Does Your Marriage Strengthen Your Faith?

I think the idea that a shared faith life can strengthen your marriage is pretty common, but I've been musing about the reverse:

Do you intentionally look to your marriage as a "platform" from which you pursue your faith? Put another way, is your primary life partner your primary faith partner?

I came to this from a curious direction. I think a lot about small groups and house churches. More recently I encountered suggestions for "Three is Enough" groups as well as "Church of Two." One thing that seemed to be in common across all of these is that you have to begin by finding one or more people to team up with, and then spend some time building a significant relationship of trust. With that foundation established, you can work together to pursue your faith with support, encouragement and sharing of ideas, insights etc.

Eventually, I wondered why not start with an established relationship of trust that a great many of us already have in place: our spouse? And I'm not talking here about sharing a life of faith as a way to strengthen the marriage, though it certainly will. Rather, the focus is on intentionally turning to the marriage relationship as a resource for pursuing faith. After all, there we hopefully already have someone who knows us well enough to "speak into our life" as they say. Hopefully, with enough trust built up to be able to "speak (and hear) the truth in love." And generally, someone you can get quality time with fairly easily (even though we often don't.)

Wouldn't that be easier than trying to find someone, find a place and time to meet, and start building a deep, faith-based relationship?

I'd love to hear from others who have though about this, or better yet begun to live that way. What have your experiences been? What kind of practices have you found helpful (or not.) What challenges have you encountered?

How My Mom Introduced Me to God

Part Advent craft for the family, part spiritual autobiography - how's that for a multi-purpose blog post?

One Christmas season when I was a child, my mom had the family do a special activity at home. She set up a little doll-size manger with a small pile of straw next to it and invited us all to "prepare a place for the baby Jesus." We were to add straw one piece at a time over the weeks of Advent. And we were to only add straw when we had done an act of kindness for someone, anonymously.

These good deeds were to be kept secret. It was just between us... and God.

It was a nice activity, and fun in a way that appealed to a young boy who got permission to be sneaky for a change. I don't recall that we ever did it again in the years after that, but by the 25th I do recall there was a decent amount of straw in the manger for the Jesus doll to lie in.

Looking back, it has seemed to me that something really significant got catalyzed in my spiritual life back then. The experience of sharing a secret with God - and essentially engaging in this "spiritual practice" over several weeks - was, as far as I can recall, my earliest clear encounter with God as an actual "other" I could relate to. My first sense of the "Thou" in my "I-and-Thou" relationship (thank you, Martin Buber, for giving me that language some years later.)

So this year, I decided to bring back the manger. I made a little video of how to build one with my daughter Rebecca that you can find below. I think she's already got a stronger spiritual sensitivity that I did at her age, but if this helps to encourage her growth (or mine, or any of the rest of us in the household), well, it's all good.

And anything that encourages more intentional acts of kindness is worth a shot!

Blessings on you and yours this season. May you all share good secrets.

How to Make a Manger from Timothy Thompson on Vimeo.

The Sticking Point: Social Density

A Facebook group I belong to associated with Luther Seminary recently started a discussion on this question:

What are the sticking points of your community of faith that keep you all from becoming a missional congregation?

I thought I'd take a crack at that and here's what I posted:

The sticking point? If only there were just one! I see a host of impediments to the emergence of a missional culture - everything from clericalism and Biblical illiteracy to the hyperindividualism and consumeristic ethos of our civic culture. But there does seem to be one factor that exacerbates all the others and is the place I keep coming back to when I try to decide where to invest my energies.

There is a general lack of substantive relationships.

You can easily unveil this by looking at the one-anothers that describe healthy Christian community. For example, how common are relationships in our churches that are substantive enough to allow people to actually "admonish one another?" Not very.

Culture change - like faith itself - travels from person to person like a virus. You can stop a virus cold (so to speak) by isolating people from each other. Similarly, our community relationships are generally too distant to support a culture-change epidemic. We don't "breathe each others air" enough to transmit anything.

Our primary gatherings may look like good places to catch something - Sunday services are something of a crowd scene. But there is very little relational contact that can take place in that setting. You may catch a cold by passing the peace, but you won't catch a missional culture that way.

Invest in small groups? Of course. But that's typically done as an add-on to Sunday services, as icing on the cake of everything else that's already entrenched in conventional congregational life. Most of our time & energy goes towards the large gathering which tends to have a small impact on a large number of people. Small groups, that have a larger impact on a smaller number, get the leftovers. That's a fundamental mis-alignment. (To see it graphically as a napkin diagram, go here: http://bit.ly/Misalignment.)

To switch metaphors from infection, think in terms of a nuclear chain reaction. To make that take place, the atoms have to be at a high density, packed very tightly together. Then as the neutrons fly, they release even more and the reaction multiplies.

Our "social density" is not high enough to support a "chain reaction" of missional culture change. In contrast, that's just what you see when the Church is "packed very tightly together" under persecution, often resulting in "explosive" growth.

So if I had to pick one factor above the others to focus on, I guess it would be social density. That's why I continue to be drawn to the house church movement - an eminently Lutheran expression and a subject for another time!

Sustainable Pastoring, Sustainable Church?

One of the blogs I follow is by Todd Heistand. He is a tri-vocational pastor (not counting the additional two vocations of husband and father!) and his community is called The Well which is in Feasterville, PA. (Not to be confused with The Well in Orange County, CA that I have blogged about previously, which is a community intentionally transitioning into a network of cells.)

Todd recently posted a very open description of his weekly schedule and wondered aloud about it's sustainability long term.

In my mind, I think he's raising a broader question, not about the sustainability of pastoral life per se but about the sustainability of a congregational life that's built upon unsustainable leadership expectations. Maybe part of the problem is what we assume is required for congregational life, in particular, weekly large-group presentational worship services.

Here is how I presented the question to him:

Todd – I echo the comments above, grateful for your transparency.

I also wonder about sustainability, but from a different angle. If this is what it takes to provide leadership to a missional community, then is the model itself sustainable for the Church?

I’ve mulled this over quite a bit and my thinking has been strongly challenged by the simple/organic/house church expressions that I’ve encountered. It’s left me wondering if we’re encountering a stumbling block in our assumption that we have to offer a large group gathering every week. I do think people should be gathering weekly, but that could be in the home/small groups. But what if the larger community gathered, say, monthly for something more like a traditional worship service with sermon, liturgy, music etc.?

So my question to you is this: if your community went to a monthly gathering, would that make enough difference in the workload that your current tri-vocational + family lifestyle would be sustainable over the long haul?

If you're interested, you can follow that conversation on his blog though I'll probably cross post some of that here as well. But I'm interested in hearing from my readers.

What do you think about the sustainability issue, both pastoral and congregational, and my suggestion to have weekly small gatherings supported by a monthly larger service?

Advent Conspiracy

If you'd like to share some ideas on ways to make Christmas more meaningful this year (and less stressful) click on over to this little blog I set up for my congregation and friends. There are links there to the main Advent Conspiracy site, as well as one to Rethinking Christmas. Good stuff!

The Workers - Video

The confirmation students at my church presented The Workers in a dramatic version, and added impact by setting it into our contemporary context. They did a great job, as you can see in this video.

The Workers from Tim Thompson on Vimeo.

The Workers - Conclusion

As the line advanced, the workers became more and more angry. John felt deeply ashamed at the way they were treating the owner; grabbing the money out of his hand and making angry remarks. Finally, there were only three of them left to receive their wages. The first one stood before the owner defiantly with arms crossed. "So!" he said, "You think my work is no better than what you get from some bunch cripples and weaklings? You think a whole day in the sun by me is worth as much as an hour in the shade by some lazy beggar? Is that what you're trying to say with your lousy money?" Then he grabbed the money out of the owner's hand and said; "Let me tell you something. I'll take this money because I worked for it and I deserve it. But I'll rot in hell before I waste my time working for you again!" and he stormed off.

Then, the second man stepped up to the owner and stood before him. He calmly took the money out of the owner's hand, turned the coins over in his palm, and then let them fall between his fingers into the dust at the owner's feet. "I don't need your money." he said, looking him right in the eyes. "My pride is worth more than a lousy day's wages." "Oh?" said the owner softly, "And is it worth more than the hunger of your wife and children, who have no bread to eat?" The man's face flushed with rage and he stood there stiff before the owner. Then he spat on him, and walked away.

Now there was no one left but John, and the owner of the vineyard, and John's eyes were brimming with tears. "I don't know how they can say those things," he said, "when you've done nothing but good to them, and to all of us! You came into our town and offered us work when we were nearly starving. You gave us food and water while we were working, and time to rest. You even hired people who couldn't work the whole day, or could hardly work at all, and then gave every one of us a full day's pay! I... I just want to thank you." he said, taking his hand, "Thank you, for all you've done for us today." And then he turned, and brushing a tear away from his eye, he began to walk home.

But the owner said to him; "Wait!" And when John turned around, he saw him smiling with his hand outstretched, holding John's pay.

"You'll need this to buy bread for your family." he said.

John smiled and took the money, and then the owner of the vineyard said; "John, the harvest is great, but there aren't many workers. Come back again tomorrow. There will always be work for you here."

So John went home and shared the good news with his family. And from that day on he worked gladly in the vineyard, and he and his family were never hungry or thirsty again.

Video