the drum|rob fairbanks

Discernment and my Broken Soul

While enjoying a wonderful break with my family in Seaside, Oregon, I was able to carve out enough time to read Henri Nouwen's perceptive book entitled, Discernment. In the book, he makes several statements regarding how he spent much of his life craving affirmation, attention and acceptance of others.

He had attempted to possess others in the hope of acquiring satisfaction for his souls neediness.

In many ways, this has been my journey. I know it is a soft spot for me because when I don't get what I think "I deserve" I enter into a horrible soul level tumult.

Along the same lines, I have encountered real struggle when I have attached my soul to a community. I, with complete certainty, believe that every person, including me, desperately needs a community to be fully healthy. Nevertheless, if the community occupies too large of a space in one's life, there is a fragility or inordinate exposure. It must not occupy the space only Christ should hold. Nouwen wrote:

"I also learned afresh that friendship requires a constant willingness to forgive each other for not being Christ, and a willingness to ask Christ himself to be the true center of the relationship. When Christ does not mediate a friendship, that relationship easily becomes demanding, manipulating, and oppressive and fails to offer the other the space to grow." (Discernment, p. 75) 

This became altogether evident in my experience with the church I formerly led, particularly upon the final stages of separation. The moment that demonstrated the nadir was the “reconciliation meetings” with the person who was my successor. Besides being poorly arranged, it also provided a clear reality of an over-reliance on the community. I needed from the community more than was possible or what should have been expected. It manifested in my need for acknowledgment and affirmation and in the apparent injuries to the next pastor and his spouse.

The meeting, from my perspective, was ill-fated from the beginning, mostly because of my injury and immaturity.

The moment of darkness came when the mediator finally realized, though I had led the community for nearly 20 years, I was alone in the room. I literally felt like something broke inside of me, that which in many ways I am still healing from years later...

I was expecting something from a group of people that for a variety of reasons was an impossibility...something that exposed in me an expectation that only Jesus could meet.

They tried, at least that is what I cling too…to navigate the complexity of hurt and separation, but at the end of the day it was not to be sorted. I still carry with me the awful sadness of the experience. I hope I can find (discern) the balance of commitment and connection, without enmeshment that is always the enemy of true community.

The thing on my end is, I held too tightly to something that never belonged to me. Though difficult, I need to employ the Ignatian discipline of “detachment!” It is the need to hold all things loosely. God can take and give, and it should be my posture to hold all things passionately, yet loosely (a tough proposition).

Two things I know: Nouwen, through his writings, continues to be one of my most trusted mentors, and I sadly held my former role too possessively.

r

Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier

Over the last couple of months I’ve had the privilege of reading the book “Prodigal Christianity” with a group of my friends here in Spokane. All of them are good thinkers and we had a wonderful time processing the ideas by Dave Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw. 

The book is really an attempt to locate a way forward that is truly prodigal in today's Christianity, a third way if you will. A writing device the authors employed is a cyclical juxtaposition between a Neo-Reform perspective of Christianity (Piper, Keller, et al) and a more “Emergent” version (McLaren and Jones). Honestly, a device I am not entirely thrilled with and I would suspect the authors represented in the book probably were not wild about either. Nonetheless, while looking at both of these poled perspectives they seek to mine out an alternative way for the church to move forward in the undulating social challenges of Western society.

The authors capably lay out a progression of ideas tethered to the idea of Barth’s “Far Country.” They move from a theological orientation or baseline to the more practical issues such as homosexuality and social justice (both chapters are probably worth the price of the book), both I deeply appreciated. They refer to “Signposts” that assist us to navigate both the church and “powder keg” issues we currently face as Christians in the U.S.

As far as full disclosure, I must say that I've appreciated Dave Fitch’s ideas before I read this book (The Great Giveaway) and am a causal acquaintance of both authors. I have great appreciation and admiration for both of them. You can locate both men’s personal blogs at…Fitch - Reclaiming Mission & Holsclaw - Into the Far Country

One of the key elements of the book for me was the nuanced challenge to be present in every situation trusting God is there before us, an idea often called prevenience. I honestly think if each Christian person I know could embrace the idea that they are expounding it would change Christianity. I know that sounds like a stretch, but I truly beleive it. In Signpost #2, the missio Dei, Fitch vulnerably writes about learning how to pray for his neighbors;

"I had in mind that this meant to pray for my friends to somehow see their need for God's forgiveness and that I would have an opportunity to give them the answer: the gospel of being forgiven from sin. The friend challenging me said, 'No, God is already working there, in each person's life. Just pray that you will have eyes to see what God is doing so you can participate with a word, or a prayer, with laughter, or a tear.'  If the Triune God is already in mission, then I need to see the world in which I regularly walk as the arenas of the Spirit – places imbued with the presence of God. This was a fundamental shift. It changed the way I walked into every space of my life. Missio Dei means that God is already at work in our lives and the lives of all around us."

The other bit that I found quite significant about the book is the author's insistence that these issues that all of us face must be worked out in a local context, the local church. All of the jockeying for influence on the net or in celebrity Christianity is doing nothing more than exacerbating the problems that we have. These issues must be worked out with real people, in real time, in a real location. I could not concur more.

In summary, I would recommend this book with great enthusiasm to anyone trying to navigate the nuances of what it means to live life on mission in a postmodern context. Both Fitch and Holsclaw have grasped the idea that being a Christian today isn't about reactivity or in finding yourself in some sort of theological entrenchment, but in moving  into the “far country,” being prodigal in a nonreactive, loving, open…local way.

r

Through the Lens of People

I see the world through the lens of people. 

I love nature with its grandeur. At times when watching a sunset or breakers crashing ashore my breath is taken away. I also love cities. I have literally been in a lifelong love affair with cities. I love walking them. I love listening to them. The city holds complexity and vibrancy; they encompass light and darkness, life and death. It is difficult imagining wearying of them.

But both are mere subplots in my life for my love for people. I must admit a perpetual enchantment with people, friends and strangers. I'm captured with each person’s diversity and one-of-a-kind uniqueness. I marvel when I see or discover what motivates others. Each time I am with a group of friends, I begin to inch closer to the compelling future depiction of what the Bible calls “the new heaven and new earth.” If it isn’t like that, it should be.

I suppose that is why I like pastoring so much. I get the tremendous opportunity of partnering with people on their life journey.  Whether sitting with a young single woman as she describes her aloneness, through tears or smoking a cigar with a group of men “yukking it up” like adolescents or sitting with someone as they breath their last. All of these and more are elegantly sacramental and feel like a beautiful life dance that leaves me whispering prayers of gratefulness.

To be candid though, this love affair stuff does bump up against certain things, such as reality. See, I am also a hopeless dreamer/romantic. That means that there is an inescapable collision looming, and my love affair with people is not excluded from the dust up. I call this the romance/reality collision. See, I am curious with virtually everyone I meet. In my mind I think each new acquaintance is one of the most amazing humans ever. Truth be told, theologically at least, they are! In hard reality though, they’re just like me… broken which has a lovely side to it, but also can be incredibly emotionally taxing. When coming face-to-face with this challenge the natural tendency is to retract or create a personal safe zone. That means you begin to create distance or establish boundaries. 

This, however, is precisely when love conquers. It must conquer! Even though I am  semi-proficient at interpersonal engagement, my particular proclivity toward others can become paper-thin. Over time, however, I've come to understand and deeply appreciate that it is in the collision and the challenge that true community is exposed as real or whimsical and is potentially thickened, crafted into a love poem. The many lines of this poem are: long-suffering and endurance, honesty and vulnerability, confession and forgiveness, admiration and mutual respect, grace and mercy, tears and laughter that are both impulsive and lasting. If these encounters with others can holdfast, move toward rather than away from the “other,” I am convinced they provide a hallowed space for and a demonstration of what life at it's very finest can be. 

It is a lens I want to see the world through, held in the tension of curiosity to engage and resolve to stay.

r

Church Planting in Real Time

I've been involved in church planting for a long time now. Practically my whole adult life. The first church that I planted was 26 years ago. It was a massive learning experience and an abysmal failure. We closed it with a sad groan after 3 arduous years. I don’t know if you remember the CD some years ago by Lauren Hill, but it was entitled, “The Miseducation of Lauren Hill.”  In a very real sense, my first church planting experience could’ve been given a similar title – The Re-Education of Rob Fairbanks. For the first two or three years of pastoring prior to launching out in the church plant, I found my tutelage in the “Church Growth Movement.” It was an inebriating experience. As a voracious learning, I drank long, hard and often. With my competitive orientation, the “by the numbers” approach to a growing a large church became a drug of sorts, which deeply confused my motivation for planting.  I have written about that wonderful/painful progression elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say that I needed breaking (which happened) and re-educating (which I am still doing almost 30 years later).

The second church that I planted was in 1991, 22 years ago (New Community). I went on to pastor that church for close to 20 years.  To say that it was an easy experience would be to lie, but the community of people that eventually emerged ended up being a beautiful and fruitful symbol of what church could be in a west coast city of the U.S.

Running parallel with both of those experiences I have had, in varying degrees, the privilege of assisting in planting eight other churches.

For the last four years I've been leading an organization with a stated purpose that is exclusively church planting. Its mission statement reads: “The mission of Christian Associates is to establish churches who follow Jesus in transforming their world.” I got the chance to drop in on communities from North and Latin America, through most of Europe, all the way to Russia. It was an exhilarating experience. (Link to Christian Associates)

Now, at 54, I'm embarking on a new church-planting venture. Some have wondered about my sanity. Heck, I've wondered about my sanity. I've always said that church planting is a young man's sport. The church is called Immanuel Church and is in Spokane, WA. While I have a veritable lifetime of experience in church planting, I find that moving back onto the ground as a practitioner brings about many challenges that I simply don't have pithy answers for (I am finding that it is much easier to be a strategist when you don’t have to actually put it into practice - :-/). I am a bit of novice all over again. Well, I don't want to suggest that I don’t have any answers. I do have a general idea of how to go about this and a functional progression in mind of how church planting happens best in Western culture. Perhaps I will talk little bit about that in future blogs but it is my intention to travel along those guidelines that I have, along with others, discovered over the last 27 years.

Some have wondered if I will utilize methodologies for church planting such as an "attractional" approach or simply planting a "worship service" as I begin this new project. Seems like odd wonderings. If I did, it would be the first time. We have always operated out of a decentralized approach where the "gathered" community was responsive to what the church was doing in the world...even before there was "missional" language to describe it.

I guess the only thing I can promise is:

• I'll try not to be stupid regarding things I should already know.
• I will attempt to stay in a humble, learning posture.
• I will seek to honestly travel along the pathway of my personal convictions about how I believe mission happens.
• I will seek as much as possible to follow sensitively where I perceive the Holy Spirit is leading.
• and all 4 of those will happen within a community of real people who are trying to live out the Gospel of the Kingdom in a particular context.

Is that enough?

I hope so. I can't think of anything else besides that as a way forward.

Peace,

r

Listen Then Act

“Do not have your concert first, and then tune your instrument afterwards. Begin the day with the Word of God and prayer, and get first of all into harmony with Him.” -Hudson Taylor

“But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” (Lk. 5:16)

I think the word “often” is there for a reason.

Catholic theologian and mystic Thomas Merton writes, “My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond.” What a unique and fantastic approach to salvation and communication.

For Merton, the goal of life is to listen to God and then act. Not just in his communication with God. His goal in life! Listen then act.

Just as Jesus did, we ought to listen to God and then launch into his mission, wherever that takes us. An yet, even after we’ve jumped into the mission we ought to pray more, we ought to pray often just as Jesus did for God is moving.

We make millions of decisions each day. (You’re making one right now by continuing to read this!) How many of them do you ask God to be a part of?

Listen then act. It will change everything. (Sounds like Jesus doesn’t it…)

Phil 

Slandering the world & the Christian name

    When introducing yourself as a Christian you may sometimes be greeted in a strange manner. Some people assume that being Christian also means you are an extremist. This is because some of the only interactions they may have had with a “Christian” is someone yelling about God's wrath, or picketing on a street corner. They think we all abide to some strict controlling cultist style life. However we know this to be false. We must do our best to correct this misled view of our collective group of believers. Religious extremists, cultists, and hate mongering groups are destroying the good name of Christ, by standing behind it while they speak nothing of the love and grace of God.

    One such group would be the Westboro Baptist Church, who interestingly enough has no association with the Baptist Church, nor should it even be considered a church. This particular gathering of beings is completely misled by their leader, and believe themselves to be spreading the word of God. This word however, is that God hates pretty much everyone, that he is destroying and will continue to destroy the world and everyone who does not agree with him. The list of people the WBC claims God hates consists of: Homosexuals, Transsexuals, Military, Muslims, Obama, Police, Government, Immigrants, and many more.

    While we would all very much enjoy to shut this group up permanently, our response to them must not be one of equal disprovable as they preach. That would be fueling their fire, as much as it pains me to say, we must react to them in a loving nature, kill them with kindness, in order to prove them wrong. 

Joshua

Hugging Jesus

    I had a dream when I was child that I will never forget. I was walking on lush, green grass when upon looking up there stretched a perfect, blue expanse of sky like I had never seen before.  Then I saw a man walking towards me, I knew it was Jesus.  At this point I got pretty excited, understandably!  I started running as fast as I could to reach Him, and He started running towards me.  He knelt down to me and said a simple “I love you very much” and then He hugged me.  I don’t remember His face, only His eyes.  They were dark and beautiful, telling of everything He is-Savior, healer, lover of our souls, funny, strong, man, God, King, the list goes on and on and on.  When I looked in His eyes I felt stronger and taller but at the same time a complete vulnerability, that my heart was wide open.  What surprises me about this, looking back years later, is that it was not kindness in Jesus’s eyes that I saw.  Instead, I stared back at a fierce, passionate love that so far extends the kindness which we have been conditioned to expect from our white, blue eye, brown hair-with-a middle part Jesus.  What a one dimensional view of His personality!  I woke up stunned and incredibly loved, feeling an unexplainable peace and joy.

    This world does not need any more of these scenarios depicting either a “white, middle-class, nice Jesus” or a “white, middle-class, unforgiving Jesus.”  What is needed is the “wild terrifying, fascinating, dangerous, Middle-Eastern Jesus” (Michael Frost).  Why would I expect a tame, predictable Savior, or one who is “safe?...Who said anything about safe? Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” (C.S. Lewis)   I am tired of trying to be ‘safe’ in the way I do church and life for that matter.  I want to be all in, to be a part of this awesome Body of Christ, to love the Church, to kill the institution, to dream. To love furiously, with a reckless abandon without a thought of self-preservation.  To be about the Church, we must first be about Jesus and who He truly is, allowing Him in to compel us and change us so that we can further the Kingdom in awesome and radical ways.

Jamie

I know who you are

My mom has had cancer for almost five years.  She prays that she will live to see her three daughters get married.  Last summer, the first one of us daughters had her wedding in our front yard.  My mom wept: It was like God was giving back, gift-wrapped, her deepest desire that she had surrendered fully to Him.

 

One of our friends who had been battling brain cancer died last week, leaving her two sons without a parent.  One of her sons has Asperger’s syndrome and will need to live with and be cared for by her other son.  She told me once her prayer to see her first grandbaby…God didn’t grant her request.

I don’t know why God hasn’t healed my mom from cancer, and I certainly don’t understand why He would take this mother away from her young sons, never realizing her dream of seeing a grandbaby

Yet “sometimes the only way to understand is fall on your knees and say you don’t…Because God knows sometimes there is suffering beyond our knowing.

When we want to know answers, God simply wants us to know Him.

The answer to our suffering is so incomprehensible that it has to be incarnated — the Word must come to us as flesh…He came – because in all our pain, we don’t want some answers like we want a Someone”

                ~Ann Voscamp.

J.J. Heller echoes this belief in her song lyrics: “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I know who you are.”

Yet again, we hear the reverberations of this faith in the powerful words of Oswald Chambers: "Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

This I know with all my heart: The character of God is trustworthy and steadfast.

                And I know He knows our pain: He loved enough to lose a child so we could live.

“Since the children have flesh and blood,
[I] too shared in their humanity –

so that by [my] death, [I] might break the power of him who holds the power of death—
that is, the devil—

and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”

~Hebrews 2:14-15 

“There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.” ~ Corrie Ten Boom

Jessica

Thankful

Today as I sit in my house in Portland, sipping coffee, and listening to the sweet sound of rain fall on the ground outside, I am thrust into waves of peace. I am reflecting on a month of learning, laughter, increased friendship, sorrow, and deep joy. The past three weeks I got to spend listening to amazing classmates (who I now consider friends) discuss and grow in what it means to be the church. I again learned that there is no perfect church, mostly because there is no perfect person. And in my most vulnerable moments, I have to remind myself that the church is people. Beautiful, broken, alive, and challenging people. 

We read the Gospel and understand maybe a tenth of what Jesus was trying to teach and model to us. Reading through Mark 10 and 11 a few minutes ago, I am in awe of how little I seek the Kingdom of God and instead seek the opinion of the world. How often do I stop and listen? How little do I remind myself that joy is a gift and a choice? How terrible am I at thinking of myself as a little child, hopeful that God redeems and saves? How often do I care more for my possessions than I do for my present relationship with God? 

All of these questions I examined this past term and found that there is no greater answer than the person of Christ. And for me, that begins by being thankful and being disciplined enough to listen wholeheartedly to God. So today, I don’t have any huge theological answers to how the church should function better, serve God more, or be wholly united. But I am able to live into the posture of being thankful. Thankful for a class who tested me, encouraged me, and put up with me. Thankful for a Creator who is infinitely more able and loving than I. 

Thankful.

Katherine

Move It! ‘Cause you really ‘ought to

    There is something heartfelt and immediately piercing about praising God with
movement. There is a part of ourselves, our physicality, that we have neglected in our
worship. And because of it we have lost touch with our emotional souls; our movement
and our emotions are intricately linked. It is hard to lie and keep the world out when you
are engaged in authentic movement. I have found that some of my most honest and
vulnerable moments have been when I have used movement as a form of worship.
    Our bodies, our movements, I think, are that last piece in our worship; the piece
that connects it all together. I cannot express how freeing it is to use dance and
movement to pray and worship God, and at the same time, I cannot express how hard it
was to get to that place. It is not natural for us to be open and vulnerable with each
other. It is not natural to be uninhibited in our emotion and movement. So we have
learned to worship unnaturally: keeping everything inside locked up tight. But I don’t
think God wants us to worship only with our voices; I think we glorify Him most when we
are authentic and honest with each other. And I think that we could do that better if we
all learned to move a little more; to dance a little more. David danced, after all, as did
Jesus. So why can’t we?

Zach