Personal Log 10.19.21

My allergies kicked in Saturday Evening & they've been off & on the last few days. I love the Fall but I hate the allergies that come w/ it's arrival. It's almost like it's expected & I just get used to it. 

That got me thinking: there's a lot of things that we just get used to… birthday parties… family reunions… holiday get togethers… daily routines… prayer life… ministry…  evangelism… church services… worship… some things are, for lack of a better term, simply sacrosanct.

People are different, they come from different backgrounds & everyone has their own ideas about how things should be done. Several years ago I talked to a handful of pastors about the format of their services & whether they would be willing to change that format; every single one said “no”. Even if the Holy Spirit told them that morning to not have worship, just go right into preaching? What if He wanted an hour of worship & no sermon? Even if He said no one makes a sound, just sit there & meditate on Jesus? Every one of them was not open to even the idea that service could be done differently; there was a certain structure, a certain format, it had to be done “decently & in order”, they knew what that was & there was no deviating from it. So much for “where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom”.

One even rebuked me, “We're not going to do something different just for the sake of doing something different.”  I replied, “So, you're going to keep doing everything the same just for the sake of doing it the same...” We never spoke again.

I've been meditating on the verse “ask of Me & I will give you the nations.” About 20 years ago now I heard Danny Chambers speak on this & he said, “Lord, I want the nation of music.” That changed my intellectual paradigm to think out of the box. I had never thought of that before, that nations were not exclusively continents. There's the nation of music... the nation of entertainment...  the nation of the arts… the nation of youth… the nation of social media… the nation of technology, etc, etc.

There's something about thinking / being unconventional, let's face it; making a mud pie w/ your spit & putting it on someone's eyes to heal them was not the norm. Jesus thought outside the box, He was the ultimate iconoclast & if He's our model… 

I'll be deactivating my Facebook account at the end of the month, I'm just tired of seeing the excruciating minutiae of every little detail of everyone's life in my timeline. 

Enough. 

Now, I realize that Facebook is the mission field for many people & that's fine; if that's your Crete have at it. Right now, I'm mainly focused on Twitter, XAPiT & Skype. What if the Ekklesia completely took over these social media platforms? What if the Ekklesia completely took over the airwaves? How different would everything look? 

I've talked about this in several previous blogs, how the Church can utilize CB radio for ministry, monthly video conferencing / Bible Studies w/ Zoom, Skype & Google Meet, hosting quarterly open mics w/ the Youth bands & musicians in the area & live streaming it, about shaking things up & doing things differently.

Ministry can & should be, unconventional. The only lock on the box is found on the inside of it & the only key to it is your mindset.