Insight on the Kingdom of God, all of life, and the state of the church, society and culture from a minister, attorney, entrepreneur and writer who's occasionally taught apologetics and theology at a liberal arts Christian college. My roots are evangelical and essentially reformed, while also drawing on the rich history of thought from other Biblical traditions.
I often get a chuckle from Lark News, and their latest spoof definitely rings all-to-true.
It reminds me of a very large (huge, in fact) evangelical church in town — where the pastor preaches his sermons on a vast stage each Sunday while a smoke machine bellows out measured amounts of awe and mystery in the background. For real!
It’s very good theater, plus the sermons aren’t half bad if you’re into that kind of thing.
The church that meets together at my home each Friday evening to share a meal, encounter God and minister one to another is an improbable assembly of believers and even not-yet believers. We 
cut across races, cultures, nationalities, social status, and so many other lines — producing a rich tapestry of interwoven lives.
It reminds me of Adullam’s cave, where “every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented” went to flee from Saul. While there, God began the process of forging them into leaders who eventually established and became pillars in David’s kingdom. 1 Sam. 22:2.
Likewise, if you saw us you would laugh and wonder, “what can God do with these people?” Yet, isn’t that God’s way: to establish his Kingdom on earth by transforming lives, cultures, nations and history not with the ordained, but with the ordinary?
A fellow pilot, David Lytle, discovered a cassette tape in a small recorder he purchased for $3 at a flea market last week. It contained a recording made in 1978 of a few World War II bomber gunnery crew members who hadn’t seen each other in many years and were reminiscing about their experiences during the war. David mentioned the tape on a forum for other pilots that I frequent, and with everyone’s encouragement converted the recording to an MP3 file and posted it online.
This is another YouTube video posted by a friend on Facebook (give credit where credit is due!). It’s a hilarious spoof on worship.
It’s good, sometimes, to laugh even if it’s at ourselves!
A friend posted this short video on Facebook and it’s too precious, timely and relevant to pass up. As you listen, may God mercifully and lovingly wound you in order to heal you.
It’s by Paul Washer, who I first mentioned in a blog back in March (see God Is Not Passive). His burden for the Church touched my heart then, and continues to do so now.
As I’ve previously ministered in other parts of the world, I’ve been alarmed at the growing influence of the so-called “prosperity gospel”.
The prosperity message is simply the latest incarnation of the historically persistent “gospel of self” that’s been a blight on the Church since the beginning. Going back to Simon the Samaritan in Acts 8, there’s always been those among us — with gifted personalities and beguiling, mesmerizing spirits of seeming sincerity — who pimp the gospel for personal gain.
Such God pimps have become a dominant force overseas — much more so than in America (where they nonetheless have a significant but I think shrinking foothold). John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and other self-promoting, heretical TV preachers are all over the airways outside the U.S. through TBN and other so-called “Christian” media peddling their seductive gospel of “self”.
As last Friday’s church met over a shared meal (nothing fancy — KFC this week!) around a kitchen table, someone asked a question that opened up a great discussion on God’s sovereignty and human will. We must have spent at least an hour in dynamic exchange — with amazing questions, comments and seeking Scripture together as God’s truths opened up for everyone.
I vividly recall leafing through World magazine back in 2006 and reading the unsettling but hardly surprising news that Randall Terry – the 
firebrand evangelical who formerly headed Operation Rescue and was then financially wiped out following a series of lawsuits by pro-abortionists – had joined the Roman Catholic Church.
“Unsettling,” because it provides further evidence of the growing weariness and disillusionment I’m seeing among spiritual “entrepreneurs” who’ve been laboring within evangelical circles to expand the Kingdom of God in all spheres of life and culture.
“Hardly surprising,” however, as those “on point” for the Kingdom increasingly seek refuge from the prevailing pop-theology (or dare I say lack of theology) and me-focused brand of Christianity that pervades evangelicalism (which includes charismatics and Pentecostals), animates many of our local church and national leaders, and cuts believers off from the great historic doctrines and creeds of our faith.
The intercessory prayer movement of the last several years is at a crucial junction.
Driven by angst over our nation’s declining commitment to basic principles and the growing malaise of our increasingly dysfunctional churches, many Christians are crying out for God’s intervention. What I’ve rarely seen, however, is a matching embrace of effective, transformational repentance — which Biblically involves changing the way we act by changing the way we think.
While desperately seeking to touch the heart of God, few intercessors seem willing to do the hard work of understanding the mind of God. The challenges facing our nation, and the Church, require both. We need intercession, but we also need God’s understanding followed by corresponding action.
Of the seven spiritual gifts listed in Romans 12, the last — and I believe the most powerful but least appreciated and most abused — is mercy.
As I watch and sense what God is doing with an emerging new spiritual generation, I see that their dominant characteristic is mercy. I also have begun to realize that God wants to use “mercies” (those with the primary spiritual gift of mercy) as catalysts to unleash additional gifts in others. That, in turn, will bring this rising generation to new pastures where God’s presence can dwell among us.
This doesn’t mean everyone in this new spiritual generation has mercy as their dominant individual spiritual gift. But as a whole, they nonetheless seem to collectively exhibit the main motivations of mercy — which are a deep, personal craving for the presence of God and for genuine intimacy with others.
As a result, this rising generation has little interest or patience with the moral and cultural wars of my generation, or with our prevailing hypocrisy as we tried to fix everyone else but failed to exhibit God’s presence in our own lives. Nor can they understand the isolation, loneliness and lack of authentic community among older Christians.
Today in the jail, after two hours of powerful ministry between the men one to another, they stopped and said they decided earlier this week to do something for me. They then stood around me, laid hands on me, and prayed the most wonderful, tender prayers of blessing I’ve ever heard.
I cried as I realized what they were doing, because they’ve learned — maybe with some of them for the first time in their lives — to give rather than always take or receive. After months of mentoring them in “being” the church (see my blog, The Church in D Pod), they heeded God’s gentle call to new pastures. As a result, they now “get” it and wonderful life is flowing between them and from them — even to me!
Each of us is born with a personality that’s uniquely tailored to what God wants us to do with our lives.
Understanding God’s calling and the associated personality gifts he’s given us is not difficult: We find joy and fulfillment in doing what we are gifted in, and we are gifted in what we are called to do. Furthermore, when we use our gifts and fulfill our calling according to God’s will, we feel his pleasure – in addition to our own.
There’s a problem, however, in seeking validation from using our gifts or pursing our calling instead of pleasing God. Instead of being content with God saying “well done, thou good and faithful servant,” we seek legitimacy in who we are, what we do, how others react or in the results of our actions. Such validation comes from and is about us, rather than God.
If you look at Romans 12, there are seven “gifts” that correspond to seven very different personality types. With each of those personality “giftings”, there are different abilities, motivations and validation issues.
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This Sunday, like most Sundays, I will be fellowshipping with the “Church in D Pod” at the local jail.
D Pod is a unit housing around a hundred men, and God has been pouring out his new wine in an exciting way among those inmates.
A couple of months ago, I started shifting my focus from “conducting” church services “for” the men. God was challenging me to start mentoring and training them instead to “be” the church by learning to minister one to another.
At the same time, God sovereignly arranged for two brothers from Africa — where Christians generally are way ahead of their American brothers and sisters on these issues — to be jailed in that unit. They, too, understood the concept of ministering one to another and started fostering authentic fellowship among the men.
I urge you to watch this ten minute video, then ask: When did “church” become a podium-focused “God Show” watched by passive spectators for an hour or so each Sunday morning?
Friends, the days of the “podium church” and the Sunday “God show” — where we go each Sunday to look past the backs of the heads of those sitting in front of us as we passively watch and receive carefully scripted ministry from the front podium through a tightly controlled microphone — are passing.
“The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” — Margaret Thatcher.
Some may think we’ve not yet sunk into the clutches of socialism — 
which happens when we have a state-run economy. But consider this: In 2009, federal and state governments will consume 40 percent of the United States’ TOTAL gross domestic product. This means that nearly half of all the wealth generated in America this year will be taken by civil government to fund its ever expanding control over more and more of our lives and our economy. As a result, we have run out of money while undercutting the means for producing future wealth.
Yet the federal government seeks to expand its reach even more.
As God brings forth new wine in a new generation, there’s a fundamental dynamic that can’t be ignored. To put it bluntly, new wine sucks!
In my younger days, I was an amateur wine maker. So I know what Jesus means when he says, “no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, ‘The old is better.’” (Luke 5:39)
On June 30, 2009, no less an authority than J. Lee Grady, the editor of Charisma Magazine, declared that “the Charismatic Movement is dead.”
It’s the 4th of July weekend here in the United States, and I was thinking about the first time I truly fell in love with America.
It was during my first trip overseas on my own, at the ripe old age of 21, after a year of grad school at Westminster Theological Seminary. I was sitting in Trafalgar Square in London on Independence Day, after more than a month of backpacking through the British Isles. It had been a grand trip of personal discovery as I hitchhiked from town to town, ate my meals in open air markets, slept on church steps, and occasionally visited youth hostels to take a shower. During my stay in Scotland, someone had given me a book by then Senator Helms called “When Free Men Shall Stand,” and I had been reading it off and on during my travels.
Here’s an interesting article, reprinted below, on how people will stick to what they believe or think even in the face of contrary facts or circumstances. As I’ve watched people react to challenges and controversies 
over the last couple of months, and to God bursting old wine skins as he brings forth new wine, I can believe it!
Isaiah 9:6-8 tells us that God’s Kingdom, from the incarnation onward, has been and will continue to be ever advancing. As such, God is constantly fermenting new wine — and providing new wine skins to contain it — as his progressive plan of redemption moves forward from one spiritual generation to each successive spiritual generation (which can include individuals of all ages!). God’s active and ever expanding intervention in history is clear, and his tendency to discard the old while bringing in the new is repeatedly seen in Scripture.
Yet it never failed to fascinate me, as a graduate student in church history back in the 1970s, to see how — time and time again — most Christians reject God’s new wine of new anointing for new generations. Instead, they choose to stick with their old wine and old wine skins.
New Covenant Fellowship in Manassas, Virginia, started out as a great church twenty-five years ago under a gifted pastor who’s since left. Under the current “pastor/elders” (the term they choose for themselves), massive numbers of additional people have left as the church sinks into cult practices and cult doctrines. As a result, attendance has plunged from thousands to barely thirty on Sunday mornings.
over the last several years — despite the tiny size of the congregation and the fact that he doesn’t even work at the church but works for an unrelated organization. When his self-enrichment was exposed, he denied it and claimed to have taken only a small fraction of the true amount.I received a number of calls and cards this weekend wishing me a happy father’s day. What was special is that they came from various men who I’ve mentored and walked besides over the years while they were in jail and upon their release. I felt very honored, blessed and humbled.
People don’t realize that the Biblical mandate to be “a father to the fatherless” is not talking solely about babies and children. There are many young men who need spiritual dads. It can be messy, but the impulse to embrace these men springs from the heart of the Father. There should be no orphans — of any age — in the Kingdom of God.
(c) Copyright 2009, Fulcrum Ministries. All Rights Reserved.
My closest friends have seen me walk through some very difficult times with my health over the last several years. Where others see the “together”, upbeat and accomplished Jim, they see the reserved, careful and slow-paced Jim who has learned to live with chronic fatigue.
This all started about five years ago. I had founded and was running a number of successful international businesses, including a law firm and a cutting edge scientific consulting firm. But in 2006 I had to walk away from it all due to debilitating chronic fatigue that began more than a year earlier.
I’ve been meeting with various brothers who also minister in the informal Christian networks I’m part of, along with others, to discuss starting a weekly fellowship (possibly in my home) for ex-inmates. My burden is for men whose lives are dramatically captured by God in jail, but then stumble when they get out because they can’t find authentic Christian community in our churches.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but health issues and distractions over problems in my local church prevented me. The church problems persist, but my health has been largely restored and my heart is stirring once again over this. That’s causing me to ask whether it’s time to stop putting the Kingdom of God on hold while waiting for some who hold local church offices to climb out of their seemingly perpetual leadership ruts, to begin moving forward, and to trust that God’s provisions will follow.
Maybe, my heart is saying, the best outcome is to provide an opportunity and a motive for churches in general — including mine — to get their acts together and start being the church, rather than doing “church”, by showing what’s possible when people of vision become engaged with each other and engaged in what God is doing in the earth today. After all, the Kingdom of God is much, much more than “church”, although hopefully each of our local churches are part of that progressively advancing Kingdom!
Self Delusion
“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.
“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I John 1:5-9 (KJV)
