Sunday am Focus

I truly got excited about this question because this is one of the deepest parts of my core beliefs.

Sunday.
Is not.
The key experience.

Consider this:

David tending sheep while waiting to be annointed king. Noah enduring scorn for years while he built a boat and preached an absurd message. Elijah mocking the prophets of Baal in the penultimate Olympics of the Gods. Jesus pointing to flowers and saying, "Consider the lillies..." while walking and hanging out with the 12. Paul walking and riding and sailing around his part of the world during several missionary journeys. Jonah smelling the bile and stench of digestion, sitting in whale spit and decomposed fish. John in exile at Patmos, writing a puzzling and terrifying letter. Jacob refusing to let go of the angel he is wrestling with until the angel blesses him. Peter caving to social pressure and denying he ever knew Jesus. A son sleeping with his father's wife. A mighty leader being inundated with the petty squabbles of people. An argument between two apostles.

Not one of these happened in a building with a bunch of other people with their backs to each other. Certainly, there was the temple but today you and I are the temple. For sure there were priests, but today, you and I are priests. Absolutely, it is wonderful to sing with other people and learn from the word from those among us who handle it well. Let's keep doing that!

But let's also spend time together. Let's eat together. Watch movies together. Discuss life together. Confess our weaknesses to each other. Listen to someone's problem and not offer a solution right away. Laugh. Enjoy a roller coaster ride. Do something with someone else that you both enjoy.

Most of the stories in the Bible show people doing spiritual things (and sometimes not spiritual things) in the context of every day life. Most of the transformation we see in Scripture and our own lives happens outside the building and with other people (I can see in my mind now a woman pushing her way through the crowd to touch Jesus' cloak and now I can see friends lowering a lame man through the roof to have Jesus touch him).

We just have to find out how to build patterns of relationship where we spend time together. We have to decide (or not) that Sunday isn't the most important event during the week.

Maybe part of the collaboration of Sunday morning is an open session where people can say what they did together that week.

Just quick snippets:

"We got together with Frances and Skippy to watch a movie and had a great conversation afterwards."

"A while ago, I hurt a friend of mine by something I did. I screwed up and went back to acknowledge it. It's not fixed yet, but I feel like we might be able to regain what we had."

"I asked my LTG to help me paint the bedroom just for an hour or so. Five hours later, we hadnt touched the paint brushes and all we did was laugh and talk."

"I watched my father die Thursday."

Over the past 8 weeks, the original Purple Cobras team spent 3 hours together almost every Wednesday night. We know each other better now. Tanya and I were the n00bs on the team, so that pattern of intensive work and discussion has helped us know other people better and them us.

We need to spend time together outside of Sunday morning and then we need to bring awareness of that rest-of-the-week life together into the experience of Sunday. Tell stories about the week that have nothing to do with the topic of the message.

Maybe some Sundays, there is a just a small message and lots of short discussions. We create the experience on the fly with just a seed of structure. It's risky and could go wrong in thirty different ways, but do we want propriety or do we want what's real?

Maybe we gather as a church outside of Sunday and go see a rock concert together or a movie or go to a museum or an art display and then take over a bunch of coffee shops and talk about it.

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I believe in God because every once in a while, I hear a voice that says, "You're my favorite."

For me Sunday is a pep rally.

an amazing movie.

a mind blowing book.

something that keeps me up at night. i just c a n t S T O P thinking about it.

I like the idea of us all dealing with a topic together...a shared experience.

after an amazing movie, i wanna go for coffee with my closest friends, get hoped up on coffee and argue, discuss, recap, question until 1AM.

this, my friends, is what Sunday AM should be.

but hey thats just my belief.

Whoo, you go, Dave.
So what is our Return On Investment on Sunday am? On other activities?

i was listening to donald miller a couple weeks ago talk about arts in the church and the cool (duh!) thing was that we need to let somethings simmer in people's minds. my mantra has been "show, don't tell" lately because as a big-C church we often want to explain everything to death. people have to get the "right" idea, so we need to feed it to them.

dane cook did this whole thing about how women fight by planting little bombs in your head that go off later. where all of a sudden it hits you what that meant. i think that's how jesus did a lot of his teaching; people had no idea what they were hearing until a few (days, weeks, months, years) later. then it hit them.

i love a pep rally.

i love hard questions.

I have a strong belief about the bible. But it probably isnt a belief most people would guess.

It's a book of questions. So many people treat the bible as an answer book. Guys like Pat Robertson and James Dobson write books that reduce the bible to well-reasoned principles of certainty.

There's so much ambiguity, uncertainty, inconsistency and chaotic churn in the bible. For example, how come Moses can get away with busting the tablets of the ten commandments but poor Uzzah reaches out to stabilize the ark of the covenant and God smokes him? How come Ananais and Sapphira get popped for lying but Rahab gets inducted to the Hebrews 11 Faith Hall of Fame for telling... you guessed it... a lie (Jos 2:4).

The bible guides and leads us, no doubt. It comforts us. But it also stymies us, confuses us, gives conflicting information. As much as some contemporary exponents of faith would have us believe otherwise, there is not a 1:1 correlation between principles and ideas in scripture and real life. It just doesn't work that way.

The bible is a book of questions. A rabbit hole of questions. Each question spirals off into another tangent, leading you to ask, "Oh! And another thing I wanna know is why....?" And then you ask questions and get NO MOVEMENT on it for years. Then suddenly, something drops into place and ties year-sold questions together. I just had this happen to me about 2 months ago while reading a book on quantum physics and string theory. The author used a metaphor that completely tied together a theory/set of questions I've had for about 15 years. It was awesome. But the other side of it was I waited 15 years to get satisfaction.

Sometimes the answer is asking a question and trusting not in the rightness or certainty of the answer but instead in the God who I think wants us to know him much more than he wants us to behave "rightly" in his name.

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I believe in God because every once in a while, I hear a voice that says, "You're my favorite."

I love the concept of this... want it desperately...but wonder HOW to make this happen with a group of 120 people this Sunday at 10:30am?
Spiritually I believe the Miracles series is the right one... and a good one... but, the topic of Jesus casting out demons is not like a pep rally and MOST people are not emotionally moved to have a shared experience and discussion around it...

Help me "see" what that actually looks like this Sunday?
How could we set that up?

just an idea

but for me i think as communicators we have to focus on the following.

I .exploring the topics, the biblical background, stories personal tie in's etc

II. Asking the hard questions, lots of questions really, provoke, push

III. How does this relate to my life now? No like REALLY TODAY. When I leave this auditorium what does miracles mean to me when im going to lunch with some people from work that i don't really care for half of them or i'm stressed out about things, etc.

- How to be a miracle in someones life. - How to look for miracles. - How to create your own little miracles.

yikes... a pep rally is the opposite of what I personally believe our Sunday AM meeting should be... party/celebration, sure, pep rally... ugh, I have had enough of that. I am looking for a communal spiritual experience on Sunday AM... haven't found much yet at the Journey but I am still hoping and praying.

See the topic “If you build it…” for discussion on how Sunday am does or does not relate to evangelism.

I really appreciate James Dobson... he is one of my heroes of the faith (among many)... his organization Focus on the Family has been a great resource for our family... especially when I was a new parent with no clue how to raise four children... and now I have six. I don't find the Bible near as puzzling. It really starts to makes sense when we start to understand God better. His ways are just so much higher than our ways that it blows us away sometimes.