Power: Faith and Healing

what do you think?

This month we would like to share about healing and the move of the Holy Spirit. From our many travels around the world and our gospel expeditions we have seen the mighty hand of the Lord work in wonderful and spectacular ways. We have been eyewitnesses of healings, deliverance's, and most of all the miracle of the new birth. Sometimes people ask us, "Why do we not see the same type of spectacular healing here in America as we hear about overseas?" This is a valid question, but unfortunately it leads some to question healing altogether. The answer to why this may occur, and granted there are many healings and deliverance's happening right now here in America, rest with Faith. Hebrews 11:6 "And without FAITH it is impossible to please Him, for those who come to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of those who seek Him." You see, apart from faith God cannot move.

In places like Asia and Africa the spiritual world is very prevalent. It is apart of daily life and most BELIEVE in it. Where as in Europe and America, we are, for the most part, very skeptical when it comes to the supernatural. Skepticism, or unbelief, even occurs in the church and we tend to conform our beliefs from our environment rather than by what the Word of God has to say. The word is clear that Christ Jesus is never changing (Heb. 13:8) and throughout the word of God we find a healing Lord. Read Mark 5:21-34 to see faith of an individual in action and healing because of it.

When we minister the word in far reaching places to people who believe in evil spirit and supernatural works it isn't hard for them to believe in the supernatural God we preach. As we teach about what Christ did and what He can do in them their faith begins to rise. They know of the spiritual world, and when they hear of a healing God who will take away their sins, helps them physically, and listens to their cares and worries they say, "YES, I want this Jesus. Yes, I want to be healed. Yes, I BELIEVE He can heal me." They come to this decision because they also feel the lack from the constant visits to witch-doctors that seem to do more harm than good. They come to this decision because they know instinctively in their heart that no stone, idol, or earthly object can ultimately heal them. They come to Christ because when truth hits their heart faith springs forward.

I can remember a moment in India when we had a small church service where many Hindus came to see and hear of this God who does wonderful works. A local man who did intense physical labor came forward when we asked if anyone would like us to lay hands and believe for healing. We prayed and believed for this man. Two hours later he walked, after gathering his family (wife and two children), 10km from his village to the place we were staying. He reported to us his back had been completely healed. He then wanted us to pray for the rest of the ailments his family was suffering from. We explained it is from the power of God who heals and we simply believe in that power and pray. He laid hands on his family with us as we prayed and they too received healing. Consequently they now all believe in Jesus and carry the testimony of a healing God.



There is much to be said about healing in the Lord, but know this, if you are suffering and want a work of the Holy Spirit simply BELIEVE. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, so meditate upon scriptures that deal with healing. Walk by faith and not by sight and claim, "I am healed in Jesus name!" Watch what wonderful things happen when you couple faith with what you speak.

Tim and Will

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TRAVEL THE ROAD

3-25-07

you are blessed
as air travels through you
expanding your lungs to their full capacity
as you hold your breath
and as the tinge of pain
from waiting and holding it all in overwhelms you.
as life twists, turns, and flips you,
heartache after heartache
working through the strain of life's struggles
and trying to find the glimmers of hope
through the darkness of suffering.
you are blessed
even in those times when hope is not enough
when to persevere seems foolish
and when our character fails us
do not allow circumstance to deter you
there is something much deeper,
even when not seen,
that holds you there
singing to your subconscious
something that keeps you coming.
the hope that God is who he says he is.
that if we really truly try,
we too can rejoice.
we too can tell the story of suffering,
of perseverance,
and of character.
that we too can know,
deeply and intimately,
what it means to hope.

This got my attention!

Our good friend and emerging missionary Shannon Hopkins was quoted in one of the books I've read recently. Her words really grabbed me.

"If we have no power, the emerging cultures will not be drawn to us. They are not afraid they are going to go to church and be changed. They are more afraid they will go to chruch and not be changed."

Wellspring Group Meeting

We will be meeting at the Napier's for tonights group meeting.

3-4-07

i encourage you
in times when you forget what it is to smile
when your heart is so heavy it hurts
and it feels as though no one understands

i encourage you in your 'lostness'
in your dark nights
as you descend the depths of silence
and as you brush the bottom of your soul

as your voice grows hoarse
as your confidence weakens
as you question-as you doubt
as you wonder who is friend
and who is foe

i encourage you
to passionately wait
to diligently seek
to quietly hope
to grit your teeth
to clench your fist
and to continue on.

for God has not forgotten you
you have not been abandoned
God will renew you each morning
and will deliver each promise.

feel yourself held.
rest.
breathe.
trust.
and above all else,
hope.

What is Post-Christendom?

Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch have a lot to say about Christendom and post-Christendom. They believe the epoch of Christendom is over. What do you think?

Here are some of their thoughts:

We acknowledge that the epoch of history that shaped the contemporary church has crashed like a wave on a shore and left the church high and dry. That epoch is known as the era of Christendom. Christendom has been in decline for the last 250 years.

Christendom is the name given to the religious culture that has dominated Western society since the fourth century. Awakened by the Roman emperor Constantine, it was the cultural phenomenon that resulted when Christianity was established as the official imperial religion, moving it form being a marginalized, subversive, and persecuted movement to being the official religion in the empire. Whereas followers of Jesus at one time had to meet secretly in homes and underground in catacombs, now they were given some of the greatest temples and meeting spaces in the empire.

The net effect over the entire Christendom epoch was that Christianity moved form being a dynamic, revolutionary, social, and spiritual movement to being a static religious institution with its attendant structured, priesthood, and sacraments.

Christendom describes the standardized form and expression of the church and mission formed in the post-Constantine period (AD 312 to present). It is important to note that it was not the original form in which the church expressed itself. The Christendom church is fundamentally different form the NT church, which is made up of a network of grassroots missional communities organized as a movement.
Christendom is marked by the following characteristics:

Its mode of engagement is attractional/extractional as opposed to missional/sending. Come to us.
A shift of focus to dedicated, sacred building/places of worship. The church in the Christendom epoch is more static and institutional in form.
The emergence of an institutionally recognized, profession clergy class acting primarily in a pastor-teacher mode.
Church is perceived as central to society and surrounding culture. The church holds a place of honor and respect in the community.
The Christendom mode church is dualistic. It separates the sacred from the profane, the holy from the unholy, the in from the out.
The church in Christendom is hierarchical. It’s top down and bureaucratic in it’s approach to leadership

One Foot in Front of the Other

The AIDS Walk is fast approaching! I want to invite all of Wellspring to join me and the Bering Omega team. We'll have a table that clearly identifies the folks related to our hospice (Omega House), dental clinic, etc. So we'll be easy to find. For those concerned about whether it will test their physical capabilities, no worries. The walk isn't three miles and the pace is very slow because most folks are people-watching more than exercising! If you are still hesitant to walk but want to be involved, I'll gladly accept your donation!!! Check out my page for details.

Anyone up for some Anne?

That's right - Anne Lamont's coming to Houston. I read her book 'Traveling Mercies' and loved it! I'm not sure what she will be talking about - it doesn't say, but you can't go wrong with Anne Lamont. Check it out here. It will cost about $25. Let me know if you're interested. If you haven't read Traveling Mercies I would suggest reading it.

lent

so ken has given me permission to try some things this lenten season.
the first thing is going to be a 'fat tuesday' meal at pappasitos on 1960!
we'll get there tomorrow around 7 and will hopefully eat ourselves into a bit of gluttony.
(i might even bring some mardi gras beads...don't get excited rodney, you've got to keep your clothes on at dinner!)
following that is ash wednesday, and i encourage all of you to pop into a catholic, episcopal, or lutheran service...(there may be other denominations doing it as well).
it's short...and they usually do several a day.

for those of you that may not have grown up in a church or lifestyle that included lent...
you can check out some info on wikipedia

i'm usually the last person to be a proponent of anything traditional...
but i'm working on that.
it's real easy to get excited during advent leading up to christmas...
and many times i forget about the time leading up to the crucifixion.
this is a good time for reflection...
and perhaps for our community to try something new.

2-18-07

blessings...

in the moments where the cost to follow seems
too much
too hard
too long.

a place where eyes grow tired of searching
hands grow weary from the work
voice is strained from the yelling
and the heart is breaking from the waiting.

feel yourself tethered
your mourning, your anxiety, your desperation
will not carry you away.
this is where even your groans are understood.

blessings...

as you do the hard work of letting yourself go
erupting out onto the other side
stepping into the grace
into the rhythm
into the light.

allow the crying to cease
allow the yelling to subside
feel yourself enveloped in love and patience
by something much bigger than you
something that does not grow weary
and that will never leave you.
rest here...
here in this embrace.
amen.

From "A Minute Of Margin"

Speaking of Community......Perhaps our techno world is anti-community?

Loneliness, Boredom, Stress, and The Media.
In the years ahead we will live increasingly in fictions. We will turn on our virtual-reality systems on and lie back, experiencing heavenly pleasures of sight and sound in a snug electronic nest. The real world will almost be totally blotted out from our experience.A quote from "World Future Society"

Life is meant to be participatory and relational. In the past life was "experience rich" but "stimulus poor". Today that ratio has reversed, and much of this trend is due to the pervasive presence of media in our current environment , it is easy to lapse into a media saturated existence. When lonely, or boredom or stressed, the first thing we often do is activate our media surroundings,which usually means turning on the television. In a previous era we would have perhaps have visited a friend.This is not to say that all such media usage for loneliness is inappropriate. But if over used, it will result in more isolation, not less.It is therefore wise to guard against media constituting our only barrier to loneliness.Loneliness and boredom are often traveling partners. While loneliness can motivate to move toward community,boredom can motivate us toward creativity.We should not fear boredom as we do, it can be useful. If we tolerate a bored state for long it can become a seedbed of imagination and to short circuit boredom is to short circuit creativity.The temptation is to immediately solve boredom with media. When children are bored, we usually rescue them with television,videos,or computer games. Instead, if we allow boredom to build with no possibility of electronics, imagination will begin to surface. This is called play.Play is the business of childhood. It is healthy for kids to get bored and to have to play their way out of it. In addition to loneliness and boredom,stress is another factor that drives us to a relaxing media respite. This is acceptable from time to time.But when a media respite becomes a media overload,turn off the television. When media saturation becomes physical sedentary and socially isolating,move to restore appropriate levels of physical and social activity, where real healing is found.

THE RX
Allow boredom to nourish the imagination rather than consume and reenergize your participatory experience. Dont live a vicarious virtual-reality existence, create a personal-experience reality and in doing so, you will increase physical exercise,connect to others,and build community.

blessing

per ken's request, i'll be adding our weekly blessing to the blog.
thanks to all of you for being so supportive of it.

2-11-07
you are blessed.
your inheritance is waiting,
since the dawn of time
when God molded chaos...
even then,
the Kingdom was waiting for you.
you are blessed
because at one point
you too were a stranger.
someone was kind to you
because you were different.
someone listened
when no one else would,
and perhaps even clothed, fed, or cared for you...
a stranger.
you are blessed
as you attempt to open your eyes.
your blindness is gone...
if you choose it.
your heart is softened...
if you want it.
and your hands will begin to help...
if you will only try.
you are blessed
as you choose love over indifference
as you meet eyes with a stranger
as you individually and corporately seek to help
as you are overwhelmed
as you cry out against injustice
and as you are taken into the warmth unseen
as a friend...
no longer a stranger.
be loved.
be welcomed.
be blessed.

I like this quote

Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccupations, fears, doubts, and despair are the enemies which slowly bow us toward earth and turn us into dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature and of God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic, and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man’s soul.

General Douglas McArthur

Real People in the Real World

When we dialogued yesterday about eternal life, what Jesus might have meant when he did the big John 3:16 thing on old Nick, and even got into how David, a "man after God's own heart," seemed to be fairly proficient at messing up, I was reminded of a list that an African American pastor used once in a sermon with much enthusiasm.

I liked it so much I asked for a copy. He was making the point that our "heroes of the faith are flawed." While it may be too telling about me, I have to confess that I find great comfort that the Bible is filled with stories of the real-ness of people such as:

drunkards like Noah
liars like Abraham
tricksters like Jacob
murderers like Moses
adulterers like David
idolaters like Solomon
backsliders like Elisha
cursing sailors like Peter
doubters like Thomas
spoiled brats like James and John
persecutors like Paul
sinners like you and me.

write it

so at my very baptist university we had a week long university-wide conversation about art and how it is effected and effects faith.
we even had our very own dr. sloan give a lecture.
i was surprised.
i thought that, being one of his first public lectures, it would be something powerful, something enlightening, something uplifting...
and it was, but not in the way i had expected.
on the topic of biblical writing and poetry, sloan decided to pull from lamentations and the psalms.
lamentations is a sad, sorrowful, book of despair.
it's hard to read for most, and something i think most of us tend to skim over.
from my OT survey class i remember the discussion of how lamentations begins every verse or line with the consecutive letters of the hebrew alphabet.
some think this is a nemonic device since everything was committed to memory...
but as sloan pointed out, that would be really hard to do considering there are several lines beginning with a, with b, with g and so on.
most of the lines begin with a word we translate to mean 'how?', but it actually is more like an unpronounceable moan.
so perhaps, he offered, that this was not for sheer memorization but for survival.
that when we mourn, if we aren't tethered down...we can tend to allow that slow moan to turn into outright shrieking hysteria.
it is freedom to mourn and grieve, but in such a way that keeps it somewhat contained.
sloan laughed when he said that you must have lived many years if you had looked to the psalms for consolation and daily reading.
perhaps i have lived many years.
the psalms, too, are sad.
it's funny to read some of them since they start off with such, again, sorrowful words and yet end with a 'praise God!' or something. sounds like us sometimes. we can relate to someone else all the shit that's going on with us, and then at the end finish it with something ridiculous like 'but God is still faithful....yada yada yada'.
why do we do it?
sloan mentioned lots of other things too, things that i'm sure most people-like our own ken w.- know from their own long days of religious schooling.
he touched on the many places jesus drew from the psalms and how that was probably the collection of writing that had the greatest effect on jc.
and...the point of all this...sloan addressed how, back in the day, lamentations were used during worship.
the people were in a hard place...they felt alone and deserted and confused...and they used that honesty in worship.
i want us to use whatever it is...maybe we are in a moment of celebration or mourning...either way, i want us to use it.
ken has been asking for us to find heartfelt ways of worshipping...
and so i wonder, what if we could all jot down our thoughts and begin to form ways of using it in worship.
maybe a poem, maybe john or rodney or some other musician were to make it into actual music...
i don't know. i just want us to begin to use our lives to worship with.
i don't want to sing songs about things i've never experienced and never felt. some of them the rest of you have felt or gone through, but i haven't, and maybe some of you can relate to that.
anyways, something to think about i suppose.
let me know what you guys feel about it.

This is so not spiritual

After reading the previous post by Ken in which the author gives a wonderful quote describing the searching of a follower of God, I hate to break it up with something as non-important as this; but since we are in community and in this community I tend to be the only one to spread the gospel of soccer I found the following article to explain the "coming of becks" highly relevant. I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Beckham but his arrival could be significant. While reading, PLEASE click on the Steven Gerrard link and take seven minutes of your life to witness one of the truly great athletes of our time.

The Link:
http://www.burnsidewriterscollective.com/sports/2007/01/its_beckhamania.php

"A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling. ...We must play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, and live by improvisation and experiment."

This is a quote of a quote. The origional quote is from the book The Church as the People of God by Hans Kung. I found it in the current book I'm reading called The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsh.

the big 5-0

yes, ken shuman is celebrating...
and we plan on helping him do that.
thanks to karen (party planner extrordinaire) we'll be celebrating 'traditional baptist style'...meaning, bring your own pot-luck dish. anything you want, but enough to share...and by anything, we mean ANYTHING. (i guess this isn't totally 'traditional baptist' after all! ha!)

so give shuman a call for directions if you haven't made it over to the new estate...

should prove to be a pretty fun evening...come and help us toast one of our favorite guys :)

An Incarnational Lifestyle?

In the book “Exiles” Michael Frost makes the case that following the example of Jesus includes the following four aspects. I would like to know what you think.

An active sharing of life, participating in the fears, frustrations, and afflictions of the host community. The prayer of the exile should be, “Lord, let your mind be in me,” for no witness is capable of incarnationality without the mind of Jesus.
An employment of the language and thought forms of those with whom we seek to share Jesus. After all, he used common speech and stories: salt, fruit, birds, and the like. He seldom used theological or religious jargon or technical terms.
A preparedness to go to the people, not expecting them to come to us. As Jesus came from the heavens to humanity, we enter into the “tribal” realities of human society.
A confidence that the gospel can be communicated by ordinary means, through acts of servanthood, loving relationships, good deed; in this way the exile becomes an extension of the incarnation in our time. Deeds thus create words.

God tells Pat Robertson what's coming up for 2007

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VIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia (AP) -- Evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday that God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would cause a "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network.

"The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him about the impending tragedy during a recent prayer retreat.

God also said, he claims, that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

Robertson suggested in January 2006 that God punished then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a stroke for ceding Israeli-controlled land to the Palestinians.

The broadcaster predicted in January 2004 that President Bush would easily win re-election.

Bush won 51 percent of the vote that fall, beating Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

In 2005, Robertson predicted that Bush would have victory after victory in his second term. He said Social Security reform proposals would be approved and Bush would nominate conservative judges to federal courts.

Lawmakers confirmed Bush's 2005 nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. But the president's Social Security initiative was stalled.

"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."

In May, Robertson said God told him that storms and possibly a tsunami were to crash into America's coastline in 2006.

Even though the U.S. was not hit with a tsunami, Robertson on Tuesday cited last spring's heavy rains and flooding in New England as partly fulfilling the prediction.
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What is the deal with this? We know that God and Pat are tight. Anyone who smiles as much as Pat can must have some good friends. Apparently, God lets Pat in on some good gossip and it's not very good news. Doom and gloom, etc. Now according to Pat, God has given him "predictions" in the past. Some of which have come true, but not all. So, are we supposed to get from this the notion that if God tells us some dire prediction, we can assume that a 50% success rate is good enough...from God? Now,when it doesn't quite come out as predicted we get get this quote:

"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."

So in his next breath he says He gets it wrong sometimes. So who are we supposed to believe is really speaking here? God or Pat? I just do not see what the point of Pat Robinson is.

I could guess the future as well as anyone and if I had a 50% rate of success that would be pretty good I think.

I will give it a try: I predict that ratings and revenue will slip on the 700 Club and Pat Robinson will say stupid crap to get his mug in the news.