Tim's Toolbox - Introduction

Hello friends!

It's been a long time coming but I have finally written up a brief introduction to what I call my discipleship "Toolbox" - a collection of ten themes and practices for followers of Jesus. These are the things that have been the most helpful to me and that I have gone back to over and over again in conversation with others.

In the coming weeks I'll be featuring the Tools one at a time in blog posts here. As I go, the links will all be collected onto one page that I'm calling "Toolbox Central." You can always find that on the main page of this blog at the tab labeled "Toolbox" under the main banner. There is also a link there to the entire set of tools as a pdf in case you're eager to have a look right away. I do encourage you to subscribe to this blog so you'll get updates by email as they come out.

Here is a copy of the Introduction that I wrote for the Toolbox booklet, just to get things rolling.

As always, I'm eager to be in conversation and hear your questions, comments and suggestions from improving my material!

Tim

Introduction

Imagine that I wrote a book for you, telling you all about the ideas and practices that have been the most meaningful to me in my life as a follower of Jesus. It would be my own personal toolkit so to speak. Now imagine that each chapter in the book had a brief summary at the end, recapping the most important points for you. Well, that book doesn’t exist, but the chapter summaries do and that’s what you’re holding now!

Truthfully, I’m sure that an actual book would be more helpful for you to be reading first! These summaries can be pretty dense as they try to say a lot in just a few words. But better a summary you can have now than a book that may – or may not! – get written later on! 

I am hugely indebted to Mike Breen for much of the good stuff you will find in here. Four of my Tools (Rhythm, Follow, Balance and Prayer) are taken directly from his own collection of Life Shapes. Two others – Diversity and Multiplication – are based on his shapes. So if you do want a book to read, please get Mike’s Building a Discipling Culture and you’ll have an excellent introduction to the Life Shapes and much more! It’s a tribute to Mike and his colleagues at 3dMovements.com that they encourage people like me to share and build on their work without concerns over copyrights and such.

Finally, although I love to teach the tools, the Toolbox is not a curriculum. A curriculum is about content one is trying to learn, rather than skills and practices one is being trained in. With a curriculum, once you have achieved understanding there’s a sense that the work is done. But in the Toolbox, once you have learned how to use the tools, that is when the work begins.

I pray that these tools will be as helpful for you as they have been for me! Blessings as you build a Kingdom life.

Tim

The Parable of the Two Farmers

Once there were two farmers who each had a vision of a wonderful crop, free of weeds and producing a great harvest.

The first farmer gathered all the seeds and spread them out, then began picking out the weed seeds from among the wheat seeds.

The second farmer sowed all the seeds right away.

Some time later the second farmer was busy at work pulling the weeds each day as the crop grew, while the first farmer was busy at work searching for and removing weed seeds in preparation for planting.

Eventually, the second farmer had a wonderful harvest. The first farmer had a lot of very clean seed.


(Just a little window into my world on a Wednesday morning.)

Join the Conversation in June

For the month of June I'm inviting people into conversation - with each other and with me - around four weekly themes that I have found to be foundational in the way I understand and practice my faith. Would you like to join in?

The themes are part of a "Visual Catechism" I'm developing. The first theme is "Flow," which explores the idea that humans are designed to be like L-shaped pipes that receive and release goodness so that it flows through us from God to each other. The second theme, "Abide" emphasizes the importance of learning how to be loved since the inflow from God is what drives the outflow. "Rhythm" considers how we can order our lives so that this way of living is built into our schedules and not dependent on when we happen to be having a good day. Finally, the "Follow" theme looks at how we can hear and act on what God is up to in our lives which gives our outflow direction in the world.

To support conversation on those themes I've created a downloadable Travel Guide with scripture references and discussion questions, and a Facebook page that will follow along with the weekly message I will be preaching at St. Stephen's in West Saint Paul. The messages will be posted online here for easy access. All these resources are being collected on the Excursion tab on this blog, so that's the hub for pretty much everything you might want.

To participate, all you need to do is find someone else that you'd like to explore these themes with, grab the resource and run with it! If you'd like to be in conversation with me and others along the way, the Facebook page is the place for that.

I hope you'll come along on the Excursion! It's be a joy to have you in conversation and a real help to me as I continue to work on creating a resource that I hope can be valuable to many.

Tim

P.S. - Some of my icons are drawn from or influenced by the resources of the 3dm Movement. I HIGHLY recommend you check them out!

"Road Trip" Sermon #1 - The Great Commission

This is the first message in my "Road Trip" series at St. Stephen's Lutheran Church.

Title: "The Great Commission"

Summary: In a series of messages I will be taking the congregation on a "Road Trip" of sorts. We'll start and end with Matthew 28 where Jesus tells us to make disciples. Of all the good things that the church can do and does, the core task of the Church is to make disciples; not converts, not Lutherans, not churchgoers and not good, moral people, but disciples. On the Road Trip, we will be focusing first on what it even means to be a "disciple," and then build on that to explore what it means to make disciples.

Slides: Click here to view slides in a new window.

Video

"Road Trip" Sermon #2 - Go and Make Disciples - What Does This Mean?

Message #2 in my "Road Trip" series at St. Stephen's Lutheran Church.

Title: "Go and Make Disciples - What Does This Mean?""

Summary: A disciple is an apprentice to Jesus: we learn not just information from him, but we learn how to be human by walking and working with him. A very helpful tool for thinking about being human is the L-shaped Pipe metaphor. The Pipe describes how humans are built for connection in relationships with God and each other, and also for flow so that all that God pours into us naturally flows out of us to bless others. We do encounter a lot of "plumbing problems" in our lives, the worst of which is disconnecting from God and our neighbor to curve into ourselves. The most important thing is to keep a strong and healthy connection with God, which Jesus refers to as "abiding."

Slides: Click here to view slides in a new window.

Video

Birth Defects and the "Image of God"

Thought I'd share a little theological musing with you this morning.

In a clergy group I belong to, a member asked; "God creates us and we are made in the image of God, what are some good responses to someone who questions this because they were born with severe handicaps/illness, etc.?"

Here's the reply I offered.

To me, being created in the "image of God" means that humans have, in the essence of what they are, a similarity to God in the essence of what God is. I understand the essence of God as being "persons-in-relationship" (with all the good Trinitarian stuff that evokes), and so I see the essence of being human is in our design to also be persons-in-relationship. From that perspective, the condition of one's physical body isn't that much related to how one bears the image of God.

As regards congenital handicaps etc., I see that as simply an aspect of the brokenness of creation which leads to some of us being born with bodies that are far from what God intended in the original design for humans. In my own case for example, I was born with propensities that have shown up over the years as both depression and diabetes. That's a reflection of the uniqueness of my personal brokenness.

Interview with the Blogger

My friend Ry Edwards just posted an interview he did with me! It's 20 minutes and touches on why I believe in God, my favorite metaphor for understanding what it means to be human, and a Developers Conference I'm presenting at coming up in August. I've written about The Pipe metaphor on this blog before but I think this video gives a better introduction. Take a look and let me know what you think!

Interview on Facebook.

Here are some links you may want to check out as well:

Gofundme page for my conference expenses: www.gofundme.com/resource-developers-conference

The website for 3dm: 3dmovements.com

My blog of occasional posts over the last 10+ years: http://feralpastor.blogspot.com/

Done With Church but Not With Faith? You're Not Alone.

There's a large and growing group of people who have left traditional church life (buildings, budgets, programs and pastors) but are decidedly not walking away from their faith in Jesus. Or from their desire to follow him and bless the world. Or from their hunger to be in community with others. In fact, many of them have "left the church in order to save their faith."

Sociologist Josh Packard has coined the term "the Dones" to describe this group in his book Church Refugees. He finds the term "refugees" particularly apt because it speaks about people who didn't really want to "leave home" but felt they had no other choice and often flee out of a sense of self-preservation.

I highly recommend the book. Below is my own summary, drawn largely from the book, about who the Dones are. If you would like to download a copy you can find it here.

Key Research Findings on the Dones

Timothy Thompson, 4.4.17, FeralPastor@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, observations presented here are from Packard and Hope, Church Refugees, (Group Publishing, 2015); Joshua Packard, Exodus of the Religious Dones: Research Reveals the Size, Makeup, and Motivations of the Formerly Churched Population (Group Publishing 2015); and “Meet the ‘Dones”” by Joshua Packard (Christianity Today, http://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2015/summer-2015/meet-dones.html)

1.       They were highly active in their churches.  Dones are not disgruntled consumerist Christians whose preferences were not met, or controllers who stormed off in a huff when they couldn’t get their way. Neither are they marginal members who drifted away over time.  Rather, they were typically very active and highly committed members in their congregations, frequently having served in leadership roles.

2.       They didn’t want to leave. Dones often worked for years to reform the church from within and address the challenges they were encountering.  This is a key insight, and why Packard refers to them as “Church Refugees,” evoking the plight of people who desperately wanted to stay “home” yet felt compelled to leave as an act of self-preservation, suffering a deep sense of loss as a result.  One person interviewed described it this way; “At first it was just survival, man. Spiritual survival. We had to get out.”

3.       They felt stifled by church structure. A key factor in why the Dones left is not that the church was flawed, which they expect to be true for humans and their institutions, but that the structures in place prevented them from helping to address the flaws. “I don’t think the institutional church is filled with bad people. I think the church in America is an inherently flawed structure that compels people to make poor decisions” said one person interviewed. This distinction between the structures of the institution as opposed to the people and the faith itself is what is expressed by the saying; “They are done with the church but not with their faith.”

4.       There were four key desires that they found frustrated by life in the conventional church:

a.       They wanted community in the form of an extended spiritual family of care with shared life and substantial intimacy.

b.      They wanted to be able to affect the life of the church.

c.       They wanted spiritual conversation that invited exploration rather than doctrinal teaching that squelched it.

d.      They wanted meaningful engagement with the world.

The Dones are a large and growing group. Barna and Kinneman (Churchless, Tyndale Momentum, 2014) argue that the “dechurched” comprise about 33% of the American population and are the fastest growing segment as well. Packard estimates that about half of the unchurched - roughly 30.5 Million people - would qualify as Dones, no longer attending church services but retaining their faith in God and Christian identity. An additional 7 Million still attending church report that they are “on their way out the door” as Almost Dones.  Beyond the sheer size of the group, it should be stressed that the impact of these people leaving congregational life is greatly multiplied by the fact that Dones tend to come from among the most active and committed members in the church.

2015 Devos in Review

For many years I've used a simple journaling format with my daily devotions: writing down a passage or verse of Scripture; noting what it is in that reading that catches my attention; writing down how it applies to me that day, and writing a short prayer. The whole thing is usually about half a page long. It goes by the acronym SOAP for Scripture, Observation, Application and Prayer. (If you'd like to learn more about it, check out this post.)

I also make an index as I go of the scripture passages I've written about with several keywords that point to the theme of the reflection. One fun side-benefit is that at the end of the year I can collect all of the keywords and display them in a Wordle  where the most commonly used words show us in larger font size. The three images attached show what my devotional keywords were in 2015. The first one below uses all the words, the second just the 20 most common words, and the one above has the top 5 words by frequency.

(You'll notice that my most common keyword this year was "pipe." No, I've not been moonlighting as a plumber, "pipe" is just my personal shorthand for a core metaphor for faith and life. Briefly: to be human is to be like an L-shaped pipe, connected to God at the top, with love, joy, peace, forgiveness and all good things flowing *down* into us from God and *out* from us to bless our neighbors.)

I wanted to share this with you to encourage you in your own devotional life. (New Years... fresh starts... resolutions and all that.) First of all, of course, just to spend some intentional time each day with the Lord. And in addition, I highly recommend some kind of writing practice that lets you see your faith life over time and find good words again at a later date - for yourself or for others!

And while you're at it... and annual spiritual "year in review" is a pretty good practice too.

Blessings!

All keywords:

Top 20:

Blog In Review - 2015

Fellow blogger and ELCA Pastor/rabble-rouser Clint Schnekloth invited folks to offer a year in review blog post and offered to compile them on his own blog so here goes!  

The Church Isn't Dying, It's Just That The Bubble Has Finally Burst (The end of inflation.)

(Church) Life Can Be Different (Imagine one service per month?)

Maybe the "dones" are done with the "form" of church we offer them.  (Walking away can also be walking towards.)

Is the Kingdom of God a Gated Community? (No key to the Pearly Gates?)

2014 in Devotions (Common themes and helpful tools.)

And a perennial favorite from years ago that still gets traffic...

Luther on House Churches (It's time we acted on his proposal.)

House Churches and the ELCA?

There's been some house church activity in my ELCA denomination over the years and now there's a one-day conference coming up to explore this direction October 23-24! If you've followed this blog much, you know that's a topic near and dear to my heart. I've got 55 posts with that tag... so far, and pretty much started this blog in April 2007 in order to advance this conversation. I'll be there. Care to join me?

Christians are not called to be "good people."

For my daily devos this morning I wrote a longer reflection than usual. It's based on this verse from Romans 12:2

"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect."

In a nutshell, what I came around to is simply this: Jesus does not call Christians to just "be good people" and "live good lives." He calls us to give up our lives.  That's counter-cultural, not only for a corrupt culture, but even for a culture that's basically "good."

Here's the "long version" from my devotional journal.

2014 in Devotions

Here's a visual summary of the themes in my personal devotions over the last 12 months:

If you prune that down to the top 20 words, it looks like this:













And if you go all the way down to the top 5 words, you see this:

Not that you really need to know that much about what's been on my heart for the last twelve months as I read and reflect on Scripture of course, but I wanted to share with you the tools I've found that have made this little look-back reflection possible.

First, I've been using a simple journaling format that I learned from Wayne Cordeiro at New Hope in Hawaii.  It uses a SOAP acronym to provide structure (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer) and help keep things simple.  I've written more about that before.  What I may not have mentioned is that the journal invites you to create a Table of Contents as you go, and for each entry to record a title and some keywords that identify the themes in what you've written.  Here's what mine looks like:

I've been using this journaling tool for several years now and have begun using the keywords as a window into the past.  (The Table of Contents is also a HUGE asset when you need to find a verse on a topic for yourself or someone else.)

With that list of words as raw material, you can visualize it as above using the website Wordle. Paste your text into the box and BOOM!  A word cloud where the words that appear most frequently are shown in larger font.  Wordle gives you a lot of flexibility on how the visual is created... fonts, colors and alignment etc.  But you can also limit the number of words that will be shown from your content, which is how I made the three versions above.  (You can also make a Wordle from a document, or even from a website.  Try pasting in a whole book of the Bible sometime to see some interesting things about the topics that book is engaging.)

If you're not doing daily devos, I encourage you to start and I recommend the Life Journal as a great tool.  It's been a huge blessing to me!

Resonating with Brokenness?

I pursue a practice of daily devotions (note: pursuing is not the same as achieving) and when my devos are suitable for public view I often post them on my Feral Pastor Facebook page.  A recent post there that touched on the experience of brokenness, and how "cheering people up" is often not the best approach, seemed to get more attention that most.  Maybe that's just because simply naming the reality of brokenness has a powerful resonance with a lot of people.  Whatever the reason, I thought I'd also post that reflection here in case it was a blessing to others.

Helpful Lenses for Devotions and Discipleship

In my work with 3dm as a discipling tool I've picked up some valuable "lenses" that can be put on like
glasses to help me interpret and even see things.  For example, one 3dm lens is the Triangle, which invites us to consider our relationships with God (Up), other believers (In) and everyone else (Out).  In my devotions this morning, that lens gave me a second and third look at a verse I might have otherwise skipped over because it "didn't connect with me."

(Note - here's an introduction to the SOAP format for devotional journaling I'm using.)

Contradictory Theologies as a Guard Against Intellectual Idolatry.

I pursue a practice of daily devotions and journaling using the SOAP format, which I highly recommend.  Of late, I've begun posting photos of my journal entries as an easy way of sharing my life with others that are my travelling partners in the faith.  (Much easier than re-typing everything!)  So below is a photo of my entry for today.  It's a reminder that faith is about trusting a person, not confidence in a particular way of thinking about Him.

Baptism as a Binding of God - Metaphor from Adoption

Talking about baptism has a tendency to start fights among Christians, but I gave in to the urge to offer a key metaphor for me in a post on another blog so I thought I'd let folks here have a look too.

"Maybe the significance of baptism isn't in what it "does to" the baptized, but in what it "does to God." Perhaps baptism is a way God has empowered us to "bind God" to the person being baptized in a way that has eternal, spiritual significance.

For a metaphor, consider this. I traveled to Vietnam years ago, empowered by my wife to legally bind her (and me) to a child through my own signature on her behalf. Signing my name is a routine and frequently meaningless act, but in this context, it had huge, real and lasting significance for me, my wife and the child. (Her name is Amy.) In the same way, washing with water is usually not very meaningful, but in the context of baptism that act could have real significance.

The metaphor could be extended to address some of the other struggles around baptism. Suppose my wife and I had made a personal commitment to provide in every way possible for the welfare of the child *regardless of whether the formal adoption was allowed to go through.* Our ability to deliver everything our hearts desired to Amy might have been hindered if the formalities couldn't be enacted... (it wold have been pretty hard to get her out of the country and situated with American citizenship, for example!) Who knows, maybe we would have ended up finding it necessary to "move into the neighborhood" (See John 1:14 the Message) and become citizens of Vietnam in order to follow our hearts and care for the child we had *unilaterally* claimed as our own. When you use this metaphor as a lens, you can see nicely that the underlying commitment is the real thing, the main thing, but it's also helpful to have the formalities enacted since that 1) makes the commitment public to all and 2) makes it much easier for the blessings of the relationship to flow to the child."

Celebrity Endorsement of The Feral Pastor

I am thrilled to announce that the Feral Pastor Facebook Page has just been "liked" by none other than KVB Luther!

Truly, if I had bothered to create a bucket list, this would surely have been on it.

Membership Decline in the ELCA

Yes, numbers don't tell the whole story.  Yes, "membership" is not the best or only indicator of congregational vitality, much less faithfulness.  Yes, for some people this is old, old news.  Yet I continue to find people are generally unaware of the decline we are experiencing in my tribe, and those that have a sense of it don't readily have a sense of scale to go with it.  So, let me provide the visual that has haunted and energized me since I first began to attend to it about 10 years ago.

Primary data from Loren Mead, Transforming Congregations for the Future,
with more recent statistics added.

As a percentage of the US population (which has continued to grow year after year) this shows a trend of decline, unbroken for half a century.

However people may parse the causes and debate the responses, it's been clear to me since the get-go that a response is needed.  And given the "inertia" stored in a system with such a long-term shape to it's life (spanning at least two generations) I've always expected that the response will need to be very, very significant if it is to "turn things around" in any meaningful sense.

My own response has been to explore the possibilities for Christian missional community outside the core conventions of congregational life: pastors, property, programs and presentational (large group) worship.  This led me initially to folks in the house church movement, and more recently to those who are focusing on making disciples per se.  

They have a nifty saying: if you plant a church, you may or may not get disciples.  But if you make disciples, the Church will arise.

So, I am now moving my top ministry priority into directly discipling and equipping leaders.  Not just "church leaders" in the typical sense.  Leaders who will directly disciple and train others.  I am learning how to do this from the folks at 3dm, as I have found their material and approach to be excellent, and their theology to be wonderfully lean and hugely resonant with Lutheranism.

Happy Birthday to Me!!

Well, today I am 54 years old and thinking, if I play my cards right, I just might hit my stride in the next year or two.  ;)

I am totally jazzed to share a birthday with my friend Caroline Ticarro-Parker, who is the founder and leader of the Catalyst Foundation.  Catalyst works to build communities in Vietnam to fight human trafficking.  So in addition to sharing a birthday, we share a passion for the people and especially the children of Vietnam - in part because we have both adopted children from there!

Caroline

Now, someone else who knows and loves Caroline and her work has put up a $10,000 matching grant for a water project in honor of her birthday!  So if you want to help me celebrate, you can invite a thirsty person in Vietnam to join you in a toast by making a contribution to Catalyst.

The matching grant is for today only, so if you're inspired, now is the time to act! Follow this link to the water project on the Catalyst website.
Thanks for your interest in my blog and my journey!  Let's share the joy together!