The Homeschool Slough

(pronounced slew, up here on the Canadian prairies…so it rhymes!)

So for the last two years I’ve been struggling with my homeschool. Nothing seems to work the way I want it too. I pray, buy books, make my plan, and then hate the outcome. I know that no plan survives contact with the enemy, but what happens when I feel like the plan is the enemy?

So I’ve been spending the last couple of months in deep prayer about what I should do. And God, in his infinite wisdom, didn’t show me where I should go, but instead, where I was sitting: idolization of academia.

I want for my children to be smart and well spoken. I want for them to be able to impress people with their knowledge and insight. I want them to be intellectual powerhouses.

But God wants for them to be Christ followers.

There is nothing wrong with knowledge. But when my whole daily focus is on the acquisition of knowledge than something is wrong. Even when I mix daily bible study and prayer time in with the knowledge part, I realized that a part of me is just getting it done, so we can get onto real school.

And as long as I am not willing to acknowledge the sin in that thought, God will not bless my home school. My children will learn, and grow, and perhaps even succeed by worldly standards, but something will always be missing, from my life, from theirs, from our home.

And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:2

Lord teach me to teach my children. Show me the way, so that I may show it to them. Help me walk the path of righteousness so that I may walk it alongside them. Teach me to love and serve and obey. Let me not be ensnared by the things of this world that rust and corrode and pass away.

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Here’s a list of the “Most Influential Churches in the World“.

Pastors of small churches and megachurches were asked to name America’s most influential church, and the answers were collated into that list. Those who hold conferences, or speak at conferences or write books for leaders are more likely to be chosen, or at least specially listed in this article. It seems that “influential” means having influence on your fellow pastors more than on people in the world.

The Bottom Line
Collectively, the churches identified by pastors of every size spectrum reach hundreds of thousands of people in person every week with the gospel of Jesus Christ. If the use of television, radio, podcasts, CDs, and other media is factored in, these churches collectively reach millions every week.

Some “bottom line”. If they reach millions and they are so darned influential, then why aren’t we seeing more change in the world? How can they be reaching millions every week and Christianity still be dying an ugly public death in North America?

How can there still be hungry kids on the streets in our cities, not to mention around the world?
How can there still be widows and orphans unfed and hurting?
How can there still be people who have never felt a warm hug and a kind word?
Why are single mothers left to raise children in a vacuum?
Why are there sheep left unfed? They eat and eat and eat at the trough and they are starving to death.

I just read this in Organic Church by Neil Cole, and I’m going to quote it a lot, I think:

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilization to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of good literature. — Mohandas Gandhi

I want to be influential. So do I sell books to pastors, or do I go get me some dynamite?

As MrsPages alluded to earlier, we’ve been going through some scary stuff. “Scary”, as in “changing everything we know and understand about church”. We’re planning on documenting it here, but it’s rather complex and it might take a while. Stick around and don’t write us off if we’re unclear about something. Feel free to comment, but also realize that anything we’re not too detailed about will likely be discussed later.

We’ve always thought that evangelism should happen in your own living room, over the back fence, and through your day-to-day relationships. We’ve always believed that one of the best ways to evangelize to someone is to serve them. We’ve always been of the mind that if you live your life in a Christ-like way, people will ask you why and how they can do it too.

It works. It’s a simple, effective, proven method. Be a light on your street, or at your workplace, or at your gym. I’ve noticed that many testimonials include the phrase “That person had something special about them, something that I wanted…”. Our job as Christians is to be “that person”.

Until earlier this year, we had still been trying to reconcile the concept of “personal, small scale evangelism” with the concept of “large church”. Like Willow Creek, we had begun to ask ourselves about how spiritual growth happens, and how to develop a deep personal faith that depended only on God, not on programs. We kept feeling that so much of our money and effort was being directed to things that did nothing but perpetuate “the church” rather than reach people and help them grow.

We stepped back and looked at the organized church, the concept of building and services and programs and meetings and outreach programs and all of that. If you step back and look at the church as a whole, it’s easy enough to see places where you can work to fix it, or make it work better, or how to fine tune the process.

But then we took one step further back, one step too far. That was where the problems started. We stepped back far enough to evaluate the concept of the organized church as a whole. Everything started to look strange. We started to ask questions about everything.

The answers to the questions are coming, but they are not what we want them to be. Church as it is is easy. It’s great to write cheques and sing songs on Sunday mornings and volunteer and stay really busy and think we’re doing all the right things.

But what happens when the answers start leading in the direction of simple church? What happens when the “church” starts to become a few families gathering together to worship and teach the children and support each other and pray together and study the Word? What happens when the Outreach Committee is you and you’re talking to your neighbours and the people at the coffee shop? What happens when you start thinking that your tithe could support a lot of kids at Compassion and a lot of neighbourhood barbeques and bible studies instead of 28,000 square feet of air conditioning?

You get scared, that’s what happens.

Several months ago MrPages and I started a WonderfulWorship discussion, and then it dwindled off. We feel we owe an apology of sorts to those who joined in.

We started off asking what worship in the Sunday morning congregation should be. The discussions were awesome. We began to passionately search out information that would help answer this question.

What we found was an answer that has completely terrified us.

We wanted to know what worship should and could be.

God asked us, instead, what His church should and could be.

The answers we’re finding are disturbing.

The ramifications could change the very nature of our comfortable suburban lifestyle.

And we are scared. And excited. And scared.

[[MrPages note: to see the end results of our quest, check out the "Home Church" category!]]

61. The squirrel who is burying seeds in our yard, whom I dubbed “Nuts”.
62. Hot chocolate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it.
63. Lullabies.
64. Michael Card.
65. Water.
67. Clothes.
68. The Penners
69. Canada Geese.
70. Pink clouds at sunset.

I’ve been asked to preach at our church for the first week of the Christmas series.

The pastor and I talked last week generally about some topics and where the series was going. I had a couple of ideas in my head about the early prophecies, the coming King, something like that. Cliche Christmas stuff.

Then last night he called me and suggested that a good place to start this series would be to do a “What does Christmas and the coming of Christ mean to MrPages? What is the impact of Christ’s arrival to the Pages family?” type of theme.

I paused and stared blankly. A whole sermon’s worth of “What does Jesus mean to me?”. Egads. That could be really cheesy, and really hard to write. How broad! How vague!

But then I prayed about it some, and I talked about it with MrsPages some, and the framework is already there, with some details fleshing out. This could be pretty powerful to write, if not to hear. Having to sit down and actually verbalize this sort of thing is good for the soul. It makes me appreciate Him even more to start to verbalize all the different things He means. I’m sure the text will eventually be posted here, if not the audio too.

So, how about you?

Sit and think about it: What does Jesus mean to you? Tell Him!

There has been all sorts of fuss about a recent Barna survey that says that non-Christians think that Christians are anti-gay, judgmental hypocrites.

The blogosphere is abuzz with words like “image management” and with questions like “How do we change our image?”. I’m sadly sure that the answer in many cases is going to be PR firms, publicity campaigns and concerts.

The missing piece here is that those non-Christians’ opinions are exactly correct.

The only way to change our image is to stop being those things. If we don’t want to be seen as judgemental, then we need to stop being judgemental. If we don’t want to be seen as hypocrites, then we need to stop being hypocrites. If we want to be seen as a light, then we need to be a light. If we want to be seen as loving, then we need to be loving. If we want to be seen as a place of refuge, then we need to be a place of refuge.

Brant Hansen over at Letters from Kamp Krusty has a post today about a recent book where a pastor takes a non-believer on a tour of many churches and they discuss his reactions. Brant’s summary of the book ties in brilliantly here:

Casper keeps earnestly asking [after seeing the fog machines and sound systems and worship services], “Is this what Jesus told you guys to do?”

Jim’s says it’s a difficult question, but you know what?

It isn’t.

No, it isn’t.

If we want to be seen as different than the world, then we need to be different than the world. The problem is that for the most part, we don’t want to be different than the world.

And that is a big problem.

“Child” Said Aslan, “did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?“ - C.S Lewis (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader)

(TMI means “Too Much Information” and any non-parents, or just more mature individuals, may not appreciate the humour in this!)

Overhead at my house today in the potty training area:

Sometimes my bum whistles. I can’t. But sometimes my bum does.

I love the complete honesty of small children!

As I talked about yesterday, seeker-friendly pioneer Willow Creek has revealed that their method is not making believers with much depth. Their research reveals that the program-centric model is acceptable for church-goers in the categories of “exploring Christianity” and “newcomer to Christianity” but is miserably failing members that are more mature in their faith (for lack of a better term).

The survey breaks people down into 5 progressive categories:

Category 1) People exploring Christianity
Category 2) People who love Jesus, who are growing, but are fairly new to the faith
Category 3) People who are close to Christ, He is important to them on a daily basis
Category 4) People whose lives are centered on Christ

And a 5th category of people that are outside the “timeline” of the other 4: Stalled in their relationship. These are people who are saved, but not investing time in their relationship with God. Importantly, they are investing time in church on a regular basis, but not with God

As people move through the first 4 stages, their level of intimacy and love of God increase.

The survey finds that levels 1 and 2 are the most satisfied with church. Category 3 people are increasing in dissatisfaction with the churches role in their lives. Category 4 people, the most centered in Christ, are the ones most thinking about leaving the church. To quote Hawkins, “The people who love God the most are the most disappointed by their local church.”

Willow Creek suggests we begin to ask (apparently obvious, but previously unasked by most churches) different questions. We are to ignore numbers and ask “Are the things we’re doing helping people grow in their intimacy with God?”. We’re focussing on getting people in the door and we’re ending up with churches full of category 1 and 2 people, and anyone who has some maturity as a Christian is under-addressed and is becoming disgruntled and/or leaving. As soon as people say “the prayer”, we drop them like a rock in favour of new seekers.

The budget is being spent to draw newcomers and the growth of existing members is being ignored.

Hawkins says of watching the collection plates go around:

Part of that goes to pay for what I do, and it pays for the rest of the staff and it pays for these lights, and all our programs and all of the different things that we do. And I sit there, Sunday after Sunday and I wonder “Are we spending those folks money in the right way? Really? [...] Would they feel great about how we’re investing their resources?

Somedays I’m not quite so sure we’re making the right decisions. Some days I’m not quite so sure.”

Amen.