Change

Remembering to Serve People on the Journey to Refuge

April 19, 2018 0 Comments

Origin in Athens

Photo Cred: Reed Eaglesham

Dear Readers,

I’m doing something new, using my blog to ask for help.

 

Origin is headed back to Greece. We will be in Athens in May to serve alongside our friends with Canadian Global Response. Ten of us will be going to “remember the poor.” You can help them too. People on the journey for refuge have had to run, to leave, to survive, to witness. Its not a pretty experience and its worse than most of us can imagine.

 

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei, wants you to know that “Over 65 Million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes.” I watched the film and cried. This is what many of the dear people we met last year have gone through. What will our compassion do? Compassion comes alongside the human flow not to judge but to give hope. Though we are tempted to, I’m learning we must not underestimate the power of a cup of water, a smile, a listening ear, a gift, and a moment of care and kindness in a safe environment. We believe these are the small gestures affirming the incredible worth of each person.

 

Our team of ten is going to Athens but we cannot accomplish this alone. We need your help to extend the ministry of our friends there in city. We will be assisting with what they want to do in order to serve folks who had hoped to pass through the city but have gotten stuck there and who find themselves to be intensely vulnerable. Our strategy for supporting and extending the ministry of our partners on the ground in Athens requires about 1000 euro’s per day in ministry funds.

 

Help us serve people on the refugee journey in Athens, Greece.

Let’s move remembering the poor into real presence and action. Here’s how you can give. By clicking on the Origin in Greece button you will land on our Canadian Global Response project and giving page. Follow the instructions, making sure to to note “Origin in Athens.”

Thanks so much.

Craig

 

 

 

Change, Leadership

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What’s on your summer reading list for 2018?

April 12, 2018 0 Comments

As Winter term ends for students and we get ready for summer term, the church I’m a part of at UBC publishes a summer reading list.

Our list of books seeks to get at our desire to be a Gospel-Shaped, Disciples-Making, City-Blessing church. So we know we have to get in touch with authors who help us engage some aspect of the four relationships of Christian discipleship — with God, with self, with people, and with the stuff of Creation.

You can see our 2017 Summer Reading list above.

I’m curious — what would you recommend for a summer reading list?

 

 

Change, Discipleship, Education, Leadership

Worship: The Question Everyone Must Answer

April 9, 2018 0 Comments

Here’s the latest talk from the Sunday Gathering of Origin Church

Live Loved: The Question Everyone Must Answer

Change, Discipleship

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A Pastor’s Agony on Easter Monday

April 2, 2018 0 Comments

In 24 years of ministry in Vancouver I have never preached an Easter message I am completely satisfied with. The Resurrection of Jesus has more to say to us than I can say. Texts built around the Resurrection of Jesus provide a frame, the subject, and the colour for the message, but I must admit again, I am terribly inadequate to the preaching of the Resurrection of Jesus on the day of our celebration. I fall short of finding words conveying the joyful and fearful surprise of this great reversal.

 

Lord help.

 

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”  Matthew 28:5-7 (NIV)

 

Did you see that?

 

“Now I have told you.”

“Now I have told you.”

Who gets to end a message with that? Who gets to say, “Now I have told you” and be done?

Apparently the first messenger who proclaimed the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, that’s who!

The angel says it.

And next, the women proclaiming this good news to the disciples could have said it too.

“Now I have told you.”

 

But for me, on a Resurrection Sunday I am plagued with the indictment that I’m going to have a crowd who have heard it all before and somehow are not moved. Somehow we have been conditioned to non-response. I don’t get to say, “Now I have told,” with the same confidence that somebody is going to get moving.

 

Lord help. Stir us again Holy Spirit.

 

Maybe I should take up painting. Well on second thought, probably not. Last year Mike Frost introduced his readers to what he calls the “greatest Easter painting of all time.” I like it. The painting, The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection, by Eugene Burnand, is most appropriately housed not in a great museum, but in an old railway station in Paris. Typically no one stands still for long in a railway station. If your train is called, you get moving. “Now I have told you.” The word assumes a change is coming, in fact the change has come, whether you are ready for it or not. Scroll up and take a look at it again. John to the left seems to joyfully anticipating the possibility of a reunion with Jesus. Peter though has a look of agony and fear at the possibility. They have been told, and they are moving.

 

8So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”  Matthew 28:8-10

 

Before the women preachers got to their audience they were interrupted by the subject of the Resurrection.

 

Did you noticed the pairing of fear and joy?

Did you notice how Jesus interrupts their movement?

 

The Resurrection of Jesus will illicit both fear and joy. Fuelled by these we may want to dance; we may want to run. We may be so ready to take action. Zeal for the message and task may consume us. But it seems our Lord, would have us pause before the apostolic action is taken, and simply meet Him and worship.

Change, Discipleship, Leadership

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The Cost of Prayer

February 23, 2018 1 Comment

The cost of our redemption is succinctly captured in the phrase, “Jesus paid it all.” So, why do we treat prayer as a struggle? Why is it a struggle to pray? We struggle to pray not because prayer for us is meant to be a struggle. It is not that God Himself has ordained for us that prayer must be a struggle. God does not gain from our struggle to pray. Rather we have gained the right to pray from His struggle.

 

And yet, I do struggle at times

to pray.

And I struggle

in prayer.

 

Oswald Chambers suggests our struggle in prayer may spring from unsettled regions of our heart and mind, places where we have not yet rested in the redemptive work, agony, struggle of Jesus Christ.

 

The more we get into the atmosphere of the New Testament the more we discover the unfathomable and unhastening leisure of our Lord’s life, no matter what His agony. The difficulty is that when we do what God wants us to do, our friends say, “It is all very well, but suppose we all did that?” Our Lord did not tell all the disciples to sit there while He prayed. He told only three of them. The point is that we must take as from God the haphazard arrangements of our lives.

 

If we accept the Lord Jesus Christ and the domination of His lordship, we also accept that nothing happens by chance because we know that God orders and engineers circumstances. The fuss has gone, the amateur providence has gone, the amateur disposer has gone, and we know that “all things work together for good to those who love God” (Romans 8: 28). If Jesus says, “Sit here while I go and pray over there,” the only appropriate thing we can do is to sit.

 

We ought to give much more time than we do— a great deal more than we do— to brooding on the fundamental truths on which the Spirit of God works the simplicity of our Christian experience. The fundamental truths are redemption and the personal presence of the Holy Spirit, and these two are focused in one mighty personality, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank God for the emphasis laid on the efficacy of the Holy Spirit to make experientially real the redemption of Jesus Christ in individual lives.

 

Remember, what makes prayer easy is not our wits or our understanding, but the tremendous agony of God in redemption. A thing is worth just what it costs. Prayer is not what it costs us, but what it cost God to enable us to pray. It cost God so much that a little child can pray. It cost God Almighty so much that anyone can pray. But it is time those of us who name His name knew the secret of the cost, and the secret is here: “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death.”

 

Beware of placing the emphasis on what prayer costs us. It cost God everything to make it possible for us to pray. Jesus did not say to these men, “Agonize!” He said, “Watch with me.” Our Lord tried to lift the veil from before these disciples that they might see what He was going through. Think who He was— the Son of God. “My soul”— the reasoning mind of the Lord Jesus Christ—“ is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me.”

 

Chambers, Oswald. If You Will Ask: Reflections on the Power of Prayer (Kindle Locations 223-229, 242-249, 256-259). Discovery House. Kindle Edition.

 

Heavenly Father,
I have struggled to drag myself forward into prayer. So, I’m going to sit here in this moment and trust You in the shadow of the your Son’s Cross. I will take each thought that comes to mind and consider it under your gaze and your grace. I trust you. May Your Spirit direct me into Your thoughts and your ways. Thank you for creating me anew as your child. Thank you for calling me into your Kingdom.
AMEN.

Change, Discipleship, Prayer

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