New year, new resolutions

At the beginning of every new year, resolutions, new promises and deals with God, family and self are made as we all declare afresh that "This year is going to be different!"

Well I count myself as one such sucker. This year will be different!
Along with my usual annual goals to become "as big as my brother", to "get married...or at least go on a date or two", or "to eat more healthily" and the infamous but simple "to get to bed on time on a regular basis", this year's main agendas on my check-list are not as trivial or superficial. On a spiritual front, each new January begins with promises to try harder, to be at more meetings, to pray more, read the bible more than just on Easter and Christmas, to get deeper involved in church, to give more, to quit a habit or an addiction, to be a better dad or mom.
Basically, to do more.

With none of these being bad accomplishments to look back on at the end of the year, this year I have a simple resolve:

To DO less and to BE more

Sounds a very new age type of outlook on life but when the penny truly drops that we are human beings and not human-doings, we will clamber off the hamster-wheel of performance and trade the running shoes for a pair of footwear a liitle more comfortable and to our taste.
The bible calls us to keep in step with the Spirit, not to try and outpace him. My pure delight is to see what He is doing and then to run with that.

The great Puritan preacher Richard Baxter put it this way,

"If we rejoice firstly in our Christian duties rather than our Christian destiny, what will become of our joy when our duties fail or falter?"

So my pen is out and I've written down my top 3 resolutions for 2013:

1. TO RELAX MORE
2. TO ENJOY GOD MORE
3. TO KNOW THAT IT IS FINISHED...MORE AND MORE

Doing less, being more and the resolutions start shaping into something more like a recipe for a revolution.

Christmas Wish-List

 

 

6 things I've decided to do differently this Christmas. (for reasons why, read the blog below)

1. Stop Hoarding

-Clothes and go through my cupboard and give away every piece of clothing that I haven't worn in the last 5 months

-Food and have piles of tinned and canned meals in my car and at my home ready to give to any who ask for "A christmas box"

2. Start Inviting

-The lonely to my home for a meal

-The lost to one of our christmas services at church (people generally say "yes" at this time of year)

-The lazy to hit the back garden for a game of cricket, a round of golf or even a swim in the ocean...yes, I do swim on occasion...when conditions are perfect)

3. Lose my pale skin

(I know, it would be a christmas miracle, but one can dream!)

4. Watch Less

-television and series on my own with the justifying statement of "it's MY holiday!"

-movies as a default when asking the question, "what should we do today?"

5. Keep Quiet

-when family frustrate me

-and ask more questions rather than always giving my opinion. (be interested and stop trying to be interesting)

6. Make Memories

-with my parents, brothers, sister in law and nephews

-for other people who haven't had many memorable christmas' before

-by taking the danger encircled path of sacrifice over the highway of self-entitlement and gluttony


Best Christmas ever?

An African Christmas

Nobody does Christmas better than the Phillips family.

Growing up in our home each calendar year was split into 2 parts. BC and AD. Before Christmas and After (christmas) Dinner. We are such suckers for the christmas spirit that we would be pumping Bony M "By the Rivers of Babylon" and other such festive jingles as soon as we waved goodbye to the exam month of November and welcomed in December first! And we played them so consistently and with such great gusto, that our neighbours couldn't help but join in with a rousing chorus of "Rocking around the christmas tree" by the time the big day actually arrived.
Advent calendars, tinsle, singing lights and songs about chestnuts, snow and reindeers were all part of the christmas fare...and it didn't even matter that temperatures were soring into the high 30's and that the closest we had come to a white christmas was in the December of 1998 when the suncream bottle top came loose as I shook it above my head.

Like I said, my family has christmas waxed!

It's with these seasonal musings that I turn the pages to the first chapters of Matthew and Luke's Gospel accounts and dig a little deeper into how that first "christmas" went down. Compared to our Zimbabwean rendition of the yuletide occassion, the bible paints a pretty bleek picture of what happened +-2000 years ago. I mean for goodness sake there's not even one mention of a turkey or snow!

In fact when we get down to the bare bones of things, that initial "christmas" gathering didn't have nearly as much sparkle and glamour that we attach to our present day celebrations. Sure there was some gold, frankincense and myrrh (by the way, "myrrh" isn't worth as many points as you would think when playing Scrabble) and they definitely had some high profile guests (Wisemen attendance and angelic visitation definitely trump our usual christmas visitors - deaf grandparents and the creepy neighbour from down the street who somehow always seems to wangle an invite) but overall Mary and Joseph's soiree doesn't come remotely close to our jovial and expensive traditions.


The long and the short of my ramblings is that this year things are going to be different for me. No, I'm not losing the tree, the carols or the mince pies but I've decided to add some new traditions to the Phillips family list (said list will be in the next blog). We live in Africa where despite our best attempts to hide behind high walls, to turn a blind eye at traffic lights and to take alternative routes home so we don't have to go through "the bad neighbourhood", poverty, disease, joblessness and an all round lack of hope is running rampant. To pretend anything else or to sugar-coat the problem by turning our christmas carol volume up and putting our fingrs in our ears to not hear the cries is just as evil as those who turned Mary and Joseph away that fateful night in Nazareth by saying, "We have no room."

This year, I'm asking myself the question, "Do I have room?"

Do I have room in my heart, in my home, in my budget for the lost, the last and the least...
...or do I just have room for a second helping of the christmas ham?

We Are The Church (Red Week #3)

Video summary of a week that changed many people's lives...

Why we canned our Prayer Meeting

 

Sometimes churches are in danger of becoming museums or mausoleums rather than a place where the life of God fills and spills out of. We get so caught up with defending and propagating our systems, our “holy cows”, “it’s just how we’ve always done it” way of thinking that we become not so different to the manufacturers of caskets who spend thousands of rands and countless hours in fashioning out elaborate handles, felt inner linings and ornamental outer decorations that we forget that all that these glorified boxes are doing is containing death.

 

Our homes can become like this as well. We break the bank in buying the new flat-screen, the latest leather lazy-boy, lavish new carpets and mini fridges fully stocked and the only people who get to enjoy them are people who have removed their shoes at the door, who place their glass on a coaster and who make polite conversation around why we should upgrade our hi-fi system. They look good, but are lifeless in terms of kingdom benefit.

Same with our cars.

Same with our churches.

A few years ago, we at Life Changers decided that it was time to take out our shot-gun and get the braai ready as we prepared to take down one of christendoms plumpest holy cows. The prayer meeting.  Phrases such as “you judge the size of your church by the size of your prayer meeting”, “your prayer meeting is the engine room of your church” and “we’ll cancel Sunday before we cancel our prayer meeting” made us all weary to ever even consider tampering with this midweek meeting. Sure we could shake things up every now and again (pray in pairs and not just in groups of four or five) but this was one closed-handed issue that seemed as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar itself.

 

But after quite a dry spell of poorly attended (by our people and of faith and life) Tuesday prayer meetings , we courageously pulled the plug on this meeting to the sound-track of anger and shock from many voices at home and from a far. But just to show you that we are not heretical, and that this was a faith inspired assassination and not just because of a lack of attendance, here below are some of the reasons why we canned our midweek prayer meeting.

We want to be less busy

-We gather on a Sunday and on a Wednesday already on top of other social and outreach moments. We never want to be a busy church that is so consumed with meetings that it forsakes what the church should really be doing. We wanted to free up an extra night for people to be with their families, to join a tennis club or to invite other people over to their homes.

We want to be hungrier

-The same people at prayer meeting were the same people at everything else. And they were tired. Doing away with the prayer meeting got us thinking about how we could get more people praying. We had to ask ourselves the hard questions that we had so often just skirted around with dogmatic statements about prayer that we had just inherited.

We want revival

-Probably our greatest trump card for drawing the season of a formalised midweek prayer meeting was because we heard God say so.  We couldn’t help get away from the fact that even though we had an hour dedicated to corporate prayer each week, we were not a praying church. Ever since we closed it down, people are gathering off their own bats, in smaller informal gatherings, to pray and worship together, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. Since Tuesday nights of prayer came to an end, we have begun a journey of corporately fasting and praying in unique ways that have released the life of God like we haven’t seen before. Prayer is starting to become the language of our home groups. God spoke, we acted, and life has come back to our prayer expression as a community.

 

We don’t have the full answers. We are still learning. We might even go back to a weekly prayer meeting into the future. God will highlight his strategy as we continue to pray...

All we keep reminding ourselves about is that our God is not a God of a set of formulas that need to be followed for his life to come. We love to pray because it helps serve as a catalyst to seeing the life of God released more and more in our lives. We don’t want to be so present and pursuing the right ingredients, that we actually end up missing His presence. We applied this to our prayer lens. We want this to be the measuring stick of everything in our lives. 

 

A coffin has a body, but contains no life.

 

Unity (the introduction)

Unity is an interesting word.

Worth very little on the scrabble board, this 5 letter noun is thrown around often in political and church circles with such vehemence and passion that an unobservant outsider would think it is something we have waxed. Nestled near the back end of our scant used leather bound dictionaries, we often find ourselves spouting off some trite comment about unity (or lack there-of) in the church or amongst the churches and denominations as if we have the clarity and insight into it's true definition.


Psalm.133 "God commands a blessing when the brothers dwell in unity" is recited on mass by prayer groups the world over. As soon as we split up into groups of 4 or 5 (for this is how the Lord taught us to pray), it is worth taking the plunge and praying this verse upfront because if you hang back at all it will be snatched up quickly by another before you can say John.3:16.

(Quick side note on prayer meetings, always take the lead and pray the go-to scriptures early on and then settle back into the “Yes Lord’s” while the others fumble about, giving you time to scour the concordance at the back of your ESV (NIV is SO last year) for some more verses on that evenings theme. Useful tip I know. You’re welcome. But I digress.)

Over the next few blogs I am going to add to the vociferous commentary on unity by taking a few snapshots at what we as the wider body gather together around. Denominations, missional groupings, teams, teams within teams, circles, gatherings, or whatever the latest buzz-word is are coming together in a continuing pursuit for a truer and richer understanding of “unity”, with different ideologies, agendas and issues being thrown into the recipe of these collaborations.

 Can we learn from our mistakes or are we bound to just repeating them with just a different coat of terminology and slogans?

The next few blogs will be fun.

And I promise I won’t use Psalm.133

We Are The Church (Red Week #2)

Here is how Red Week went, by the numbers:

5- the number of days (various nights and mornings) that people abandoned their television schedules, their evenings at home, their Saturday lie-in, their Friday date-nights, and instead donned their Red Week T-shirts, got their hands and feet dirty and pursued what a church could look like when it started behaving like The Church.

+200- total number of different volunteers over the course of the week

176- number of one of a kind Red Week T-Shirts sold. That means I still have 24 left. Perfect stocking fillers for Christmas. Just saying.

3000- number of sandwiches (brown bread if anyone is asking) made and handed out. 2000 went to a pre-primary, a primary and a high school in DuNoon. The rest was delivered to individuals in the wider community of DuNoon during our Saturday morning Soup Kitchen.

+50- number of police and firemen we blessed and visited on the Friday evening.

+100- sick people visited and prayed for on the Wednesday night at the government hospital in Tygerberg. Emotional and faith stirring evening that not many will soon forget.

 2500- the collective age (or somewhere in that region) of the elderly folk that we visited, loved on and prayed for in the old age home in Melkbos.

40- the amount of people who were available on a Thursday morning. Apologies to all bosses for the numerous employees playing hooky that day.

Countless- number of lives that were impacted and changed through this week. Whether it was by making a sandwich or receiving one, visiting or being visited, life can not be the same again.


The Shepherd in Luke.15 left the 99 and went after the 1. His heart is our heart. Red Week, and The Church for that matter, should never measure its success on mere numbers. May our ongoing pursuit of being His hands and feet always be about the individual and not just an accumulation of figures to bandy about. His economics are never like ours.