I’ve noticed a trend. In my response against consumerism and hating collecting items or my opposition about buying unnecessary goods, I have caught myself falling for another kind of consumption that isn’t healthy. It’s the insistent need for me to continually want and have new experiences. Whether it be extreme sports, traveling to wild places or putting myself in compromising situations, I seem to be treating these experiences as someone would treat a new shirt at a mall. I browse through them on the internet, I brag about them to all my friends, and sometimes I take pictures of them and put them on my wall at home and experiences become what we use to prove our worth and validity as being educated and wise to the world.

I’m wondering that if in the rebellion against consumerism, there is a large majority of us who found an outlet through experience. We still get all the same feelings as those who are addicted to things, but in our world it’s a bit more socially acceptable to be addicted to experiences than it is material goods. The problem with this, even more so than things, experiences come as options to those who are privileged. I can jump on a plane and have the experience of seeing a handmade drum be played and carved by the same person and then handed to me and that gives me the same sort of fulfillment as someone who just purchases the drum for no other reason besides the fact that they needed to buy something here back at home. Then there is the guy who made the drum. He sleeps on cement behind his store. He may never have the option to be addicted to buying things or to flying all over the world.

I’m left with the question, do I really want to use my privilege as an opportunity just to fulfill my desire to consume more experiences? Probably not. So there you have it. There is no way that my life in being anti-consumerism has actually turned up to be more holy or righteous. The selfishness just found another room to inhabit.

“Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.” – Acts 1:26

Right now at theStory we are in Acts, we’ll probably be there for another two years.  I must not be reading it very carefully because I totally skipped over Acts 1:26.  Are you kidding me?  They picked a disciple by casting lots?

If that doesn’t make you want to just throw away everything you’ve ever known or read about leadership then I don’t know what does.  Think about how subversive that is.  It’s almost like they are saying, we don’t care who our leaders are because this community doesn’t live or die by it’s leaders.  We just need someone to fulfill the role.  Sure we can chalk it up to thinking they just really trusted God to pick the right person.  I think though it’s deeper than that.  This tells us a lot about who leaders are and how we determine who they are.

For theStory, we’ve always chosen leaders by their gifts, and how they will contribute to the overarching conversation as we lead our community.  If someone doesn’t do that well, we get frustrated and we can’t wait for them to step down or we ask them to leave.  It’s all backwards.  It’s not about having the right people in the right place to find success.  Obviously, this is the case if our entire church movement was founded on the back of someone drawing the short straw.  Hauerwas in the video below asks “what kind of community do you need to be that you can choose your leadership by lot?”

That question completely leaves me blank.  I’ve never thought of it that way.  I always thought it was what kind of community do you need to be so your produce good leaders?  Or what kind of community to we need to be so we can raise leaders up from the inside and not have to hire from the outside?  Those questions those presume that leaders are picked by someone (other leaders?  democracy?) and that we actually know what a good leader is. So I think we do need to ask this question. Because it takes the pressure off the one leader to be a perfect leader so his community succeeds. This question though forces us to put the pressure on the community so that it doesn’t even matter who the leader is. Hauerwas asks this questions and others in the video below.

Something in a conversation I had tonight sparked this post, there is nothing of substantial value in this post, it’s just me ranting.  Fitch has an excellent post on this topic here if you want to read it, but I’m just going to wrestle out loud for a minute.

Does the multisite church model work and is it effective in producing the kind of people that are bent towards the kingdom?  Is the idea of a local church really compatible with a multisite, beamed in teaching pastor, universally branded, hierarchical methods of multisite church methods of today?  There are a lot of questions that I have around this model.
In support of the model, I wonder if “teaching” biblical truths is all that important to be local and contextualized to a specific community.  Because if they are universal, then maybe we should just all be listening to Bruxy Cavey or Bill Hybels or whoever beams their face on the big screen.  One of the things that Tim Keller says in his Leadership and Church Size Dynamics article is

In a larger church people will let you pastor them if you are a good preacher, in a smaller church the reverse is true: people will listen to your sermons if you are a good pastor.

I think when I say I support the model, I basically mean is I can see what people would argue as to why this was important.  I don’t actually agree with it at all.  In the quote above, I land pretty heavily on the side of be the good pastor so people will listen to your sermons.  In a multisite model, that doesn’t exist.

Then come the problems I have with it.  The problems are never ending actually.  Whether it be how closely multisite church models seem to resemble corporations or how the teaching pastor is never actually speaking directly to people and only to random topics and ideas or how the entire model seems to be completely void of any local community engagement, I don’t see how a multisite church model effectively models what the kingdom of God is?  If the kingdom of God is awakening people to the reality of a resurrected Lord, how is a multisite church doing that?  By branding churches with a stamp/logo made by a marketing company that was paid $100, 000?  By getting people in multiple cities to believe in your version of Christianity?  By mimicking corporations, growth paradigms and marketing strategies?  By collecting tithes from all the sites just to keep the main site afloat and running effectively?

Obviously there are exceptions to every rule.  People have been affected, changed and brought closer to the kingdom because of a multisite church.  But really.  Is this the way that Jesus points us to?  Is this the slow and patient way forward that we are told it will be?  I just can’t help but think that multisite churches are just another exasperated attempt by the evangelical church to offer something relevant that meets people needs but doesn’t actually lead anyone to change let alone be empowered to actually live radically and faithfully in the contexts they find themselves in.

I’m not sure what it is, but I seem to make my way into the public sphere a lot.  Even as a kid, my neighbour was one of the journalists for the local paper and I would get my picture in there just for sledding down a hill.  Now days I still end up being in front of people, being written about for random accomplishments and then sometimes pushing my way into the limelight by starting protests or opposing something.  I recognize that a large part of this is my personality, some of it is my own pride and loving to be noticed and some of it is this push that I have to just expose what I see as harmful and oppressive.

I started this blog about 7 years ago and have had my share of drama on it and put myself in the public eye numerous times.  Whether it be writing letters to the editor for my local paper, writing as an opposition to church related blogs or authors, thinking out loud about controversial topics or saying a swear word that offended someone it always seems to upset people a lot or inspire people a lot.  In almost everything that I have done I have gotten a range of responses.  Never have I written something or been involved in something that has had people all agreed as to whether or not what I said was good or bad.

This for me is fun at times.  I like the tension, I like the dialogue.  I like being wrong sometimes because I find being publicly corrected to be a educational experience for me (though I would generally feel embarrassed at first).  I also like being right and people linking to me to prove a point or because they were inspired or because they wish they would have said what I did.  I like sparking unsettling feelings in people and I love motivating people to continue on in their direction.  I’m not sure how I ended up this way, but I’m completely comfortable in the public sphere.

As of late though, I’m wondering if being public is almost working against what I’m trying to do.  I can honestly say that the reason I go public with things isn’t because I want to be known (it obviously is something I like and I struggle with pride like everyone else, but it isn’t my motivation).  I go public because I believe that being in the public’s eye makes you accountable and honest or it at least forces you to be closer to the truth.  I like being told I’m wrong, and I like to tell someone that they are wrong.  They are both important experiences for me.  I think it’s because I value logic and truth.  I just love it.  I love learning, I love dialogue, I love being confronted, I love confronting and I love people.

I’m having a crisis right now though.  It seems that no matter how much I value truth, and exposing it – it doesn’t become more popular.  Through all my moves of going public, calling out people, critiquing in love or in sarcasm or whatever tactic I use, it doesn’t actually seem to serve the purpose of convincing anyone new (it’s easy to inspire people who already agree with you).  It doesn’t seem to encourage me when someone agrees with me or tells me that it’s good to hear someone else that has their thoughts or when I get the same commenters on my blog encouraging me.   So the only voices that really affect me are the ones that that are silent.  Either that or the ones that seem to be overly hurt by the things that I have said or caused seem to haunt me and I can’t get it out of my head.  It’s not that they disagree with me.  It’s not even that I have offended them.  It’s more that I have somehow caused them to be less closer to what I believe to be the truth than when I first came into contact with them because of something I have said.  Can talking and pointing about the truth actually cause people to be further away from it?  I’m afraid it can.

Dialogue, I am learning, is only a helpful process when the other person is involved.  It’s important to see when dialogue happens, because when dialogue happens, change happens.  When I say things like ‘involved’ and ‘dialogue’, I don’t just mean reading my blog and yelling at me because I am hurting someone’s feelings, or scanning your Google Reader.  I mean participating in seeking truth alongside of me.  Which, turns out, doesn’t generally happen through words on websites, at least not for me and protests on street corners.  Since the beginning, the only real change that I have seen is in myself and those that I actually live in and among.  It’s the people that I’m in daily relationship with every day, carrying each other burdens and celebrating joys that I actually seen any change in our lives.  People that comment on my blog?  People that are pissed off about something I wrote in the paper?  People that followed the Tyndale/Bush fiasco?  I don’t even know.  I doubt change came from these situations to them.

So, it forces me to ask myself the question…What do I love more? People discovering truth or myself knowing more truth and proclaiming it more?  My track record has been all about absorbing as much truth as I can and as soon as I know something new or exciting or to expose something I blurt it out because I can’t hold it in.  But I think my answer to that question is that I would much prefer to see myself and my community changed by the truth that we have come to see together rather than going off by myself and coming to whatever random conclusions I have come to and then trying to get everyone else in the entire world to believe me.

Which brings me to my title.  I’m starting to think that any public, loud, in your face truth seeking or exposing is unnecessary and distracting from what I should really be focusing on.  What if the truth is to actually shut up about the truth and just live it in your community and wait patiently to be changed to be more like the truth you believe.  What if the most honest and good thing I can do is to not even participate in the global arguments of sexuality, politics and religion? Really what is the purpose of my twitter feed, my blog posts and my list of friends on Facebook.  I’m at least coming to grips with the fact that whatever my social activity is online isn’t the source of change in people.

If I oppose Bush coming to Tyndale, and it works, he actually doesn’t come, but then leave a thousand people frustrated and disjointed what is the point? Have I actually helped those thousand people come to see truth more clearly, or have I made it worse?  Sure lots of people loved the protest and even signed it, but those were people that already agreed with the fact that we thought it was wrong for him to come.  I can easily fuel my passion to think what I did was right because of all those people who agreed with me.  I’m wondering though, for all the heart ache and work that was involved.  Did anyone actually get closer to the truth (whatever it may be in this situation), or did the whole situation cause most of us to get low and stand more firm in what we already believe so that we could launch attacks in every other direction?  Maybe the approach needs to be different.  Maybe it isn’t just to win where my voice is the loudest and I can get the most people to agree with me because that seems to be the way of politics, and it doesn’t really seem to work to change people’s minds.  We all know politics doesn’t change people’s minds.  No one really has a choice anyway so we just go with whatever media tells us best lines up with our current convictions (which were probably already formed by the media anyway).  So what does?

It’s the slow and steady patience that doesn’t depend on results to feel like you are doing the right thing.  Parker Palmer tells this story of this Quaker named John Woolman who felt that the Lord told him that slavery was wrong and evil and the Quakers needed to free their slaves.  The Quakers took this information and brought it to their group and wrestled with it for a long time and they could not come to a consensus.  Quakers don’t vote, because they don’t think that 51% should be able to control the 49% and they see that as an act of violence.  So they said to Woolman, that while they can’t see this light themselves, they were certain that he could see this very clearly.  So they told him that they would support his family while he would travel around delivering his message for as long as it takes for some kind of outcome to happen.   So he did this, traveled the East Coast for almost twenty years proclaiming this message to his friends and other Quakers.  He became famous for wearing clothing that wasn’t made by slaves, or if he knew a meal was prepared by slaves, he would fast that meal.   He had this slow and patient way of confronting that which was wrong without being so in your face about it that he wasn’t welcome.  Twenty years!

After twenty years, the Quakers eventually reached a consensus and freed their slaves.  The Quakers were the first religious community to free their slaves in the United States, and they did so eighty years before the civil war.  Parker Palmer says that this story helps us see that sometimes slow actually means faster because we are getting to the root system as opposed to just putting wallpaper over what we think.  This wasn’t just taking a vote and then moving on, but this was a patient waiting game allowing people to change and shift while slowly nudging them along.  I find this story encouraging.  Because it tells me that all the individual moments of protest and dialogue I will have probably won’t change people, and if it does, it’s shallow and meaningless over time.  But that’s the game that everyone plays.  Everything has to happen now, you preach a sermon and you expect your community to agree and then shift their entire lives to match that sermon in a week.  The media moves from story to story giving us snipets of reality and truth, and we think that’s the way our lives should be as well.

Long term, slowing down and patience is the only way forward.  It’s the only way that change comes to me or anyone else.  The game is fast and you need answers right away and you need to win.  So just leave the game, stop playing it.  Grow a garden, take your sabbath, be a mentor, read more books, put your feet up more, relax – be truthful in how you live, not just what you say.  The world is in a frenzy all around you and one more person in the chaos screaming about what is right and true doesn’t help anyone.  The people who quietly exit the chaos and live beautiful lives are the ones who are the game changers.

In the past fifty years, we have consumed more goods and services than in all previous generations put together.

September 2007 is when I posted an idea I had to start sharing things.  It was called ATIC and the basic concept was that people could post items that they had for other people in their community to browse to borrow.  I wanted to get my Sarnia church on board.  No one used it.  I’m sure there was a hundred reasons why, but as reality set in I started realizing that this was an up hill battle of helping change people’s habits of how they viewed their possessions.  Different people loved the idea and it was replicated in a few different churches in Canada and the States.  Sarnia is a tough city to experiment with anything new as it is.  It’s a blue collar town and people are generally happy with the money they make, the things they have and their pace of life.  The idea of changing habits isn’t welcomed as much as I hoped.  However, this idea started to spread quite rapidly and now there are hundreds of different sites and companies started around the world to help facilitate this kind of sharing.

The world has been changing quite rapidly.  The way that people view their things is changing as well.  A few months ago I stumbled on this video by Rachel Botsman about the rise of collaborative consumption and started to see that she has made a case for projects like ATIC all over the world.  Sharing is starting to become as natural as buying things and people are using the Internet to do it.

I found her book What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers and have been enthralled by the amount of data they have collected on how the world is changing this way.  From sharing cars to rooms to children’s toys, the shift is exciting.

However, the disappointing part of all this is that this is yet another example of how the church is not really leading culture at all.  We are far behind in learning to appropriately respond to culture and lead an alternative lifestyle that models the kingdom of God.  Where are churches in this shift?  We are probably just moving at the same pace as everyone else as I am starting to see communities pop up around of Christians learning to view their things differently.  We should be leading the way.  Showing the world what it means when the kingdom of God is present.

Nevertheless, it’s exciting.  It’s exciting to see more tools available to share and more ideas spreading so that we can replicate them in our local communities.

And when it comes right down to it, what most of us really want is, as legendary designer Victor Papanek put it, “the hole, not the drill.”

Allright so Joe spoke last week about how John and Peter were taken in and questioned by the high priest and Sadducees. Basically what happened is you have John and Peter and they are running around healing people and telling people that the messiah that they were waiting for is finally found in Jesus Christ who died and was no risen. They were doing fascinating miracles that God was using to prove that what they were saying was actually true. They get questioned by them and put in jail and berated about who’s name they are performing miracles under and John and Peter just keep saying that all they are doing is proclaiming what they have seen and heard with their own eyes. It happened so all they are doing is being honest about what they have seen. On top of that, everyone else was impressed because someone they knew who was very sick and crippled was healed as well. So people started believing because it seemed to them that the God that they have been serving all their lives was up to it again, and they were speaking truth about them.

So we need to ask ourselves why would the Sadducee’s press John and Peter so hard and seem to come again something that was so good? It’s easy to write a song about them and toss them off but it’s important to know who these people were and why they would be so upset that John and Peter were proclaiming the news they were proclaiming. The Sadducees were an important sect of Judaism during the time of Jesus because they were a link between the Jewish religion and the political world around them. They were responsible for the maintenance of the Temple, performing certain sacrifices and were generally considered one of the highest roles within Jewish culture. Since the temple was very much the center of political and religious leadership in Jerusalem, it made sense that Sadducees would eventually move into places of power within politics. And they were. They performed all sorts of tasks for the government as well including collecting taxes, represented the state internationally, regulated relations with the Romans, equipped and led the army and administered the state.

The Sadducees were extremely powerful people. Their livelihoods were caught up in their vocation and they held the keys of power to the people in Jerusalem and the state that they were in. You can see now why they were so involved in putting Jesus to death, he was a revolutionary with a following who his followers called him Lord. There was supposed to be only one Lord and that was Caesar. If Caesar wasn’t Lord, then their entire operation falls apart and they don’t have a job. They no longer hold their powerful positions, they no longer are needed.

So you can also understand why when Peter and John start going around proclaiming that this revolutionary who was put to death by them is not really dead and then start performing miracles in his name why that might freak them out a bit. They are obviously willing to go to great length to prevent power from leaving their hand and a few loud mouths wasn’t going to stop them. But alas, the multitudes win again and they are all astounded at the healings and people started believing what they were saying. So they threatened them a bit more and then they let them go. They couldn’t win this one, so they probably muttered a few things about them not coming back and disturbing the peace and then told them to get lost. This is where Joe left us last week. With John and Peter just getting out of custody from under the Sadducees, and so we will read from there in Acts 4.

23 On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.[b]’[c]
27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29 Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”
31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

So Peter and John get back from their little battle where they get thrown in jail and argue with the powerful religious leaders and then they come back to their people and tell them everything. It makes it kind of fun doesn’t it? I think that at this point Peter and John are probably starting to get excited/worried as things start to unfold. They know the biggest secret in the world for man kind. Jesus is risen and he is our Saviour and he has saved the world from it’s downward direction. Why wouldn’t everyone get excited about this? The very people who should be excited are throwing them in jail for simply telling people what they know to be true. They start telling everyone what is happening then burst out into some spontaneous praying and rejoicing. They start making the connections with the very beginnings of creation all the way to David and quoting scripture and eventually tell the story again how everything has unfolded. They are acting in wonder and awe. Can’t you see it? They just have this run in with all the powerful types who just put Jesus to death and then they have this grand realization. Oh man, God knew this was coming all along. God had this all planned out since the beginning. He knew it! It’s all working according to plan. All this time we were freaking out, denying Christ and now look how it’s all unfolding. Let it happen God, they say, let the miracles flow and let your story continue forward. It’s like a movie plot unfolding.

I just find this little section to be quite transformative for the church. It’s like the moment when yet another light flips on for them. I feel like this is the moment when they decide to enter into the story at God’s pace and they are finding their place in it. It’s like the moment when they realize things are going to get worse before they get better but they all make the decision to jump into it. Like in Mission Impossible, when they are all sitting around and they get the news that they might die or if they get found out no one is going to vouch for them. It’s like that moment.

They ask for miracles, but really it’s not about that. They just want boldness now to speak what they have seen and not be scared by the powers that are oppressing them. This moment in Acts seems to be that realization, that moment where they make the connection that if they really believe what they are talking about here then the most powerful people (the very people who put Jesus to death) were going to be in their face trying to stop them at every turn.

At this point, at this realization, Luke tells us that the place they were was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and could speak boldly. So their prayer was answered. Like times before, this moment is seen as a signpost of the movement of Christianity and how it moved from twelve people to where we are today. This is how the Christian church started unschooled ordinary men being opposed by religous scholars trying to shut them down. The realization that powerful people will confront you is an important part of being a Christian, it’s an important part of this revolution. Learning how to speak boldly in their midst and prayer and understanding your place in the story seems to be an important part of how Christianity came to be.

Q: Do you see speaking boldly as a central part of your faith? 

If not.

Why? What has happened that having faith in Jesus no longer means the same things it meant to the first Christians?

Then we come up to the end of Acts 4, which I’m pretty sure Joe didn’t read whatsoever because if he read it he would have seen that it is pretty much the same as the end of Acts 2. Let’s read it together.

32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
36 Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), 37 sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Luke is pretty persistent on this idea and he always seem to bookend this idea of having things in common and making sure no one is need with a shift in the movement of the church. As the apostles begin to better understand their role as apostles and what their calling is, Luke keeps bringing it back to what they were actually doing with their lives. While they were speaking boldly and moving forward the good news of Jesus, their lives took on a very distinct way of living. They were together. There was no other way the church could have grown and achieved what it did unless this was the case. Unless they were of one heart and mind and taking care of each other and living life by the values of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God never could have gone anywhere. So Luke tells us again, in almost an entirely replicated passage two chapters later that this is what the early Christians lives looked like.

Luke seems to talk a lot more about money than any of the other gospels. The gospel of Luke is full of the parables that relate to money, and most of the parables about money are actually unique to Luke, meaning they aren’t in any other gospel. Only Luke tells the story of the rich fool. So it makes sense that he would carry this kind of talk over into Acts. It is important to note though that coupled with all these miracles are miraculous moves by this community and their economic situation. It is a miracle that a community of people would not claim any of their possessions as their own. It is a miracle that Barnabas would sell a field that he owned and give the money to the apostles.

Most of us now are just irritated about the constant bombardment of Sundays and and church that have to do with money. We are tired of the church telling us what to do with our money. Unfortunately though, a majority of the Bible and how it interprets our life under the Kingdom of God has to do with how we spend, use and view our money. You have to look at it this way. The world works in one way. To denote value it gives something a dollar amount and everything is defined by how much it is worth. Our entire world works this way. We all live in this world so we know this. Especially today. Everything is commercialized. If you want sex, buy it. If you want friends, buy them. If you want security, buy it. If you need to pay someone back because you killed their brother, well ask your insurance company because they have a price on their life. The overall price as estimated by economists at Stanford for your life is around 129,000 a year. Money literally makes the world go round and drives most passions, inventions, relationships, entertainment, grief, wars and greed. Very few things that you do in your life cannot be retraced back to money somehow. This is the reality of our life.

However, ever since the beginning of God’s story that we know, God has had a different way of denoting value to people and things and it has nothing to do with money. Read back into the Bible and see that every time there is mention of money or how to use it or how to view it it is almost entirely opposite to how the world around it at the time was using it or viewing it. Luke, picking up on this reversal all throughout God’s story, is consistent with the theme by telling these stories about the way that God’s people view and use money. It seems like there is a very clear distinction between the way the world works and the way that God works. So if you are part of God’s kingdom, then you follow by God’s rules when it has to do with money. God’s rules are that it’s not your money and it doesn’t denote value and it doesn’t give security, only God can do that. So then money gets reduced to something else, it’s a currency of the the other way of doing things. When a community of people who are committed to God’s kingdom, their entire lives change and it usually starts with how economics are dealt with in the community. So Luke shows us this. At the end of Acts 2 and now at the end of Acts 4.

“The church takes care of its own thus creating a vignette, a paradigm of the sort of world God intends for all.” – Willimon

Luke sees parallels to Jesus showing up and commencing the way of God to how God’s people use their money. This is the way that the Kingdom of God moves. This makes sense doesn’t it? God’s kingdom isn’t a kingdom of fighting, war, violence. But it is a kingdom. It does have a king and people in it. With kingdoms there has to be some sort of marker, something that makes you different then everyone else. For the Christian church according to Luke – it seems to be marked by how Christians spend their money and how they view their money.

Q: Does money play a central role in your faith? Do we separate it from our faith? How should we view money today so that we identify with God’s kingdom?

Here is what I think. I think us, here in the room today, have spent our entire lives living with two feet in two different worlds. In one world it’s all about money. We all have jobs so that we can make money to buy the things we want and need and provide for our families. We look at our money as ours that buys us things for our satisfaction. Money is on our minds every day, whether it’s to buy something or sell something or earn something. It consumes us. However, most of us in this room are also Christians. So we’ve been told and have been raised that we should live a certain kind of way. That way usually includes giving 10% of our money to whatever church we belong too, being nice to people, showing up somewhere on a Sunday, and upholding strong morals. Our version of Christianity that we all have grown up with intersects with the world’s value system at different times. Our faith tells us to spend the money on the right things and that 10% of it belongs to God. Then that’s about it.

Living like this is actually pretty complicated because both worlds promote very different messages. The world says invest your money and make your money work for you and be responsible and save your money and reward yourself with your money. That’s how we raise our kids to think, that’s why we go to school, that’s why we get jobs that’s why we are middle class people living the way we are
So we take all those messages and then try to Christianize them. We tell ourselves that we can invest our money by giving to our church because we are investing in the Kingdom. Or we tell ourselves that we only give money to those that are grateful and who will actually use it for a good purpose. Or we tell ourselves that we deserve to be rewarded, that we are somehow entitled to rewards that we give our self from the money that we earned. We Christianize the message of money so that we can live with it making sense. This poses a problem though because we end up starting with a twisted view of what money is and how we are supposed to spend it because we are starting from a worldly perspective.

The Kingdom of God though is completely different. Value is derived from being God’s creation. You trust God to provide for you and when you have something in your possession you see it as no more than a tool to help further the Kingdom that you are part of. When you start from this point of view, from this understanding of who you are and what your purpose is in life and then work money into the equation after this, everything changes. This is what was happening in Acts. This is why these people were living the way that they were living. They derived value and security and identity not through their economic place in the world but through their place in the Kingdom of God. So then if you start from this point of view of the Kingdom of God then money when it intersects with your life has a different role. It’s no longer what drives your life but is simple the thing that drives everyone else’s lives around you. Then you can see money as a tool rather than a lifesource. Which explains this church in Acts. No one saw anything as their own. No one was ever in need. People were selling the things that they did own and then giving the money away to the cause.

Can we be the kind of community that lives like this? Do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of community that live like everyone else but then make our faith something we tack on and insert it into the lives that we are already living? Or do you think we can be the kind of community that is driven by something else entirely and then we use our money to that end? Will we be a community where our church and our lives are driven and dictated by money or can we be driven by our faith and then money falls in line to that?

Let’s pray.

God forgive us for not truly living in your kingdom.
Whether it be through our money, time and relationships
We always tend to make it about us
We never think twice
Before following blindly what we think is normal

God forgive us for being dictated by our cashflow
For feeling secure when we have money in the bank
For feeling valuable when we buy new things
For feeling powerful when we show off

God forgive us for living by our own rules
For living by our own values
For dictating what we think we deserve
For trying to control outcomes

Free us to live the way you created us to be
Free us to live generously
Remind us of our insurmountable value
Remind us that love doesn’t come through things

Give us dreams that start with you
Give us dreams that aren’t selfish
Give us dreams that help the world
Give us boldness to live backwards to this world
Give us boldness to live without idols
Give us boldness to proclaim with our lives
The kind of life that you made possible