JDGreear.com

Starbucks on Sundays

I read somewhere recently (and since I can't remember where I got it from, I can assume that it's orignial with me :)) that Starbucks' success came from taking  an ordinary product (coffee) and creating an extraordinary experience. People pay top-dollar for that extraordinary experience, even though their coffee, according to Consumer Reports, is not that hot (ranked #12!).

How tragic, then, that we Christians have taken an extraordinary "product," i.e. the Gospel, and created a rather "ordinary" experience of it at our churches.

This is the rationale behind our Sunday morning experience at the Summit. We want people, from the parking lot until the last song, to have an extraordinary experience. It's not that we think the Gospel needs "hype," it's just that we think that our friendliness, our service, our quality-level, and the environment we create should match the "quality" of the Gospel. Mediocre anything... sermon, music, environment, etc... tells a LIE about the quality of the Gospel.

So, a word of thanks to all our volunteers who make Sunday mornings so extraordinary at the Summit. Sure, our services are only an "event," and one designed to empower you to live out Christian discipleship the rest of the week. But our Sunday morning services a VERY important testimony to the Gospel. Thanks, Summit volunteers, for adorning the Gospel for our community each Sunday morning.

The Absurdity of Seminary 'Spiritual Formation' Classes

It seems that I'm hearing more and more about "spiritual formation" classes in seminaries and divinity schools these days. The question begging to be asked is, "How can spiritual formation not be coming out of the Biblical exegesis, systematic theology, pastoral ministry, and church history courses?" Have we so divorced those subjects from worship and devotion that they are simply lifeless academic exercises, and so we must add in spiritual formation later? What are we teaching people about God at these divinity schools?

I'm not saying that many of these schools don't NEED spiritual formation classes, I'm bemoaning the fact that their Christian theology classes are so Godless that they need to supplement the study of God with mystical techniques from other traditions so that students can get a spiritual "fix." How can our study of God's word be so dead that we need to turn to other religions to be spiritual?

John Piper touched on this topic in a paper written quite a wile ago. He quoted J. Gresham Machen, who recounted his study the German theologian Wilhelm Hermann with these words:

My chief feeling with reference to him is already one of the deepest reverence. . . . I have been thrown all into confusion by what he says - so much deeper is his devotion to Christ than anything I have known in myself during the past few years. . . . He believes that Jesus is the one thing in all the world that inspires absolute confidence, and an absolute, joyful subjection; that through Jesus we come into communion with the living God and are made free from the world. . . . His trust in Christ is (practically, if anything, even more truly than theoretically) unbounded.

For Machen, studying the word in the Greek Bible produced Spirit-filled spiritual formation.

It's like when people distinguish "worship" at church from the preaching... i.e. "I like it when the church does most of the worship after the preaching." Why doesn't our preaching take people so deeply into the heart of God that people worship during it?

Mark Driscoll and Handling Criticism

Mark said something to me that I've never quite heard put the way he put it. He referred to a number of mentors in his life who had turned on him or disappointed him. He said that he used to be devastated when it happened, feeling like a significant part of his own ministry was crashing. He said that now, however, he looks at mentors as people who put "building bricks" into his life. He's gotten many such bricks from many different people over the years. Some of those people have turned on him since, but he is still eternally grateful to them for the bricks they laid into his life. It made me realize that JESUS is the only mentor and master builder who never disappoints, and HE uses people in our lives who will sometimes fail us. But the valuable things we got from them were really from Him, so we don't have to despair when they fail us.

Some of Mark's best bricks, he said, have come from his critics. They threw their brick at him, and after recovering from the initial sting of it, he picked the brick up and incorporated it into his wall.

Pretty helpful analogy, I think.

At any rate, hope you've enjoyed these few posts about my interaction with Driscoll. I'm grateful for him as a pastor, leader and friend. I believe my own ministry is much richer now for his in my life.

Mark Driscoll and the Emerging Church, part 2

Here are the free downloads of the Convergent conference and here and here are a couple of great articles about it with clarification on Driscoll's criticism of B. McLaren, R. Bell, etc.

One of the most interesting things about Mark Driscoll was his love of theology. He considers himself in the "New Reformed" movement, which, as I mentioned in the last post, differs from the old Reformed in that a) they are nice; b) they look at lost people compassionately as individuals who need Christ and not just kindling; and c) they raise their hands in worship to songs, and not just songs on the cutting edge of the 18th century.

He is a ravenous reader, owning close to 5000 books and talks easily about any number of subjects. When it comes to the union of culture and theology, he is as knowledgable as anyone I've ever met. He doesn't yet have a completed seminary degree (showing you don't need one to know God, reach people, and grow deeply) but he is working toward one (showing that he values study  and learning).

He told me that he has become friends with a number of the most famous "megachurch" pastors... many of whom are not really known for depth. He named a number of them who have asked him to help them develop that part of their ministry... for books to read, etc. He said that most of them are turned off from "doctrinally deep" ministries because they don't seem to reach people and criticize those who are. Mark said that rather than just using these guys as targets, some of the more doctrinally-gifted pastors might offer to come alongside these megachurch guys so that they might learn from each other.

Mark is one of the few in the country who embody both theological richness and evangelistic effectiveness, like a Charles Spurgeon. May his tribe increase. It seems to me that we so desperately need in this country a group of men and women who can readily apply the Gospel to the the massive cultural shifts and societal idolatries while being effective with and accessible to everyone... who can build "great" churches in terms of size and doctrinal fidelity.

Tomorrow I'll post some things about he handles criticism that I found intriguing...

...still I love technology... but not as much as I love you...

Week 1 of our Brier Creek campus went well, with the glaring exception that the new video connection between that campus and our Cole Mill campus was not working properly, making for a very choppy video experience. They said it was kind of like I was Max Headroom (any 80's people out there... M-M-My name is Max Head-d-d-d-d-room?). There is a part (so I hear) that fixes that (it kind of acts like an backup anti-skipping mechanism and some other technical mumbo jumbo I don't quite understand), and Verizon had told us on Friday that it had not come in. I punched the annoying guy with the dark glasses that does the Verizon commercials in the gut over that. He said it will be here this week.

Other than that, it was a great day. (Of course, for people at Cole Mill that's like saying, "Other than your husband's incident, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?")

Needless to say we are devoting our full attention to it. I looked in the mirror and gave "video preacher" a stern reprimand and he promises to do better. For those of you at Cole Mill that hung in there this week (well over 400 of you!) thanks so much. We'll get it taken care of.

If the subject line of this post confused you, go back and review your Napoleon Dynamite notes...

I'll pick up on the Driscoll stuff tomorrow...

Mark Driscoll on the Emerging Church, pt 1

It's been my habit when I have a chance to interact with somebody I think you'll find interesting to jot down a few blog notes. This past week I had a chance to spend several hours with the colorful and controversial Mark Driscoll (and Ed Stetzer, more on that later).

Over several meals with him, coffee, and a recorded interview I conducted for the seminary (available soon) I got to hear more about ministry than I have in a long, long time. I love that guy. It is like Mark says, pastors of large churches learn more from other pastors than they do from conferences. I found him to be warm, personable, and humble. He really commits himself to serving and mentoring younger pastors.

At SEBTS he discussed, in full detail, the emerging church movement. His perspective is unusual in that he addresses thing from the inside, having started out this process aligned with all the variant streams of the emerging church. He identifies 3 streams now (following Ed Stetzer):

• The "relevance" stream, which are basically guys who hold to the basics of evangelicalism and are just trying to bring it into touch with culture... guys, he said, like Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz) and Erwin McManus. Driscoll says he has no problem with these guys.
• The second stream is the "new reformed" stream of the emerging church. Guys who are also speaking out against the status quo church, but they do so from the perspective of a deeply committed theology, particularly of the Reformed nature. This would include Driscoll, Sovereign Grace ministries, Matt Chandler, and etc. He says the "New Reformed" stream differs from the "Old Reformed" stream in that (a) they are nice; and (b) they look at lost people as people who need Christ and not just kindling; and (c) they are somewhat charismatic, raising their hands to worship in songs written after the 18th century.
• The third stream are those who have compromised some of the essential doctrines of the faith. Driscoll mentioned a number of guys--his friends--whom he said, sadly, now were in this stream. They included Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, and a few others. He cited numerous statements and excerpts from their works that demonstrated that the Gospel has been compromised in their ministries. It's worth at least hearing.

It was a great conference. It should be available soon here. Got more to say on this... and some digest of some of the things I learned... but that's all I got time for now.

Big Stuff Tomorrow

This week, BRIER CREEK!  Our Riverside Campus is CLOSED, and our Brier Creek-South Durham and Cole Mill Campuses are OPEN!

Here are the directions again if you need them.

Service Times:
Brier Creek - 9:00 & 10:45
Cole Mill - 9:15 & 11:00

I HAVE A HUGE FAVOR TO ASK.  This is a new, unfamiliar place.  We will probably have many guests, many of whom will not know where to park.  We really, really need some "one week volunteers" for this Sunday at Brier Creek.  (Actually, we need you to step up and serve each week, but we'll take you for this Sunday, at least.)  Men or women, teenagers, college students...whomever.  If you can help us out this week, click HERE for instructions about how you can help us out, and make a great experience for people on this first Sunday!

Pastor J.D.

2 Sins of Vision

As is obvious to anyone who comes to our church or reads this blog (hi mom!), I've been thinking about vision a lot recently.

I want to post one final thing on it, before I leave it for a while... and that is to urge you to consider the two main sins of vision (as I see it). These are things that have afflicted me all my life, and I think might be common in a lot of church leaders:

1. Dreaming great things for yourself (Jer 45:5). Sometimes our great dreams are really about us, even when we cloak them in spiritual language. We want a big church or successful ministry because it will make us feel better about ourselves, earn us a better reputation, or even a better salary. God cannot truly bless those prayers we offer in pursuit of that type of vision, because we are praying like adulterers. We should be fully happy and secure in who we are in Christ and not need a big or successful ministry to feel validated. That should come from our Divine Husband Jesus Christ. Even in praying for great things to happen to our churches, the hidden motives of our heart are either crying out "Thy Kingdom come" or "My Kingdom come." Both prayers, on the surface, may sound the same, but one is the prayer of Jesus and the other the prayer of Satan.
2. Dreaming too small: Once we identify and confess the idol we've turned ministry success into, we can commit another sin by failing to see the world according to the love and power of God. I will never get tired of encouraging others to see themselves, their families, their cities, and their world through the LENS of the Gospel. Jesus' willingness to save our cities is measured by THE CROSS. The power Jesus' can and will use toward that end is measured by THE RESURRECTION. If we are praying according to our abilities or our willingness to reach our city, we are surely praying too small and insulting the passion and power of Jesus. Praying according to HIS power and passion is what it means to pray in JESUS' name. Isaiah 59:1,2: "The Lord's arm is NOT shortened that it cannot save, nor is His ear heavy that it CANNOT hear; rather, it is your sins that have separated you from God..." Namely, the sin of failing to believe in the availability of His love and power.

Go dare something great for God.

Mark Driscoll and Hatin' Jesus' Wife

Mark Driscoll is going to be at SEBTS this weekend for the Convergent Conference. We got him to come in a day early to do an on-campus thing at UNC tonight. We're going to meet at the Battle House (big white house that is BCM headquarters on Battle Street on the East side of campus) tonight (Wed, Sept 19) at 8:30 for a short talk by Mark followed by a question-answer time.

Mark is one of the most colorful pastors in America. His books, Radical Reformission and Confessions of a Reformission Rev. have been among the most helpful I've read in a while for combining pure, sound theology with cultural engagement. In his words, he is a "theological conservative and a cultural liberal." Interesting combination. He is the guy referred to in Blue Like Jazz as "Mark, the cussin' pastor." Obviously, we do a few things differently. But I still thank God for him.

And here's another great article by my friend Ed Stetzer, recommended to me by my other good friend Britton "Sweet Home Alabama" Taylor, entitled "You Can't Love Jesus and Hate His Wife." Classic Stetzer... and hilarious. I wish I was that funny.

Church leaders and college students: The Convergent Conference this weekend is a great chance to hear both Ed and Mark live. I'm speaking on Friday at 3:00, Ed is at 4:00, and Mark Driscoll and Danny Akin are at 7:00. I think you'd enjoy it.

From Sunday: 4 Components of Vision

On our LAST Sunday at Riverside High School, we re-established 4 "unique" components of our vision, 4 things we are sure of, 4 things our "Joshua", Jesus, is leading us into. I want to give them to you, Summit Church, again, so that you might pray over them with me (maybe jot them on an index card and tuck them into your Bible.) They were:

1. To make disciples of our city through Gospel-centered preaching, passionate worship, and insanely-good family ministry.
2. To change the world through college students. We live in the #1 educational hub in America. We want to take those students "from atheist to missionary." We want to see a real, Holy Ghost, Pentecostal, rafter-swinging awakening. If only 1% of the next 3 college generations said "yes" to taking the Gospel the the nations, the job would be complete.
3. To love our community in a way that puts the radical generosity of Jesus on display. Imagine the day when we can say to the mayors of the Triangle, "We have 30,000 volunteers ready to serve the city in any way you see fit."
4. To plant churches around the world. Here's some of the stats from Sunday: Last week, 50,000 people died of AIDS. 100,000 kids died of preventable, hunger-related diseases. 1 billion Chinese don't know Jesus. Indonesia has over 50,000 villages with no access to the Gospel.

We believe church planting is the way to address all of these things. A local, Spirit-filled church will confront injustice, feed the hungry, and evangelize the area. That's why we are committed to planting hundreds, if not thousands, of churches in the future.

I hate to use a thoroughly overused cliche, but this is our "promised land." Ask God daringly with me for these things.

"Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to your fathers to give to them. Only be strong, and very courageous." (Josh 1:6-7)

"Ask of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance." (Psalm 2:8)

"All authority is given to me in heaven and in earth. Go therefore..." (Matthew 28:18-19).