I'm with the band.

1 Peter 2:17, "Honor everyone. Love the band."

I'm taking a small translational liberty with 1 Peter 2:17 where most people translate "adelphoteta" (see the image to the right) as "brotherhood" I think that "band" is perhaps more fitting. We aren't a fraternity, or a sorority for that matter, we are a community of believers bound together in united purpose and belief. We are a band of brothers and sisters. We're a band.

Taking "band" in a musical sense, you could say our musical chops are getting more refined as we work out what it means to do "young adult ministry." Last week we honed our sound further as we picked up a new staff member in the band: Matt Susko. He has graciously accepted a position as Captain of the Missional Leavening Project. Matt has been with the Ignite ministry for quite a while now and has been an instrumental part of the success of both projects and people. His knack for sharing the Gospel in a non-confrontational way combines with his natural inclination for reaching out to strangers in strange places, thus making him an ideal fit for this position.

The Missional Leavening Project is a new way for the Ignite ministry to engage in the missional livelihood to which we are called as Christians. We tried the traditional model of having the leader organize projects that everyone would be recruited to join - and failed. To digress on that failure for a moment... one of the reasons it failed is because in our context that approach led to measuring success based on numbers and outcomes. We were successful if we got a lot of people to come and we did lots of good work. But that model of corporate mission work is precisely the one that has been so dangerous in our traditional churches and which has led many of them down the path of believing that it is not the number of people but the number of dollars that matter. Dollars can do more than people and dollars can pay for skilled, experienced work to happen, and so the goal of the local church with regard to "living missionally" has been reduced to a "mission committee" whose primary task is the allocation of funds which have been gathered together by the slow nagging and harassment of members to contribute to the "missions of the church."

So, with the harsh reality of our current trajectory before us, we decided that the new metric for measuring our success needed to be closer to a way of measuring change. We want to see participants from Ignite become alive with a passion for not only "mission work" but for seeing their lives unfolding missionally as continued faithful engagement with their community for the good of the kingdom. This led us to look at areas of success in the Ignite ministry and realized that person-to-person encounters were more effective than signup sheets and surveys on GoogleDocs. So Matt has been recruited to be yeast in the Ignite loaf - and if there's one thing I know from brewing beer and maintaining a bread yeast starter in the fridge, it's that yeast makes yeast. Matt will begin to leaven the loaf through his own commitment to projects (yeast). I have already given him my commitment to join him as much as I am able (yeast). I expect the same will come from our other leaders, Brandon & Stephen (yeast yeast). With any luck we will be able to rope in one or two or three more folks to join us on our occasional and hopefully regular projects (yeast yeast yeast).

By sharing our love for missional living, we not only accomplish some good thing through our service, but we understand ourselves as part of a kingdom which Christ has established, which he commissions us to, and which he sends us out to live our vocations as part of his unfolding expansion of the divine will.

Yoga for W&J students

UPDATE: Due to scheduling conflicts we have for the moment pushed the pause button on this project. Our goal is to make more connections and find a better time so that we can redeploy in the Spring semester. In the meantime, contact me for more information or read below the original post:

Every Tuesday @ 2pm, the Ignite ministry is sponsoring free yoga classes for W&J students. The classes will be held at Church of the Covenant (267 East Beau St, Washington, PA 15301).

Down to brass tacks...

• Is this just a ploy to get W&J students to believe in Jesus?

No. We think that being good Christians means being good friends. While evangelism and outreach are part of the Ignite ministry, this offering is not an evangelistic stealth mission. We aren't trying to sucker you in with something you want just so that we can force on you something that we want. What we want, is to live as Christians that treat other people as people, not as means to an end. We make no attempt to hide our faith and make clear what we believe, so whenever (if ever) you want to talk about it - you can.

• Isn't yoga a Hindu/Buddhist/Eastern spirituality thing?

Sure, there a plenty of opinions out there that make an argument like this: Yoga was originally a Hindu practice. Yoga is still a Hindu practice. People who do yoga are therefore engaging in Hindu practices and compromising the Gospel. This argument usually also includes some Scriptural references like Romans 12:1 or Acts 15:29.

Rather than really dissect that argument thoroughly and offer step by step explanations through Scripture of why it is a consistent fallacy, I offer the following short list:
Christmas trees, wedding rings, the cross.
Did Christ command that we put a cut evergreen in our houses and decorate it to celebrate his birth? Does the Bible ever say that wedding rings should be exchanged as a sign of marriage? Or did Christians invent the cross as a symbol of their faith? Hardly! The cross is a symbol of ancient Roman capital punishment which was used on Christ and then continued to be used after him. These things have become signs, symbols, and practices of our faith because we have made them so and have imbued them with faithful meaning. Just because millions of Buddhists put out small bowls of rice as food offering doesn't mean that I can't eat rice. What was Peter's vision in Acts 10? A vision that God has made all things clean, that God is no respecter of persons (sorry, I got so worked up I slipped into a bit of the King James there). Why does Paul quote from contemporary poets when he preaches on the Areopagus in Acts 17?

Could it be that those making the argument against yoga (and many other things) are the ones who believe that there is a "christian culture" that needs to be defended and protected and kept pure when the teaching of the Bible is that there is a "kingdom" and that God himself protects and preserves it and causes it to grow? We need less book burnings and more burning hearts filled with the Spirit of God that is reaching out to people with the Gospel.

• Who is offering this yoga class?

A qualified and trained yoga teacher who is a Christian and a member of the Church of the Covenant (full disclosure - she's also my wife).

• What should I bring?

Bring "yoga stuff" - like a mat, comfortable clothes, a foam brick or strap if you'd like. We'll try to have extra mats available so even if you don't have yoga stuff, just show up and we'll wing it.

• I have more questions, who do I contact?

There's a link to the right that says "Contact Pastor Noah." That'll give you my email address. You can also look up Church of the Covenant and call them. If you ask nice, they'll probably give you my phone number and you can call/text me directly.

Lopsided

The following is a guest post from Ezra, who is an awesome part of the Ignite Ministry.

In my new home of Ambridge, the cheapest, healthiest way to pass the time is walking around town; it's the flattest bit of western Pennsylvania I've come across, and it's packed with abandoned shops and wide sidewalks, ensuring solitude if not a wide berth between me and other streetwalkers. Tonight, as I passed a bar blasting some banal New Found Glory-style pop punk, I overheard a man half-shouting into his phone-- some argument over what he told somebody to do and when he told them. I didn't think much of it; it was obviously a drunken squabble with a girlfriend or a business partner.

Then he belted out something I didn't expect at all. Slurring and lurching through his words, I recoiled as I heard, "Can you let me talking for one f***ing second-- after thirteen years of marriage, it's my f***in' turn to talk!"

Thirteen years? It was dark, and I didn't want to gawk, but out of the corner of my eye, this guy looked and sounded just a few years older than me. Thirteen years... you don't just get that far by accident. My own marriage lasted less than three. Yet, however he had held on for so long, what I heard in that snippet of the fight worried me, because it was the same attitude that got me signing divorce papers, though I never imagined I'd face that situation.

To make a long story short, my [marriage ended because of hurt, resentment, distrust, and retribution].

It was tit for tat. As the Christian author Walter Wangerin writes in The Book of Sorrows, "he who is cut cuts back." We're born with that selfish need to balance the equation, restore karma, ensure fairness, and the like. You wronged me, so I can wrong you. Or, in the case of the man on the street, you get to have your say, so now I get to have my say. We imagine ourselves entitled to our own idea of justice.

Yet the world, so very often, doesn't reflect that at all. A tree with optimal sunlight grows taller than its neighbor and blocks the sun, ensuring its own supremacy. A man given five talents who earns five more gets to take the single talent of a man who fearfully failed to invest his. Mozart gains immortality and Salieri disappears into the dustbin of history. We rage in vain to balance out nature, our jobs, our relationships-- anything we feel is stacked against us, when the end we're seeking is an inversion-- perhaps even a perversion-- of our natural state.

Contrast that with the ways of God. What the Bible describes is nothing less than His deliberate campaign to unbalance everything. Adam and Eve set up the system rather tidily; "you sin, you die." Yet, noting that we are minuscule, temporal creatures that God does not need, He changed that system to "you sin, I die, you live." He is a king who washed peasants' feet, a god who shared his bed with the mouths of farm animals. He humbled himself and broke the natural order to deliver to us a benefit we never deserved. People ask me how it's fair that some who never hear about Jesus might be judged the same as those who have; they've got it all wrong. The unfairness is that anyone is forgiven. We're so used to getting ours, making sure the scales tip in our favor, we lose sight of the fact that they absolutely should not turn in our favor when it comes to reconciliation with God.

I'm praying that what I heard tonight isn't the worst that I feared-- that the man will sober up, apologize, and not bottle up bitterness until it explodes in infidelity, abuse, or neglect. And though I've forgiven my wife (I messed up the scant chance I had to restore the marriage), this is a lesson I must still learn to live out. In my friendships, at my work, in any future relationships, I mustn't keep a record of wrongs against me, as it says in the famous 1st Corinthians passage. I mustn't keep that mental flow chart of what I deserve after enduring x, y, or z; I must follow the example of the One who made me and endured greater indignity and injustice than I'll ever know.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Philippians 2:5-8

   ed. note - this post has been edited to remove potentially harmful or offensive details. In all cases, every intent has been made to preserve the authorial intent of the post.

Getting us there

Guest preaching is a small part of the job description for "Young Adult Pastor to the Presbytery" but it's an important one. Aside from the obvious importance of delivering the Word of God to gathered congregations of people, and aside also from the importance of providing support for pastors who are away from the pulpit, the importance that has struck me recently is in hearing the Word which applies to the Ignite ministry.

Take last Sunday, for instance. The sermon was on Matthew 16:21-23 where Jesus begins to lay out a plan for heading to Jerusalem, suffering at the hands of the religious leaders, dying, and then being raised from the dead. This is a huge turning point in the Gospel not because it was the creation of some new plan but because it was the transformation of the existing plan to better accord with what the plan has always been. God has always wanted a faithful kingdom and so he created humanity and when sin entered and humanity was separated from God he reached out to his people with a covenant and a law and a dwelling place in their midst and discipline for sin until the fullness of time came and he sent his Son, God incarnate, Jesus Christ, to proclaim the kingdom and to reveal the Triune God and to re-cast the identity of humanity which he did fully and effectively in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ which is then given to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit who unites our hearts with Christ by grace through faith (GASP) - that was a huge run-on sentence.

One of the things I take away from that message is the need for a plan. Not just in a business management self-help kind of way, but a real and genuine goal of ministry. Ministry in general, and especially young adult ministry, slips into maintenance and then it slips into 'doing it just for the sake of doing it' and at that point the prevalence of insider talk and coded language begins to replace actual language which has a direct coherence with the real world. Case in point, for a long time the Ignite ministry hasn't had much more to describe it other than "ministry to young adults" - with 'ministry' being the coded language to describe a thing which hasn't actually been described. As we look forward to sustaining a ministry and growing that 'ministry to young adults,' we have to transition to a place where goals, details, and plans are incorporated.

So here's the plan for the next little bit:

• Continue to teach the Gospel and lead discussion at weekly gatherings in bars, coffee shops, and homes.
• Get more involved with missional expressions of our faith by partnering with local (and not-so-local) organizations. Even if those organizations aren't explicitly Christian ministry, our service will be compelled by our faith.
• Forge a connection with W&J through free yoga classes for students. It's a huge repository of young adults right in our backyard and we barely know them. The first step in getting to know them is meeting them, so we are offering a yoga class for free, no strings attached.
• Explore new models of ministry that might be replicated by Ignite, such as the Waynesburg Intentional Community. Experimenting with this ministry for a while might prove to be the catalyst for a similar approach to ministry in Washington.

The plan for Ignite has always been "ministry to young adults" but now we are starting to work on the specifics of what that plan might entail. These ideas and plans (and others that are still cookin' on the back burner) are being rolled out in order that we might continue to faithfully present the Gospel to young adults and be part of the growth of that faith.

It's not just optimism

The previous post mentioned some of our recent social outings - Mingo Creek County Park picnic, Pirates game, Kennywood - a small time of reflection might be necessary.

The Mingo Creek picnic was a great event with no snags. We played, we ate, we socialized - all with beautiful weather on a holiday weekend.

The Pirates game was... crowded. We didn't get group tickets because not enough folks expressed interest early on. Then we had the struggle of meeting up at the park. Then the tickets were sold out except for standing room only - which we got.

The Kennywood event was... wet. We got there in drizzle, walked through the gates with sprinkles, and made it to our first stop (the restrooms) in a steady rain. In a last ditch effort to ride at least one ride we ran to the bumper cars since they were in a covered pavilion. While there, the rain came down in sheets, buckets, and cats & dogs all at once. Of course, when we reached the front of the line, they stopped letting people ride. The whole park was effectively shut down so the two of us who drove made a mad dash for the exit... which we found closed due to the flow of a raging river down the tunnel. We were trapped in Kennywood by a torrent of rain.


So what do we do with these experiences? As Christians, we don't just smile and feign optimism. But we are called to have a different attitude about the world. Jesus Christ never promises that our lives will be perfect, free from pain, or basted with happiness. What we are given is a new way of looking at things. Trials and troubles become an opportunity to show love, to demonstrate our new way of life, and to seek the welfare of those around us.

We don't always practice this perfectly but we do try. So bring on the storms at Kennywood, the bad seats (standing) at PNC park. We know how to be brought low and how to abound. In each and every circumstance we have learned the secret of being full and being hungry, having superabundance and having need. We are able to do all things through the one who empowers us, that is, Jesus Christ. (so says the Holy Spirit through Paul in Philippians 4:12-13).