Winter Waiting

It has been some time since we've posted anything here.

This came our way today, & seems fitting to share as we approach the solstice.

You keep us waiting.
You, the God of all time, want us to wait for the right time
in which to discover who we are, where we must go,
who will be with us, and what we must do.

So thank you … for the waiting time.

- From the Iona Community Worship Book

Expectantly,

~ Keith

Blest Community

Blest Community

by Loretta F. Ross

O Most Holy Trinity
Undivided Unity,
teach us the gentle deference
of your dance of surrendered love
how with infinite tenderness
and utmost esteem
you so gently
adoringly
are present
to one another.

Teach us your perichoresis,

your grand circle dance,

where you eternally birth joy

from the womb of reverence.

Teach us your unending,

enfolding regard

for the pure holiness

you hold and behold.

You,

sweet breath and the lungs of creation,

eternally giving,

empty

and eternally receiving

are filled.

You release and bind,

but never push nor pull.

You hold accountable,

but never blame.

You incline yourselves to one another

as a grove of green willows

bending in the breeze

bowing to each other's grace

known and cherished

on the broad plain of mutuality.

Deepen our trust, O Blest Community,

that we may enter such intimacy.

A Bend in the Road

The journey God has had us on since moving to Oregon a little over three years ago has been mostly exciting, and also very mysterious at times. In the past six months or so God's Spirit has been communicating to us and guiding us in wonderfully loving ways and we’re writing this post to share some of that with you. The big news is this: We believe God has been leading us to voluntarily withdraw our official affiliation with The Vineyard, and no longer be considered a Vineyard Church Plant.

We've been part of the Vineyard Movement for 20+ years. It has been our home, so this has not been an easy decision. Since before moving to Oregon, we have felt welcomed and loved by all Vineyard pastors in the Northwest with whom we've interacted. Therefore, we want to be very clear our decision to de-affiliate with the Vineyard is in no way a reflection of any bad feelings or conflicts. Instead it is a willful laying down of our lives to follow Jesus the best we know how in this season. While this is a bittersweet decision, it also brings with it a sense of relief and rightness. As we've discussed this with local and regional Vineyard leadership in early September, we received their understanding and affirmation of our decision.

Over the last 9 months, it has become clear what we are doing and who we are becoming is further outside the Vineyard’s current scope and model of church-planting than we or anyone in Vineyard originally expected when we began discussions and then were ultimately released as an official Vineyard church plant. In retrospect, if any label applies, we see ourselves more as missionaries and we are still in the process of getting to know the culture of this area. Therefore we need not be dismayed that “nothing has happened yet” and neither do we sense any urgency from God for us to “make something happen”.

We’ve been asking God what He is up to with us, and have been blessed by some silence and solitude where we’ve begun hearing Him speak some clarity to us. He has been tying things together; showing us a pattern we had not been able to see before. It has been sobering, yet at the same time has been exciting and hope-producing -- we are eager to discover more about the plans He has here in Salem!

Perhaps the best way to communicate the highlights of our journey over the past few months as we've prayed and pondered; dreamt and talked is to share a couple stories, and some word-pictures God has painted for us. This post will be somewhat lengthy since we value being able to share our story in some detail, to fully communicate from our hearts.

The First story has to do with our connection to the other pastors in the local Vineyard Pastor's group. Our work schedules and paucity of vacation time have made it difficult for us to regularly attend these meetings. Despite this, the leaders of the group and the other pastors have been very warm and inviting, and we’ve felt truly blessed. Since before our official release as a church plant, we’ve felt included and truly welcomed and encouraged by everyone. It has been wonderful and we’ve loved getting to know everyone better! But around the end of 2009, we noticed feeling somewhat disconnected from the group. This has not been a change in anyone else, but instead an awareness God has been bringing us that the topics of informal discussions often revolve around issues we do not deal with:

• One pastor is struggling because of losing the lease on his building -- but we don’t ever plan to have a building.
• Another is wrestling with needing to find a new full-time Worship Pastor -- but we don’t foresee ever having any paid staff.
• Someone has great plans for a Youth Conference -- but we don’t know that we will ever have a “Youth Ministry” per se.

We’ve been in church leadership long enough to empathize with these things, and yet they have become foreign to us at this point in our process. The first word picture God gave us was this:

It is as if we are in a room full of round pegs who fit very well into the round holes God has for them, but we are square pegs, fitting well into the square holes He has for us -- so we find ourselves no longer fitting in.

When most other pastors in the area ask us about the priorities and practices in which we are engaging, the disconnect is just as clearly apparent there. Questions asked and discussions which follow indicate they don’t really know what to do with us, or how to understand the model of ministry and kingdom life we’re trying to embody. We explain and share our vision, but still don’t feel heard or understood. As just a couple examples:

• We had a 20 minute conversation where the other pastor couldn’t seem to understand why, as a church plant, we would not be interested in receiving a full copy of their children’s ministry curriculum. We tried to explain that we don’t now have, nor would we probably ever have anything as formal as a “Children’s Ministry” and the disconnect was further evidenced when he asked “But couldn’t you use it in a VBS setting?”
• Someone else asked “So when you meet together, who does worship?” We replied by clarifying that we all “do worship”, but if he was asking who played an instrument and facilitated singing, we were not doing that at our meetings, at least not yet. When asked why, we explained that the folks we were meeting with are at such a pre-Christian place that doing worship songs would be so culturally outside their paradigm as to actually build walls, rather than draw us all closer. The response was sort of a head-tilt and an eyebrow lift and he said “But how can you have a meeting and not do worship!??!?”.

This led us to the second word-picture from God:

It is as if we are player-coaches on a small rugby team, and we are hanging out with player-coaches from a large football league. The ball we all use is similar enough, and there is a process of keeping score, but the football player-coaches don’t seem to understand why we don’t wear helmets, why we aren’t trying to score any touchdowns...and what the heck is a ‘scrum’ anyway?

As we spent time with God these last few months, pondering and praying about all these things, He brought us back time & again to two particular pieces of our original call:

1. Cathy’s earliest sense was that, while God was certainly calling us to “plant a church”, there was something deeper. He gave her a word picture: it was more like He was calling us to the Northwest to plant ourselves, and we’d see over time what He would grow. At the time I interpreted this simply as us being two saplings God was “transplanting” to Salem to start The Orchard.
2. When we began conversations with our pastor in California about God’s calling for us, back in early 2005, he asked us two insightful questions:
   
   • Is God calling you to start something new, and to do that you need to move away? -- or -- is God calling you to move away, and since you are doing that you might as well start something new?
   • Is God calling you to plant a Vineyard, and you’d sort of like to do it in this organic simple-church-network way? -- or -- Is God calling you to start an organic simple-church-network and you hope it can be a Vineyard, but if it can’t for some reason, you’re still going to go do this thing God is calling you to do?
   We had not thought of either question, but as soon as he asked we knew the answer to both: God was calling us to start something new, and to do that we needed to move away, and God was calling us to start an organic simple-church-network, and we knew we had to do it whether or not it fit within a Vineyard framework.

Given the recent things God has been showing us, we’ve re-asked ourselves those original questions, and were not surprised to find we still feel just as clear and passionate in our calling as ever before -- this much has not changed. But as we’ve revisited Cathy’s early word-picture about us being planted as opposed to us doing the planting, I’ve realized that my original interpretation of two saplings being transplanted was not quite accurate. He has been speaking to us recently that the deeper truth behind his word to Cathy was this:

We are two seeds which He has planted and the lack of obvious growth
is not an indication anything is ‘wrong’ it is just part of His plan for us
since He’s already told us what must happen
to planted seeds before real growth appears:
First the seeds must die (John 12:24-25).

I wrote about this paradigm shift here.

As we’ve prayed through the things God has been saying to us it seems clear He is not calling us to “pull the plug” or stop what we are doing in any way. Rather, it seems He is calling us to continue trusting Him to build the house He has planned (Ps 127:1), and we’re excited about building with Him. While we realize and value the need for intentionality, we feel no call from God to go and “gather people” to ourselves. Rather, He is calling us to watch & listen to see what The Father is doing, and then intentionally partner with Him as He draws people to Himself; sharing that journey with them.

All of the above then led us to a third word picture:

a small potted tree which is currently fruitless. It has become root-bound in its current pot. At best it is surviving, but at worst it is actually withering -- it is in need of being removed from the pot so that it can be planted in the earth and allowed to grow without the current restraints.

The topsy-turvy nature of the Kingdom sure can be unsettling at times. We lose our lives to save them, give up families to gain new ones -- and, of course, Jesus says we must die in order to really live. Our decision to withdraw our affiliation with Vineyard was a difficult one, but we know that as He holds us in the hollow of His hand and takes us through whatever deaths are yet to come, there will be tremendous life breaking forth and so we have great hope.

Dying to Live

I'm reading Henri Nouwen's book Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring. One of his main points speaks to learning how to die well. We all will face death one day, and we get only one shot at it. What does it mean to die well? Nouwen says that one part of this is to become like children; have a second childhood. He clarifies by explaining this has nothing to do with weakness or immaturity, but with a newfound freedom and strength.

     This is not the voice of a small, timid child. This is the voice of a spiritually mature person who knows he is in the presence of God and for whom complete dependence on God has become the source of strength, the basis of courage, and the secret of true inner freedom.

     Recently, a friend told me a story about twins talking to each other in the womb. The sister said to the brother, "I believe there is life after birth." Her brother protested vehemently, "No, no, this is all there is. This is a dark and cozy place, and we have nothing else to do but to cling to the cord that feeds us." The little girl insisted, "There must be something else, a place with light where there is freedom to move." Still, she could not convince her twin brother.

     After some silence, the sister said hesitantly, "I have something else to say, and I'm afraid you won't believe that, either, but I think there is a mother." Her brother became furious. "A mother!" he shouted. "What are you talking about? I have never seen a mother, and neither have you. Who put that idea in your head? As I told you, this place is all we have. Why do you always want more? This is not such a bad place, after all. We have all we need, so let's be content."

     The sister was quite overwhelmed by her brother's response and for awhile didn't dare say anything more. But she couldn't let go of her thoughts, and since she had only her twin brother to speak to, she finally said, "Don't you feel these squeezes every once in awhile? They're quite unpleasant and sometimes even painful." "Yes," he answered. "What's special about that?" "Well," the sister said, "I think that these squeezes are there to get us ready for another place, much more beautiful than this. where we will see our mother face-to-face. Don't you think that's exciting?"

     The brother didn't answer. He was fed up with the foolish talk of his sister and felt that the best thing would be simply to ignore her and hope that she would leave him alone.

     This story may help us think about death in a new way. We can live as if this life were all we had, as if death were absurd and we had better not talk about it; or we can choose to claim our divine childhood and trust that death is the painful but blessed passage that will bring us face-to-face with our God.

This made me think about our life at present here in The Orchard. I've posted a couple of times about putting roots down like bamboo (here and here), and I do still believe that, while we appear somewhat dormant right now, there will come a season of growth and flowering. But before that, I wonder -- is it really just root-putting-down that is happening?

In this blog's very first post, I said Cathy & I were not really thinking of ourselves as planting a church -- instead we were planting ourselves and seeing what God would grow.

In light of Nouwen's words, I'm wondering if, instead of saplings being transplanted we're more like seeds being planted. And we all know what it takes for seeds to grow...