Proclaiming Lordship in a Land of Many Kings…

I decided that I rather like writing, keeping a blog, sharing my thoughts, opening discussion, and all that. So, instead of letting the City blogs die off quietly, I thought I might keep the site around for a while. There are some obvious changes to my reasoning for having such a site and I would really like to bring them to light now, to whatever limited readership I’ve got:

• The City blogs started as a way to keep in touch with my friends and family while I was away on internship in St. Louis, MO. I’m home now and can keep in touch with you people quite literally, so an attempt at open, honest, real human communication this is not.
• The City blogs acted as a means by which I could share part of my story in St. Louis. The things I saw and the things I did there were supremely impacting on me and I wanted to share that with you. June 1st, 2008 – August 11th, 2008 was a period of time quite outside the ordinary and I thought it something that should be shared. This page is quickly becoming a place of every-day reflection on every-day things. In other words, there are many other more exciting and important things you could be reading than my half-baked beliefs and ideals.
• The City blogs existed to paint a portrait of a short missionary journey. Declared, Bannered is the journal of a missional life beginning to be sought and ultimately sorted out.

I’ve been home from STL for thirteen days now and, while I finally unpacked my clothes and did my laundry, I still have not fully unpacked my heart and made sense of the entire experience. St. Louis lit a fire in me and has profoundly changed the way I view myself, my world, and my God.

I used to view myself as a relatively good person, capable of accomplishing relatively good things in the eyes of relatively respectable people. I now view myself as a servant flying a banner, who enjoys the simple and unassuming acts of blowing bubbles with children and reading books.  My future is open ended and I rather like it that way.

I used to view my world as a place full of enemies — of people who were wrong and people who were right. It doesn’t take an astounding amount of brain-power to guess in which camp I thought I pitched my tent. I now view my world as a wholly broken one. I look at America and all her figurative machines and ache for the countless millions caught up in the gears and bloody macabre. I look at the world and see a vast pantheon of meaningless gods whose existence came about only because we first built them a shrine. One has to begin wondering when the falsehood of such idols will come to light and just what will happen when it does.

I used to view my God as an entity that could be easily defined and confined within the neat boundaries of language and metaphor. I will of course spend much time thinking of and writing my thoughts out on God, but I’ve changed my metaphors and altered my linguistic angle a bit and — more importantly — I’ve all but abandoned the idea of nailing it all completely. I’ll leave that hill to the scholars and preachers who have grown too tired to go on; as for me, I’ve got much more living, loving, growing and blowing bubbles to do.

I used to view my God as a Divine Creator who only intervened in His creation at key moments in world history; most importantly at places like the Exodus and the cross. The only change I would make to that statement now is the simple omission of the word ‘only’. God broke in then — and continues to break in now — to our reality to shake things up and to point towards His supreme lordship over all things. Through the Gospel proclamation and shared suffering of His gathered people, I believe Jesus continues to dethrone those worldly powers (both flesh-and-blood and not) who wrongly asserts themselves as in-control, moving all of Creation towards its prescribed end in which the world is finally, wholly put to rights.

I used to view my God as a great many things. Now I just call him Lord and that seems to cover it.

Numbers in the City

What follows is the farewell address I gave to my Church family at North City on my last day. I wrote this on Saturday night and delivered it at Church on Sunday. I believe it is as good a capstone as I can come up with to make sense of this experience, so this might be it for the City blogs. We’ll see what happens as I unpack and process. Enjoy.

“All too often in Church and missionary circles, the emphasis and judgment of a particular movement, ministry, or experience is based on numbers, on results, and on the quantitative harvest that it yields. Our culture embeds this ideology into our brains. In world missions, it is not uncommon to find supporting Churches offering threats of ended support if the given mission does not meet a conversion and baptismal quota. As the American business world would put it, “if it isn’t making dollars — or converts — then it isn’t making sense,” so, too, would the wrong-headed missionary. I think here at North City, though, where we are each seeking to live the life and fly the banner of Jesus together, we easily find where such a philosophy is lacking.

But please allow me, for but a moment, to entertain this flawed, numbers-driven philosophy of ministry. After all is said and done, I do believe that in numbers we can find no failure: as the saying goes, the numbers never lie. My disclaimer, though, is this: in the figures that follow, I ask that you give me a certain degree of wiggle-room and leniency. My totals are representative approximations; that is, they are merely the best guesses and numerical values that I can come up with to describe and quantify my concrete experiences here in the city with you.

Since June 1st, I have blown 1008 bubbles with roughly ten-to-thirteen little girls — many of whom became regular attendees to my impromptu bubble-blowing gatherings at Vacation Bible School. I’ve pushed twenty-four children on the three swings out in our courtyard, for about thirty-six to sixty-two swings per set. I have given eleven piggy-back rides and held about twenty-nine little hands. I have tallied 4,897 individual smiley-face and exclamation-point stamps (which comes out to 48,970 points, all totaled) for 147 young VBS- and Church-attendees. I have run through the sprinkler across the street nineteen times with six of my youngest neighborhood friends. I have gone on twenty-three early-morning runs around the block and have been recognized, waved at, and heard a bright and lively, “Hey, Mr. Danny!” called out to me by thirteen little neighborhood kids. Over the course of the summer, I have taught ten lessons to twenty-seven different students, aged eleven all the way up to twenty.

With you on Sundays, I have sang well over a hundred songs, read fifty-six passages of Scripture, prayed at least forty different prayers, and listened to ten of Robert’s sermons as well as one sermon from Cody. Just yesterday, I bore witness to four different baptisms into the mystical, miraculous Body of Christ. I have said grace, broken bread and shared meals with you on at least one hundred and forty-nine occasions. I have thrown one hundred and two football passes to eight of my teen-aged brothers, eighteen of which resulted in touchdowns. On the basketball court, I took seventy-three shots, resulting in perhaps only five actual baskets.

But before we all grow tired of counting my summer’s activities like so many little bedtime sheep, allow me cut my list short. I believe that I could go on for hours — days, even — and still be far from describing my experience here with you with the degree of accuracy that the use of numbers would imply.

My point is this: from where I stand today, looking back on my experiences from June 1st until now, I am overwhelmed. In trying to create an accurate tally, my brain, it begins to hurt. As I seek to attach the meaning so richly deserved to these numbers, my heart, it begins to burst. And here, I believe, we see where the numbers begin to fail. Because in each of these separate accounts, though staggering they may be, the numbers do not tell the full story. They do not tell of the smaller differences my time has made in your lives and more importantly, they can never fully describe the gigantic differences that each of you have made in mine. You see, the Kingdom of God cannot be quantified because the Kingdom of God cannot be contained.

As I look back, I find myself overjoyed at the memories of such rich and ripened blessings. You have all changed me, shaped my mind and my heart and I know that, as I leave this place tomorrow, I will never, ever be the same.

With all of my heart, I love you, Church, and I will never forget you. Peace be with you.”

BRB, Camp!

Tomorrow I leave for six days at Camp Ne-O-Tez, where I will be helping lead and teach the teen boys’ group.  I am teaching three lessons (Monday – Triumphal Entry, Tuesday – Cleansing of the Temple, and Friday – The Resurrection).  Please keep these lessons in your prayers.  I hope to articulate my passion, beliefs, and knowledge well.

As some of you may know, I am without a cell phone (long, sordid, stupid story) so if you call or text me and I respond to neither, please blame Alltel.  I should be back in the land of the wirelessly-connected when I come home on the 11th — nine days from today!

Peace be with you, brothers and sisters.
Danny