Transubstantiate

Thanksgiving, giving thanks, and/or being thankful is both expressive and confessional. 

In a capitalistic society there are a lot of goods and services exchanged every day. And if you’re like us, you tend to say “thanks” to the employee(s) providing the goods or services.

For instance, when the waitress brings our meal, we say “thanks.” When the hotel clerk hands us room keys, we say “thanks.” When the uber driver takes us to our final destination, we say “thanks.”

As we enter the Thanksgiving season, such exchanges got us thinking about this whole idea of thanks, thanksgiving, or giving thanks.

The “thanks” described above are cultural mannerism that we use to be polite. But are such words full of true thanksgiving? Are we really giving thanks for someone bringing us our food? Our hotel keys? Dropping us off at our final destination?

Weren’t we supposed to receive the food? The hotel keys? A lift?

Here’s a question that comes to our minds:

Are you truly giving thanks if you believe you are entitled to what you give thanks for?

In other words, if you believe you are entitled to something, have earned something, or have paid for something, can you truly be thankful for it?

It seems that we live in an entitlement culture.

People think they are entitled and owed certain things.Take kids for instance. Many believe they are entitled to play the gaming system as long as they want. Many believe they are owed a smart phone like all their friends. Many believe dinner at the house should be menu-style as opposed to what momma is cooking.

They want bedtimes to be optional. Thus, when parents allow them two hours for gaming, cook them a nice homecooked meal, or send them to a bedroom with a bed, mattress, covers, and pillows, they aren’t necessarily …

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In recognizing the crucial role that church leaders play in eradicating the stigma around mental illness, Rick and Kay Warren have set out on a mission to educate others about mental illness.

It’s been six years now since Saddleback Church co-founders Rick and Kay Warren tragically lost their son Matthew to suicide. The 27-year-old had suffered from depression since the age of 7.

Being the founders of one of the country’s largest and most developed megachurches, Kay admits that she and Rick struggled at first with how to understand and accept their son’s diagnosis.

“There are signs that show a child is struggling,” she recalls. “Somehow, we missed it.”

The death of her son nearly broke Kay, but God is bigger than any earthly tragedy we will ever face. Kay’s deepest heartbreak led to her greatest calling.

Despite the astronomical rates of mental illness and suicide among teens and young adults, Kay says the faith community has traditionally treated these topics as taboo, something she calls a “tragic misunderstanding,” saying,

“Mental illness is an illness. When you start to understand that, you can start to fix the stigma. When someone is courageous enough to start talking about it, then it opens the doors for treatment and healing.”

In recognizing the crucial role that church leaders play in eradicating the stigma around mental illness, Rick and Kay Warren have set out on a mission to educate others about mental illness. Their goal is to equip churches and families so we can better minister to people living with a mental illness while shining a light on topics that are traditionally taboo in the church.

Here are four things I learned about mental illness and the church from Kay Warren:

1. “Mental illness is real, it’s common and it’s treatable.”

Kay Warren said this is the most important thing she has to say about this issue. …

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Beneath the buzzwords around sustainability, transparency, and ethical sourcing we find something far more important than consumerism: Christ-centered love for our neighbors.

Americans do the most shopping during the last two months on the calendar, fulfilling Christmas gift lists, taking advantage of online deals, and snagging up holiday favorites at local stores. But the spendiest season of the year also offers a broadening array of moral dilemmas regarding our consumerism and a yearning to make something better of it.

Beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday—lest the holiday gift of charity be overlooked—the shopping season now brings sustainable gift guides, fair trade festivals, promotions from charity-minded startups, and shop local movements like Small Business Saturdays. The ethical options force us, as Christians and as consumers, to think more deeply about the items we buy year-round, the companies we support, and how we steward our money and resources.

Take any product we’ve purchased, and we could probably tell you how much it cost and the store it came from. A $55 duffel bag from REI. A $9,000 used Subaru Impreza. A $10 V-neck tee from Target. But beyond that, plenty of questions go unanswered: What materials were used? How much waste was created? Who made the components? Were the workers cared for at each step in the process? How far did these elements travel to get here?

“The modern market economy adds layers of complexity between production and consumption, which makes it hard to see the impact of each choice we make,” said Hunter Beaumont, pastor at Fellowship Denver and a board member with the Denver Institute for Faith and Work. “A lot of our Christian moral convictions were shaped in a simpler economy, and it can feel paralyzing to apply those convictions to our complex, modern economy.”

We want to become more conscious …

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Each Thanksgiving season, I’m struck by the fact that people give thanks for things that they perhaps did not expect.

This Thanksgiving, I am spending time with my family in Florida. I am grateful for the warmer weather and the time to rest a bit. This has also given me some time to think about what Thanksgiving is about and our attitudes and actions surrounding this American holiday.

Yesterday, Laurie Nichols (our BGC communications director) had a good post on thanking God for the parts of our lives which may not be the first things that come to mind.

Each Thanksgiving season, I’m struck by the fact that people give thanks for things that they perhaps did not expect. I don’t, for example, give thanks when the car starts. I don’t, for example, give thanks when the light switch goes on. Those are pretty remarkable things when you think abou them, and probably worthy of our thanksgiving.

But the things that we give thanks for are the things that are perhaps outside of our normal expectations. This makes sense because if we look to the 1621 Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth, it was actually prompted by the fact that they had a good harvest, which reminded them in many ways of what they were thankful for—namely, a good harvest.

The year before the harvest, however, was not good. And, due to the conditions and disease, about half of these new arrivals had died the year or so between arriving and the event we call The First Thanksgiving. Furthermore, the story was that the Native Americans actually provided them food in prior times when they had little, and so when they had much, they had a feast of thanksgiving.

This, of course, would later be declared a national holiday.

People who came over to what they considered the new world during those days often died of hunger when there was a bad crop or a bad harvest. They generally didn’t …

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With the oceans no longer teeming with life, scientists and missionaries alike challenge Christians to faithfulness in the face of daunting odds.

Last month, the United Nations released a sobering report about the state of the earth’s oceans. The 1,200-page document, issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reported warming water temperatures and sharp declines in fish populations and warned that ocean levels could rise up to three feet by the end of the century.

That’s in stark contrast to early history as accounted in the Bible, pointed out Bob Sluka, the lead scientist of A Rocha’s Marine and Coastal Conservation Program. “Genesis 1 talks about the oceans teeming with life in abundance,” he said. “The only place these days to really see that is in marine protected areas.”

The report is a first for oceans and a wake-up call, said Kyle Van Houtan, chief scientist at the internationally-acclaimed Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. “What this report says, at the highest level, is that the ocean has been buffering the impacts of climate change for decades, and that buffering has a limit,” Van Houtan said. “Even though it has an immense ability to absorb and buffer heat and carbon from us, our industries, and our activities, it cannot do that indefinitely.”

Van Houtan, who studied theology at Duke Divinity School while getting his doctorate in ecology, first felt called to help steward creation because of his grandfather, a farmer whose faith exemplified a love for Christ and for creation. “There was a deep reverence for his role as a steward of the land and the animals.”

In contrast, since the Industrial Revolution, human activity has directly contributed to the devastation of ocean health. Van Houtan said the long-term effects of the ocean’s lessened capacity could …

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Suburban America is a strategic mission field.

As a teenager, I’d thumb through the missions catalog. Each location for a short-term mission project felt a bit like hope. Hope for change. Hope for adventure. And most of all, hope that I was living a full Christian life. In my evangelical youth group, the pinnacle of leadership and belonging came through missions—missions to Mexico or a mission trip to Europe. Missionaries were serious about God. In those days, it seemed to me these career paths were just a matter of a simple equation: If you loved Jesus and took your faith seriously, then you’d choose to move overseas as a missionary or at least work in full-time vocational ministry here.

But now, most of us in America live rather ordinary lives in the suburbs. Our days are more often filled with driving children to soccer in our minivans than sharing the gospel with unbelievers. Rather than building houses for the poor, we join the PTA. We go to church and wonder—maybe when we hear a missionary speak—if we somehow missed our calling. If we’re not in full-time vocational ministry, if we’re not missionaries, or if we’re not a key leader in our local congregation, how do we connect the dots between what we say we believe and the lives we live? If we’re not doing “big things” for God, is there a way to live gospel-centered, outward-focused lives in the suburbs?

The suburbs aren’t a second-rate mission field. They are, for many of us, the place to which we’ve been called, the place we are to love and serve, and a place where we can live as missionaries right in the small spaces of our ordinary lives in our cul-de-sacs. Suburbia is a strategic mission field.

The Suburbs Are Changing

Contrary to the …

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Store owners, publishers, and authors have faith despite the declines

Fifteen minutes before the store opens, the staff of the Greatest Gift and Scripture Supply gathers to pray. They open the small box they keep at the front of the store for customers to leave prayer requests. Some days there are 10. Some days, 15. Today the box is empty.

“We’ll just pray for all the unspoken prayers,” says Heather Trost, owner of the Pueblo, Colorado, bookstore. The staff close their eyes. Some of them are wearing buttons that say, May I pray for you? For a moment, the store is quiet.

Trost has an unspoken prayer. Today, she’d like to sell more Bibles.

It’s been a hard year for the Greatest Gift. Running a Christian bookstore can seem like a business of hard years. It’s no secret the whole industry is struggling.

In the last two decades, more than 5,200 evangelical bookstores have gone out of business. Trost knows how easily one hard year—a tough Christmas season, an economic downturn, a personal health issue—can be the last.

The Greatest Gift started in 1949, part of a boom of new commercial activity after World War II. The evangelical book industry flourished in the 1950s, organized by a new group called the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) to serve the growing number of Americans who identified with the Christianity of Billy Graham.

There were about 300 evangelical retail stores in 1950. That grew to about 700 in 1965, about 1,850 in 1975, then more than 3,000 in 1985. By the mid-1990s, there were more than 7,000 such bookstores across the country, and Christian retail was a $3 billion business.

In the midst of those successes, though, there were hints of darker days to come. Walmart and Sam’s Club started selling evangelical books like Left Behind, …

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I have felt the heat of burnout in my own experience (31 years of pastoral ministry in three churches).

“And if you don’t like it, there’s the door!”

Those words spoken from the pulpit out of the mouth of a ministry colleague introduced me to pastoral burnout. After delivering that doozy of a sermon, he disappeared behind the platform and broke down sobbing.

A month away from ministry and a year rebuilding spiritual, emotional, and physical strength led to decades of effective ministry.

But it was almost over before it began. My friend faced burnout. Most of us will too.

I have felt the heat of burnout in my own experience (31 years of pastoral ministry in three churches). Telltale signs for me include:

• Avoiding people (I am an enthusiastic extrovert). When I have over committed or feel the tug of fatigue, this is a sure indicator of trouble. I look at my calendar and groan. I think of excuses for canceling meetings (or even better, not setting them up in the first place). Isolation can kill.
• Procrastinating. In my church context I preach series of messages throughout the year. Usually, I stay ahead of the curve by scheduling study on Thursday mornings and all day Friday. But when I am fatigued, I find myself starting late and pushing the deadlines. That results in poorly prepared sermons, more stress, and guilt. Delay steals fruitfulness.
• Impatience. The little delays and irritations of life (sanctifying experiences usually) result in anger rather than humor. A volunteer blows an assignment, a staff member questions a decision, a family member disappoints and I am ready to blow. Anger does not produce righteousness.
• Temptation. Satan knows me well (I have given him plenty of ammunition over the years) and he seems to have an uncanny knack for raising temptation whenever I struggle with bitterness or resentment. Private failure destroys effective ministry.

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If we are to fulfill this mission and do what a human cannot do—be the Watchman God calls us to be—then we need to finally let others watch over us. 

Nearly 2000 years ago, the Roman poet, Juvenal, asked the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Or, “Who watches the watchmen?”

Five years ago, after my husband and I birthed two babies and a church plant, I started asking the same question.

It didn’t happen overnight—the hopelessness that carved a hole in my insides in the fall of 2014. We celebrated our small but seemingly sturdy church plant launch in the summer of 2012. Our leadership team was made mostly of college students and a handful of young families, all new to ministry and life.

No one knew how this should go, but what we lacked in experience, we made up for in arrogance, energy, and mediocre ideas.

I worked in a nearby hospital, bringing in the primary income. Meanwhile, our boys tagged along with my husband while he tried to build an organization with young leaders with trust issues and no money.

The launch team were at first our friends, and at times, our roommates when someone needed a place to land. But one by one, our friends left town or left the church, often blaming us for a failure or theological disagreement on the way out.

Initially, we received enthusiastic support by our sending church and denomination as they saw us reaching college students and Millennials—the then-impossible demographic other churches struggled to reach. When several other church plants from our district closed soon after our launch (including our sending church), we knew we had to stick it out to prove ourselves.

But we didn’t know how to make it. Our attempts at outreach were met with disdain by our leaders, and the money was running out.

All this during the grim news cycle of 2014: ISIS, Ebola, and Ferguson. Unrest and uncertainty …

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‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ taught us to love—not fear—our neighbor.

“Would you be mine, could you be mine, please would you be my neighbor?” The threefold question repeats for nearly 900 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It’s the recurring song Fred Rogers sings as he enters the front door, removes his jacket, replaces it with a zippered cardigan, and makes his way down the stairs of his television set home to swap out his dress shoes for canvas sneakers.

Growing up watching the slow-moving, soft-spoken Fred Rogers on PBS, I could not have imagined his resurgence in my mid-thirties. Yet Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the 2018 documentary on Fred Rogers’ television show, is already the highest-grossing biographical documentary of all time.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood releases on November 22, a dramatic retelling of the unexpected friendship between a journalist and Rogers, starring Tom Hanks as the most beloved neighbor in America. With an estimated budget of $40 million and one of Hollywood’s most amiable stars in the lead role, the man in the red sweater has become an unexpected commodity. But why the sudden popularity now?

Notably, Fred Rogers’s television entrance always climaxes with the same subject: “neighbor.” Specifically, it is an invitation to be a neighbor. In a way, it’s an echo of Jesus’s conversation with a lawyer in Luke 10, where he asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the law?” Jesus asks in reply.“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind,” the lawyer replies, recalling Deuteronomy 6:5. “And your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).“You …

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