know what hit us.

All children who grow up without dads do so with deficits – dad-shaped holes that only a father can fill - but boys are especially impacted by fatherlessness.

In his book To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing up Without a Father, Donald Miller offers this insight on what it feels like to grow up without a dad:

Because I didn’t have a father, I felt there was a club of men I didn’t belong to. I would have never admitted it at the time, but I wanted to belong … I couldn’t have put words to it back then, but I felt it … I felt as though all the men in the world secretly met in a warehouse late at night to talk about man things, to have secret handshakes, to discuss how to throw a football or a baseball, how to catch a fish and know what kind it was … how to look a woman in the eye and tell her she was your woman and that she looks good in that dress and make it so your eyes say you love her but you could survive without her, and how to drive a stick-shift truck without grinding the gears. And then I secretly believed at the end of the meeting they gathered around and reminded each other that under no circumstances was anyone to tell me about these things.

Take Miller’s words to heart, because there are millions of boys all over our country who feel exactly the same way but won’t choose to articulate those feelings with words. In stead, they’ll be acting out in ways that will be destructive to themselves and society.

It’s time for the church of Jesus Christ to admit that we’ve taken our eye off the ball. We’ve allowed ourselves to be distracted by the zero sum game of the culture wars and the culture is going to hell as a result.

It’s time to take back Father’s Day.

If you’d like to find a place to start, here are five links:

Donald Miller’s Belmont Foundation “seeks to effectively respond to the crisis of fatherlessness by equipping the faith community to provide life long, trust based mentoring relationships with young men in an effort to affect long-term change.”

Big Brothers and Big Sisters is the oldest and largest youth mentoring program in the United States.

Mike Arnold’s Cross Trail Outfitters is doing great work leading boys to Christ and manhood.

Young Lives is a ministry of Young Life that focuses on mentoring teenage moms.

Agape Pregnancy Center and The Pregancy Care Center both provide care and guidance to teenage moms.