Payday Lending Scrutiny

I am reading more and more about the increased scrutiny on the payday lending industry. Last year a law went into effect that effectively capped the interest rate on loans to military personnel at 36%. Barack Obama has promised to expand this to cap interest rates on all payday loans and "empower more Americans in the fight against predatory lending". A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights some particularly disturbing practices by some payday lenders to tap into the Social Security benefits from the elderly and disabled. There has also been increasing pressure at the state level to restrict or prohibit payday lending.

I'm not sure what this means for the small loan industry but I think smart business people see problems as opportunities. So while this may be disconcerting for some, others may see this as an opportune time to adjust the direction of their lending to

Story telling

I remember hearing Dan Allendar teach on story at a conference in April of 2006. Wonderful conference. At one point, he was illustrating a point about story by telling a part of his own story. A Christian was trying to teach him, and Dan confronted him with "tell me a story, not facts". Allendar has found that understanding comes from stories, not a list of facts.

Story has been described as the language of the heart. I know that some of my greatest growth as a Christian has not come from purely "knowledge" studies, but rather from hearing the stories of others. The Bible itself is mostly a collection of stories -- I believe I heard an estimate of 70% of it being story. I think that's low.

Story sharing should be more a part of our gatherings. As it is, most weeks the only one who can tell a story is the guy controlling the monologue sermon, if that is the type of church you go to (the majority of them). Some have "testimonal time", but we need to be much broader -- though the word "share a testimony" is used, when done in corporate settings it is more often "tell your testimony" not share.

When story sharing is incorporated into our gathering, we come to realize that our stories are an extension of what we read in scripture. And scripture becomes the backdrop of our stories. Rather than some artificially arrived at "six steps to a better marriage" derived from scripture (or contrived from), we see God's story continuing into our lives. We become encouraged and are spurred on by such a perspective.

I don't know how this is done for gatherings of 25 or more. Love to hear ideas of how to have a free flow sharing of stories of our lives in larger gatherings, as that is the way most churches are constructed. Sometimes our stories are unfolding as we share them. How's this done in large settings?

Maybe it can't. Maybe our central gatherings need to be what is advocated on these pages -- small gatherings of a handful.

The medium is the message (perhaps Part 1)

Some reading of Neil Cole, Alan Hirsch, and Michael Frost, and now some Leonard Sweet, has me thinking in the two lines as I approach this:
1) contextualizing the church to a culture -- this requires understanding what are the core purposes and values of what a church should be, and understanding a culture.
2) understanding the medium is the message. Simplified a bit, this means actions speak louder than words.

I spoke before on this last one, where I visited a church meeting of 25, where we spent 45 minutes in song before a guy spoke on how this was a family. The medium -- sitting in chairs, facing the back of the head of person's in front of us, singing then hearing a monologue sermon, spoke much louder than his words.

So what do our standard mediums speak about our message? Some examples that run us into trouble --
1) Peter wrote that we are a priesthood of all believers. The Hebrew writer wrote that Jesus is our high priest to whom we can approach directly. Yet a very common practice is to make a "clergy class" between us and Jesus. This clergy class is very much like a priesthood that stands between us and God. Paul wrote that apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (all to commonly lumped together and called just "pastors" as a group nowadays) are for equipping the church. They are authorities in the sense that they with God help us become who we are meant to be, not "lord it over" us.
2) all our life is to be worship, yet we create distinct times of the week to call worship, and create separate spaces as "sacred".
3) Jesus called us to be active worshipers, participants, and contributers. Paul wrote about "orderly" assemblies in I Corinthians 14. Yet we've seen "orderly" changed to "ordered" to the point of having a script for our gatherings. We are called in assemblying together to encourage one another, admonish one another, to spur one another on to love and good deeds. But the custom has grown to be centered along a scripted service that runs somewhere from 60 to 120 minutes, where most show up no more than 5 minutes before and those who linger do so no more than 15 minutes and talk about the weather or the immediate past sporting events or the one coming up that afternoon or other trivia.
4) A typical church's "small groups" program consist of people gathering and studying some curriculum for six weeks to 12 weeks. And the small group "script" must be followed and a 12 week study must be completed in 12 weeks. What does this medium teach? That knowledge is more important than loving others. Spending time of a session with someone in need is not allowed under this format. I fear that the message of the medium to many is that knowledge of God is more important that loving and knowing God.

IF our gatherings and discipleship approaches are to speak of the Christ, what would they look like?

Church and Repression -- the dichotomy

Another way the current church setup suppresses us from being fully who we are intended to be is the dichotomy between secular and spiritual.

In the time of the gospels, Jesus spoke into a culture that was Hebraic in its spirituality. Hebraic spirituality didn't separate the spiritual from the secular. A Hebraic teaching speaks of the glory of God being in everything -- it is a matter of orienting it toward God to release the glory.

Sadly, Hellenistic (Greek-Roman) spirituality crept into the faith. Greek thinking distinguishes the sacred from the secular. What followed corrupts the message of Christ until today. Instead of the priesthood of all believers, we have a priesthood of the clergy. We have a separate spaces called "church buildings". Everywhere we turn, we have separation. Is it a wonder we have trouble walking with God when we so separate our lives?

Where this really damages us from living in glory, of being what God intended, is the distinguishing of 'calling'. We all have a calling, but the church only seems to recognize that calling if it is for a "clergy" or ministry position. Diminished, we create second class citizens of those not in "ministry".