Experiments in Creative Action

Monday evening, Memorial Day evening, I sat with an older couple whose vitality blurred the marks that times leaves on most people. He’s around 80, I think, and she’s probably a bit younger. He was a pastor for decades. I listened as he voiced a dissatisfaction with the American church, and specifically his local church, that was strikingly similar to what my friends and I have been discussing.

And I listened as he said that, in his decades studying the church from all angles, he had not come across anything much better than what this local church had to offer. He had not found a good model of what faithful community should look like.

80-years-wise and what was this man’s response? Try something new. Start something outside of the box.


Creative Action!

I’ve heard it now from every generation – we are not satisfied with the easy demands of Sunday morning church. We can see that people living the way Jesus taught would create a strikingly different kind of community, and it’s clear that if the story is true at all then it calls us to follow that way with vigor. And the church has taught us to trust the story.

But we haven’t seen what this different way of life or its community looks like, at least not firsthand. We haven’t seen it modeled. We can read about it in Acts, and we can follow different experiments that are emerging around the country and the world. But eventually we come to the edge of what we know, what we have seen, desiring the next step but left without a clear path.

The way forward is creative action: to embed the principles that Jesus taught as deeply as possibly in your paradigm – love for God, love for neighbor, generosity, hope, service, equality, etc. – and to remember the best of what we’ve seen, then create things to do that seem to follow and fulfill those principles and examples.

Do experiments in love; do experiments in generosity; do experiments in hope. Test everything. If it works, repeat it with improvements. If it doesn’t figure out why not and try something new. Test, learn, apply, repeat. Create new ways of loving God and of loving the people around you. Try a new way of serving the poor. Test a new way to apply the idea of equality. Give someone something you’ve never thought to give, or give to someone you’ve never given to. See what happens. Write it down.

And tell me how it goes! I want to know. I’m going to be sharing and discussing different stories of creative action, wherever they happen. Send me stories that you find, or stories that you create. And I’ll share mine as well.


Let’s figure out how to live.

The Hard Work of Community

We're so good at making money. Or so good at trying, at least. We work more hours per week than any society on earth, ever, so that we can bring home the paycheck. The principle of hard work for hard-earned cash is sunk deeply into our paradigms even before we can pronounce 'paradigms.'

But here we are, checks banked, enough money to buy all that we need and more, and not satisfied. Here we are, distracted and isolated. Here we are, lonely. So terribly lonely.

Loneliness, I've recently discovered, is nothing more (or less) than the desire for community. Some will tell you that it's the need for romance or marriage or sex. But it's not, not this deep, pervasive loneliness, the one that feels like the inexpressible inside of you is shouting silently. That one is the desire for a rich, vibrant, deep community.

This community only exists when a group of people decide that they are going to love each other. That's what the church is. Remember what Jesus said about spotting his followers? You'll know them by their love for one another.

But this kind of community doesn't come easily. Most people seem to think (I know I did) that if they're relatively nice, normal, perhaps even interesting people then community will rush along and embrace them and they will be satisfied. But it doesn't come. It's never as rich as they know it ought to be, as they need it to be.

That is because, just like working year after year to build wealth, it takes sacrifice and commitment to build community. It takes a thousand little tasks - scheduling time to converse, asking questions, washing someone else's dishes, giving rides to the airport. And it takes major paradigm shifts - I'm responsible for your well being, your needs are as important to me as my own. And until we are ready to do the hard work of community we will remain rich and lonely, wondering why our paychecks can't hold a decent conversation.

For those of you who have agreed that the church as we see it on Sunday mornings is not all that it could be, I have no proven answers. What I do have is a direction that I'm headed, and that I'm confident will lead us closer to the lifestyle that Jesus taught. And that is the direction of deeper, more committed community. The direction of more love for one another. I don't presume to know what that looks like in all contexts, or your context, or even my own half the time. But I challenge you to begin doing the hard work of community. I have a hunch it's going to pay off better than any paycheck I've ever gotten. (Though that's not saying much.)

Blessings and Woes

Those who have been around me lately have probably heard a bit about Luke 6, when Jesus says that some are blessed, but says 'woe to' others.

"Blessed are you who mourn now, for you will laugh... Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn," said Jesus.

Then, from an address given by Gareth Higgins at the memorial service for the late writer John O'Donohue, quoting O'Donohue:

"If you need to be in your own space to be depressed, I totally understand, but if all you’re going to do is be depressed, then come and spend the day with me, and we can be depressed together. Because I love you today, and I will love you forever."

It's about now my friends. The kingdom of God is full of blessings and woes. Sometimes it will hurt to be a part of it, like taking up a cross; sometimes it will be a joy, like when your cares are cured. Most of all, it will be abundant. And it starts now.

Thanks Mike.

Live in the place where you live

Wherever you live, if you are not a part of a trusting community of people you don't really live there. You live in your own little world.

This is something that I've learned here in Uganda, where wealth differentials, culture disparities, and language barriers make trust a hard thing to build. But if I don't trust people here and invest in them and let them invest in me, then I'm not really here. I'm just passing through this place, like a breeze: inconsequential, quickly forgotten.

The same goes in America. You exist where you build trusting community. That's why, in a culture where most people don't talk to their neighbors, people's worlds have shrunken to their immediate families, their houses, perhaps their offices.

If we are going to make our communities better, we have to start by really living in them, building relationships based on trust, developing understanding. The larger you want the impact to be the more barriers you'll have to trust across - socioeconomic, geographic, ethinic.

But you might want to start with your next door neighbor.