Hello all...in the New Year!
It's time for me to get this blog up and rolling. I had given myself an "after the new year" deadling and we are here, to be sure.
So a week or so ago I pulled out Gerhard Forde's The Captivation of the Will and read through it again. It occurs to me that for any Lutheran leader, especially rostered clergy, this piece should be read 2 times a year and then discussed with others....colleagues, professional peers, leaders who have the same passion for mission and ministry....with a matrix of questions that get at what's important here and now. In other words, there needs to be some kind of continued baseline look at our theological grounding in grace....continually.....as we engage the constant who, what, when, where of being missional.
I'm not convinced that many lutheran leaders today understand the radical nature of grace.
And when grace is misunderstood....mission gets hijacked by the theology of glory and all we end up doing is trying to build organizations and institutions rather than travel the marvelous road of God's dream (kingdom) for the world and let Christ loose so he can change lives and change the world.
More on this as we go with this blog week in and week out. Overall, right now, I have a couple of topics, if not to say also passions, that I would like to engage regulary here: grace as expressed in and a result of the theology of the cross and the missional nature of the 21st century church.

To get things started....
Luther said this, in the form of a thesis for debate, about how God relates to us: "The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it"
This is fundamentally opposite to what we normally think. We think that we are placed here on this beautiful earth and that we just don't do that placement justice and we need to get our act together and start appreciating this great place and this great God who created it all. All of that is true enough, but we add to it all the position that somehow, some way we will in fact get it all together so that when God does her great "human belief and behavioral virus" scan (which, I suppose we suppose, occurs at a preprogrammed time so that God doesn't have to think about it but can insure that it does happen! Don't you just love that about your computer virus scan? Isn't it great that God can scan too?) we show up as "pleasing." What Luther is saying is that no, there will not be a time to be satisfying to God....but that really doesn't matter because God is actively creating us so that we are pleasing. It's all God's work. None of ours.
Most churches think mission is trying to get people to pay attention to God so they can get busy with a track of work and prayer that will make them pleasing to God. And things get very religious.
If however, we start with the premise that we never will be pleasing to God and there is no reason to try.....but instead realize we are pleasing to God because God is doing the work....we have something refreshing to share....life!....with the unchurched, instead of a religiousity that calls on them to get their spiritual lives together, whatever that means, so they can please God.
So, I leave you with a question:
How does grace, the radical reality of God's unconditional love and regard for us, impact the definition of church mission itself? I know that's a heavy one, and I will try to unpack it more with more questions, but I can't just now. I'll just leave it there. Let's have some fun.