Following the right person leads us to the right places. @theGatheringNow

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Living in the airport

Oct 20, 2011 9:47 am by Paul Jenkins in Evangelism, The Gathering

Well, here I go. Im at the airport here in Charlotte waiting to step on a plane for Chicago which will put me on a plane for Delhi, India. The thing about airports is that they arent the type of place where people stay. Theyre either coming or going. There are tearful embraces, some for sad goodbyes and others for joyful hellos. But no one moves here and lives here. Airports arent destinations. Theyre gateways.

We arent citizens of this planet. Were here for a moment, sure, but were headed somewhere else. Dont unpack your bags here, because this isnt your final destination. The question, of course, is where will that be?

In a day on the clock, Ill land at mine for this journey. Ill find myself in another country hearing another language, and Ill begin working on the task Ive been sent for. At some point (for some sooner than later), you and I will find ourselves landing at an eternal destination. A new country that will be our home forever. I know mine is with Jesus, and I pray you do, too.


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So, now what? (or, the post-Rapture post)

May 21, 2011 6:01 pm by Paul Jenkins in American Christianity, Culture, Evangelism

It’s 6:01 EST on May 21, 2011, and I’m still here.  My guess is, so are you, and so is Harold Camping…for now.  But among others, I can think of three things that aren’t: the hope of many who put their faith in a man who was a lying snake, the money that they gave him, and the credibility of the church in the eyes of many who still need Jesus.

Now, it’s time to restore at least 2 of those, and as sad as it is that some people may have lost entire life savings over this garbage about the Rapture happening today, I think the money was the least valuable of the three.  Thankfully, it’s the only one that can’t be recovered.

First, hope has to be restored for those who believed Camping and now find themselves feeling like people on the outside looking in.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12)

They had hope.  Granted, they had hope in a man, and worse than that, a man’s interpretation of the Bible that clouded their own and the years of church tradition.  But the proverb makes no distinction between whether the hope was wrongly or rightly placed, just that it once was and now isn’t.  And when we hope for something and don’t receive it, our hearts – the very core of who we are – grow sick.  I hurt for the numbers of people who are sick right now, and are wondering what comes next.

The best part of this verse for those who have lost hope?  That wonderful, three-lettered word “but.”  If you had put all your faith in an event that didn’t happen, that word means your story isn’t over.  6:01 does not define you. There is still more to be learned, to be seen. There is life to find, and it comes through seeing your longings fulfilled.  My guess is that you long for truth, trust, a shoulder to cry on and arms to hold you tightly as you weather what you feel now. Doubt. Betrayal. Anger. Embarrassment.  In a word, you long for Jesus.

Times like these make me wish that Jesus would really show up and let the hurting see Him for who He is instead of risking it all by letting man distort the image.  Camping distorted it, and if we’re not careful, how we respond now will further distort it.  There is no doubt that restoring credibility in the eyes of an unbelieving world – which now has even more reason to not believe – will be a long road.  But ultimately, it begins and ends with holding up the truth.  I say we start here:

I did not send these prophets, yet they have run with their message; I did not speak to them, yet they have prophesied. But if they had stood in my council, they would have proclaimed my words to my people and would have turned them from their evil ways and from their evil deeds. (Jeremiah 23:21-22)

How do we restore credibility in the eyes of the world and hope to the hearts of the sick? We shut up if we haven’t been with Jesus. We absolutely refuse to speak our agenda over His truth, and we resolve to become a church that says less, but says it with more honesty, authenticity, and compassion.

I believe that this is the church the hurting long to see. A simpler church, a real church, a church full of confidence and power in God’s word.  If we will become that church, I believe we’ll find ourselves saying less to more people than we used to, and we’ll begin to see hope restored in their lives.

So now, let us begin.


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How Katy Perry can make us better Christians

May 5, 2011 8:21 am by Paul Jenkins in American Christianity, Culture, Evangelism, Stupid Things Christians Do

I read an article over on the Fox News website yesterday about Katy Perry that really made me think. Feel free to head over that way and read it, too, and then come back to read my thoughts. Don’t worry. I’ll wait.  I need to make some more coffee anyway.

Welcome back.

Let’s go ahead and get the obvious out of the way first.  Like most parents, I’m sure hers did the best they could.  Some days they got an A in parenting, and others days, well, they didn’t.  That doesn’t make them wrong.  It just makes them parents.  This post isn’t about blaming them, and if Katy Perry did the interview in Vanity Fair to blame them, then she’s missing the point to.  I’m not going to write a column slamming her parents for raising her according to their beliefs.  I just want to open the discussion that challenges some of the beliefs that they may have, and that many Christians do have.

Here are a few that jumped out at me:

Wrong Belief: Change happens outside-in
The Truth: What is in us will come out

Did you catch the part in the article where Katy said she wasn’t allowed to say things like “deviled eggs” or “Dirt Devil?”  I couldn’t read that and think anything other than “bizarre.”  When she mentioned that she didn’t have a childhood because of a very strict upbringing, I don’t think she was exaggerating.  Not be able to say the d-word implies that there were plenty of other things she couldn’t do as well, and when we put the focus on changing our behavior before our heart, we set ourselves up for failure.  ”Fake it until you make it” comes to mind, and while it may sound like a great leadership strategy, it is, at the core, a lie.  Isn’t it?

Our faith is an inside-out faith.  Proverbs 4:20-27 instructs us to put the truth of God’s word in our heart, then to guard our heart, and as a result our speech and steps will change.  Jesus said in Matthew 12:34 that our mouths speak what is in our hearts.  It’s just like a NASCAR restrictor plate.  The presence of that plate doesn’t change the engine, and if you remove it, the true nature of the engine will be revealed.  Pretend all you want.  Dress the part of good Christian, talk the part of righteous believer; I can guarantee you that whenever the restriction is gone (whatever form it takes for you – parents, friends, pastor), your true nature will be revealed.  I mean, Katy Perry isn’t exactly holding back on her words now, is she?

Wrong Belief: The world is bad and will corrupt you
The Truth: Because we’re corrupt, the world is bad

She wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music or read any books other than the Bible, and that usually comes from the belief that what is in the world will get on you if you get too close.  Listen to one bad song with a good beat and you’ll run the risk of tapping your toe to it, which we all know is just the first step towards becoming a serial killer.  Sure, there are plenty of bad things in the world, but when we focus on “them” we forget that our biggest problem is “us.”  Jeremiah 17:9 says that our hearts are deceitful more than anything else and impossible to understand.  Even after salvation, when the Bible teaches that our hearts are made new, there is still so much work for me to do on my own stuff (Philippians 2:12) that I don’t have time to deal with everyone else’s junk.

I love how Mark Driscoll puts it when he says that we need to stop seeing the world as bad people and good people and start seeing it as bad people and Jesus.  Face it, not one of us is as good as we think we are.

Wrong Belief: Our separation from the world must be physical
The Truth: Our greatest connection with the world is often physical

This wrong belief is what leads to Christian clubs, Christian gyms, Christian civic groups, and a ton of non-Christians going to hell. This belief embodies the world that Jesus stepped into.  An Israel that was divided between the religious and the real, and Jesus chose the real.  He didn’t choose to stand on top of a 12-foot platform behind a plexiglass pulpit and scream truth at them, either.  Philippians 2:5-11 describes beautifully what the Gospels re-tell about Jesus: He was God come down to man.  He walked with us, talked with us, laughed and cried with us.  He healed us.  He touched lepers and prostitutes.  The first group had never been touched and the second had never been touched with love and grace.  Jesus’ physical interaction is what paved the way for His spiritual intervention.

It is no different now.  The church has failed the world because we have fled the world.  We can’t meet their needs because we’ve never even seen their needs.

Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, “Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (James 2:15-17)

Is it possible that the greatest evangelistic programs already exist, and that the world has already funded them?  They’re called rec leagues, school clubs, and civic groups.  Maybe we should join them and start rubbing shoulders again with the hurting people in them.  That connection alone could go a long way towards opening a heart to Christ.

Wrong Belief: Questions lead to doubt
The Truth: Questions lead to Jesus

Katy says something that should be a dagger to the heart of all who have placed their faith in Christ. “I’ve always been the kid who’s asked ‘Why?’ In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith. But I was always like … why?”  Did you catch that?  “In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith.”

When did Christianity become a “don’t ask, don’t tell” faith?  When did we decide that it was better to leave the obvious questions unasked?  The day that we decided the faith was really all about us.  The day that we assumed that if we didn’t have the answer, then the questions might reveal us as frauds.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  If the whole of Christianity rests on the foundation of my understanding, then the end of it is inevitable, and will come sooner rather than later.  But it doesn’t rest on me, or on my questions and answers.  It rests on Jesus, and I believe that the more we talk, the more likely we are to find Him.

Paul went to Athens (Acts 17) and he explored their culture and then engaged it.  He spoke with them, asked questions of them, and heard questions from them.  He knew that the more they talked, the closer he could move them to seeing Jesus.

All this leads me to one final wrong belief that must be addressed.  I don’t know if it is a belief that Katy Perry’s parents hold, but I do think it’s one that the majority of believers in America hold.

Wrong Belief: I’ll start when I know more
The Truth: Start and you’ll learn more.

You can already think of people that need you.  They need someone to give them the permission to ask questions, to explore the faith that we hold.  They don’t need an expert; they need a friend.  Most of us hide away from people like that, memorizing Scripture and trying to prepare for the day when we accidentally meet them at Wal-Mart.  We expect the conversation to be more like an interrogation, and so we spend our time cramming to prepare for it like a kid who hasn’t studied all semester would on the night before a final.

But they aren’t tests.  They’re people.  People who are hurting, searching, reaching.  And if we learn from Katy Perry, I think we’ll be better prepared to help them.


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When good news rides a turtle

May 2, 2011 11:26 am by Paul Jenkins in Culture, Evangelism, General Stuff

Obama announces Bin Laden's death

By the time President Obama stood at the podium in the White House and said, “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden,” the American people and the world already knew.  In fact, they’d already been chanting “USA! USA!” at the Phillies-Mets game in Philadelphia for quite some time and doing the same in front of the White House where Obama finally made it “official.” The first cryptic Tweet about the end of Bin Laden had been chirped out at 7:25 pm and by the time Geraldo said, “We’re being told the President will speak in less than 2 minutes” for the last time and the speech actually happened, Twitter was seeing as many as 4,000 Tweets per second about the news.

Apparently, good news travels fast, even when it doesn’t.

It took over an hour for Obama to finally tell us what we already knew (which says a lot about how social media has impacted the delivery of news in our culture, but that’s for another post), and as I watched the Facebook and Twitter feeds, it struck me that what we do while we wait for the “official” announcement says a lot about us.

In that hour, Americans texted their little thumbs to death.  At one point the stands at the baseball game mentioned above turned into a sea of bowed heads as the crowd became more interested in the news feeds on their mobile devices than the game that they had paid to attend.  News channels had put talking heads in front of the cameras and told them to stretch out what they had until the speech started.  For at least one hour, not one person said the words “royal” and “wedding.”  When I got up to go to bed, the B99 asked me what I was doing, and when I told her, she looked at me like I was crazy.  Why wouldn’t I want to hear the President announce the death of Bin Laden?  I sat back down and, like most of you, waited.

As I sat there, I wondered if Geraldo’s mustache was actually growing in real-time on live television.  I wondered if the President’s announcement would seem a little anti-climatic since everyone already knew what he was going to say.  And the longer we waited, the more I actually wondered if some DNA tester was looking at the President and saying, “Nope.  It’s not him.  Sorry.”  I mean, why the delay if the news was so good?

Isn’t that the rub?  When news is good, waiting seems unnecessary, almost cruel.  But if we really believe that what we’re waiting for is, in fact, good news, then the waiting simply increases the watching.  We sit and watch talking heads.  We postpone sleep.  We hit refresh over and over and over again to see the latest feeds.  We stare at a TV screen showing a long, carpeted hall and look for the first hint of a shadow, a shoe, a leg. We watch for movement, and when we finally see him coming, we turn up the volume even though it’s already loud enough, and we listen.

The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise, as some understand slowness.  He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (2 Peter 3:9)

As great as the announcement was last night for our country and the world, there is a far greater announcement coming.  At times it can seem as if the good news is riding a turtle, and yet the important question is, what are we doing while we wait for the “official” announcement signaling the end of a far greater war in the unseen realm?  If we truly believe it to be good news, 2 things will increase: our watching and our telling.  Like the Twitter explosion last night, we’ll find ourselves relentlessly telling anyone who will listen about the victory that is ours, and about how much our King desires it to be theirs, too.  And we’ll watch.  We’ll find our attention constantly turning toward that day, as we stare at a world full of signs pointing down the long hallway of time, watching for a shadow, a movement, any sign of His return.  He will come, and He will bring with Him good news.

What are you doing while you wait?


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Getting Schooled

May 28, 2010 10:05 am by Paul Jenkins in Culture, Evangelism, Evotions, Family

2 Timothy 3:14a
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of…

One day recently, I found myself laying on the floor in Sydney’s room listening as she taught me in her school. There’s not much cuter than watching your seven year-old daughter hold a pointer in one hand while she guides you through a series of questions and answers. She’d point to a map and ask, “What state is this?” I’d answer correctly, of course. Then it was onto the alphabet, and even though she mixed the order up (like any good teacher would), I knew all 26 letters.

Finally, it was the math portion. Simple problems came first. 8+3, 2+1+4, 10+10. I was on fire! Then she smiled a smile that said she was going to really try to stump me, and she said, “One thousand plus 200.” As soon as she said it, she looked at me and grinned. I said, “Ooh, that’s a tough one. Let me think a second.” She waited. I “thought.” When I felt that I’d taken long enough to be convincing, I gave her my answer.

“1,200.”

She just kind of looked at me, like she didn’t quite know what to say. Eventually, she kind of mumbled “that’s right” as if she wasn’t really sure if it was. I pressed her a bit when I smiled and asked if she was sure I’d gotten it right. Knowing she was in a tough spot, her face lit up with that “okay, Dad, you got me” smile that melts me and she laughed when she said, “I don’t know! I haven’t learned that yet!”

Later, I couldn’t get that innocent exchange out of my mind, and it occurred to me that it is eerily similar to the dialogue the church often has with the culture around us. We play as if we have all the answers, but at some point they catch us. They find us asking them questions as if we have the answers, but with a bit of pressing, it becomes painfully obvious that we have asked them to answer questions that we ourselves haven’t even learned the answers to yet.

When Michael Jackson turned 30, Oprah Winfrey asked him, “You’re 30. What do you know for sure?” I don’t remember his answer, because I was too amazed at the simple brilliance of the question, and how the answer is more likely to be a short list versus a long one. And that’s okay, as long as the short list contains the most important answers.

Paul told Timothy to continue in what he had become convinced of. Paul was convinced that nothing could separate him for the love of God (Romans 8:38-39), and I have found that to be a touchstone truth for me, too. I’ve learned through life that I can be convinced that my God will never leave me, that He will never turn His back on me (Hebrews 13:5) and that there is always grace, even if I feel that the sin in my life is too big for it (Romans 5:20).

I’m also convinced that if we would spend more time living out what we know and less time trying to pretend to know everything, that the culture around us would find itself asking us questions about what we’ve learned instead of trying to catch us in what we haven’t.

And who knows? The passion and the honesty in our answers may be what helps them decide to come to school with us.


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