This Sunday morning Rebekah Croker (New Life Children’s Leader) preached on the subject of HOPE. The message was entitled Hope, A Living Conversation. The passage referenced was from Hebrews 6:19-20. “We have this HOPE as an anchor for our soul…”

Rebekah challenged New Life Church to HOPE. She lined up children, youth & adults with balloons that spelled out the verse: Hope deferred makes the heart sick… (Proverbs 13:12a). The whole morning was devoted to stirring our hearts to hope again.  

New Life church has been through a season of much disappointment. Disappointment in finances. Disappointment in relationships. Disappointment in leadership. Our hopes as a church for the glorious promises that God has bestowed upon us have remained unrealized. Our hearts have grown sick with disappointment because our hopes have been deferred.

Yet Christian faith is all about HOPE! The world lacks HOPE! We have what the world lacks! Is your heart feeling sick? Do feel your HOPE has been deferred? Then you need more HOPE!

Rebekah exhorted us to HOPE again!

This happened not just with words. There was a HOPE WALL where people wrote their hopes and dreams. Sara Gagnon painted colorful expressions of HOPE on a canvass on the stage. The youth worship team led us in a reprise of Isaiah 61 – a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair… Church youth acted out various stories of HOPE from the Bible including the story of Abraham and God’s promise of Isaac. They built a bridge of HOPE with chairs. The Master’s Commission Young Adults group from the USA did a sketch on the Christian HOPE!

Nadira Deschner joined Rebekah to tag team the preach reading Biblical passages concerning HOPE! Romans 4:18;Romans 5:1-5; and Romans 8:24-25. (For more reading see:  Romans 15:4; Colossians 1:5; and 1 Peter 3:15). (Roll over the texts with your mouse to see the verses).  Nadira showed us painting of a morning sunrise she had done. On it were written the words of Jeremiah from Lamentations 3:21-23 - Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

Rebekah challenged us to HOPE in God and not in HORSES! Horses are a VAIN HOPE!  Proverbs 33:17. Horses are all those things we tend to hope in such as technology, money, real estate, friends, family, etc..  These are vain hopes, since it is only God who can truly save. He did that by sending Jesus and through his death he has made a way for us to enter his presence.

So in Jesus we have a new and living hope! Even if there is no reason to HOPE we can HOPE against hope because Jesus has opened up the way to GOD!

In conclusion, the whole morning was a kaleidoscope of intergenerational expressions of HOPE. It was full of colour, sound, and imagination from all of the generations. It was not simply a conversation on HOPE.  It was HOPE embodied in music, art, drama and visual demonstration.

Thank you Rebekah for calling us back to HOPE! As Rebekeh exhorted us: New Life church, IT IS TIME TO HOPE AGAIN!

This message stirred much passion in me concerning HOPE! Thus it is fitting that I relaunch this Blog.

One drawback, though, was the absence of the HOPE OF RESURRECTION. I may have missed it but I did not hear it mentioned. I think this is a common problem with us Charismatics. We get the part in the gospel about Jesus, signs, wonders, the cross and heaven, but we don’t seem to get the resurrection.

It is often tagged on as a post script to the story we tell. I see this often in YWAM. Whenever the good news is shared with groups, the truncated version of the gospel often leaves the resurrection out.

That is too bad, because when you really boil it all down, the exciting about Christianity, even more than forgiveness of sin, even more than access to God’s presence, even more than heaven, is the HOPE of a RESURRECTION to life eternal in a new creation.

Contrary to popular opinion we do not spend eternity in disembodied heaven but in a new material reality with new physical bodies that will enjoy new heavens and a new earth. (Revelation 21). That is why Jesus taught us to pray, your kingdom come and your will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:9-10;)

I have written about that already in this article When Heaven Invades Earth Twenty Four Seven! Grounding the Charismatic Hope in the Resurrection.

Now let the conversation on HOPE at New Life begin.

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I have life matters that occupy my time right now. Please stay tuned. I will be back at writing this blog soon.   more »

Watch for the book mentioned in this article. There is such a thing as a text for Pentecostal Theology after all!

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The StarPhoenix
10 Mar 2007

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Ecstatic spirit of Pentecostalism gaining strength in Canada
CanWest News Service

OTTAWA — The first time Michael Wilkinson saw Pentecostals at worship, he was a teenager, dragged along by his parents. “These people are all crazy,” he came away thinking. “I’m not ever going back.”

But then the kids in the youth group asked him to some concerts. The music was terrific and the teens were fun, not losers or hopeless squares. “You can be cool and go to church,” he thought.

Now 41, he is both Pentecostal and associate professor of sociology specializing in Pentecostalism at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C.

He maintains the Canadian Pentecostal Research Network and is compiling a study of Canadian Pentecostals, one of the first books of its kind. His colleagues are pressing him to finish so their graduate students can use it to undertake studies of their own.

Canada has about 4.4 million renewalists — some 500,000 classical Pentecostals, members of churches developed in the early 1900s; 2.5 million charismatics, people who are “spirit filled” but stay within their denomination; and about 1.3 million neocharismatics, or neo-Pentecostals, a movement that began 10 to 20 years ago among people who want to steer clear of some of the strictures of traditional churches.

Renewalists don’t all share the same beliefs or worship practices, but they are united by their experience of God — “an intense, direct and overwhelming spiritual experience centred in the Holy Spirit,” says Wilkinson, quoting from Frank Macchia’s Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology, one of several new books coming out on the subject.

The Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements says Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity is characterized by “exuberant worship; an emphasis on subjective religious experience and spiritual gifts; claims of supernatural miracles, signs and wonders — including a language of spirituality (as it is experienced), rather than a theology; and a mystical ‘life in the Spirit’ by which they daily live out the will of God.”

Psychology might describe it as magical thinking. Political science or sociology might see it as “enchantment,” a worldview that embraces wonder, belittled in western civilization but very much alive in other countries.

Renewal resides at the mystical end of the religious spectrum and much of it is an outright mystery, which is just fine with its adherents. For them, reason has its limits.

As one renewalist minister describes it, “When philosophers and theologians get to do enough thinking or talking, they eventually run themselves in a circle. . . . They’ve bumped their brains on the ceiling of a mystery, but don’t want to admit it, so they keep talking.”

Probably the most mysterious are the “gifts” of speaking in tongues, prophecy, deliverance and healing, and the signs and wonders, or modern-day miracles, “a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God,” according to Wilkinson.

Evangelicals are also turbo-charged in their worship but they believe the miracles in the Bible were intended simply to help the Apostles get the church started. Most don’t believe they are available to believers today. Pentecostals do.

Since Pentecostals take their name from a passage in the Bible in which the Holy Spirit imbues the apostles with special gifts and powers, their outlook is hardly surprising.

Tags: Pentecostalism, worship, Pentecostal, sociology, Canadian, renewal, charismatic, spirit+filled, Holy+Spirit, Christianity, supernatural, miracles, signs, wonders, tongues, healing, kingdom, God, Evangelicals

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No one likes a back seat driver least of all one criticizes your driving style loudly and in public. I confess I am guilty of backseat driving. In my last post (Establishing Trust Through Emotionally Healthy Leadership), I started out by speaking up about being an emotionally healthy church but I ended it with back seat driving comments for church leadership. That was not appropriate. I am grateful to those on the Leadership team who gently pointed it out to me. I apologize and ask for forgiveness.

Leadership has a hard enough job sorting through all the pastoral and governance concerns to worry about me telling them how they ought to run the church. They are the ones with the responsibility not me, so it was fair for a number of them to express their concerns and feelings about my directive comments. I should have addressed these comments directly to them rather than posting them at the end of my blog.

The problem with doing that in a blog on the Internet is that once you say something it immediately becomes public property and you can't really undo what you did.

So I need to make it a part of the public record that I was wrong to be critical or directive in my writing about transitions at our church. I stand behind and pray for the leadership and I wish them well as they navigate through some difficult waters.

Apologizing publicly when you have screwed up is actually one of the things recommended by Peter Scazzero in his book The Emotionally Healthy Church. It is a part of his chapter on Living in Brokenness and Vulnerability.

However, I don't recommend screwing up just so you can learn to be broken about it. Better to avoid the screw up! So one of my new year's resolution for 2007 is no more back seat driving! Feel free to point it out when you think I am doing it!

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This article continues my series on the book The Emotionally Healthy Church as it relates to my church experience at New Life Church Kelowna. (For previous articles see I, II). In Chapter Two Peter Scazzero discovers something desperately wrong in the way churches conduct themselves emotionally.  

It has to do with consistency. Specifically, consistency between espoused values and values in practice. He begins his chapter retelling the plot of the movie The Apostle, It was written and directed by Robert Duvall who also plays the main character, Sonny.

"Sonny, like most of us, is a complex individual. He is zealous, committed Christian whom we admire, and yet he is also terribly inconsistent. Most painful, perhaps, is his lack of awareness of the harm that will come from appearing to be more than he really is. In some ways he is an imposter. He easily compartmentalizes his faith and spirituality from the totality of his humanity. Most of us in Christian leadership and in the church can relate to more about him than we like to admit." (p. 39)

Scazzero then recounts story after story of real life Christian leaders who have lived inconsistent Christian lives, beginning with Bob Pierce (see CT article here), the founder of World Vision, who saw great things in his ministry overseas but ended up alienated from his family.

The number one issue that erodes trust in leadership is inconsistency. Scazzero believes that this inconsistency results from a faulty model of Christian discipleship that neglects to form the emotional aspect of spiritual maturity for church leaders. That is, leaders are unable to connect with their emotional side and be transparent about those emotions in a healthy manner.

After writing the recent articles I received an e mail from a person who has been attending New Life and is stuck in the emotional pain surrounding the things we have been going through as a church. The person asks "How can I trust when their (leaders) words and actions are so different?"

This is the central question of Peter Scazzero's book. It is about establishing trust in relationships. Whether or not it is true that leaders actions and words are different, there is often a perception in those who follow leaders that there is an inconsistency between espoused values and values in practice. Bringing actions and words into alignment both in reality and in the perception of church members is a very important responsibility of leadership. It is a responsibility that requires an emotionally healthy response because it may require leaders to admit that some actions were not in line with the core values of the church and it is through admitting those errors and being humble about them that trust can be re-established and strengthened. 

In another email that I received from one of the leaders at New Life I was asked, "Mike, don't you trust leadership?" My answer is that I trust the heart of my leaders that they sincerely desire to do what is right. That is part of the covenantal  care I have committed to at New Life.  However, no leaders are perfect, even those who guide New Life! So while I trust the heart of leadership, I do not trust that they are infallible.

For trust to grow in me and in those who were wounded by leaderships actions, there needs to be an emotionally healthy response by leadership to the concerns and questions that have been raised and that remain outstanding, otherwise trust in leadership will erode.

(UPDATED, Friday, January 5th, 2007.

I deleted four paragraphs of "backseat driving" comments. See my apology here.).

By the way Scazzero has a website for resources on being an Emotionally Healthy Church. You can read chapter one of his book here. You can take a measure of your emotional health by answering these questions here.

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