Luther’s phrase, “Here I stand, I can do nothing else” comes to mind.

That rule became a ticking time bomb.

When your belief system requires obedience to the Bible above everything else, you’ve essentially created a standard that is above your belief system. Where the Bible leads, you must follow, even if that dismantles your other beliefs.

For as much as I love the Bible and look to it as a key source of direction in my faith, I can also see how reliance on the Bible alone creates churches full of mini-Luthers who are all taking stands all over the place. This simple observation is almost enough to explain the tumultuous history of Protestantism that continues today in online spats and denominational divides.

Everyone is quite concerned about figuring out where to stand. If Luther took a stand once, shouldn’t I do the same?

After obsessing for years over where I stand, I’ve been wondering if a more helpful matter is figuring out how we got where we are—the walking of yesterday rather than the standing of today. Here are three things I’ve learned by looking at where I’ve come from rather than where I stand:

How Awesome Am I?

Focusing on where I stand gives myself too much credit. Did I really figure all of this out? Nope. I have benefited from those who came before me.

Am I awesome? Not very. Even Luther would probably call me a swine or a fart bag—he was a pretty crass fellow.

I owe just about everything to those who came before me.

How Objective Am I?

When I step back to look at the circumstances that helped give birth to what I believe and do as a follower of Jesus, I gain a really helpful perspective. Not only have  I not made up everything I believe, but I’m taking on a set of beliefs from one time and place and applying them to my own.

I may discover that the beliefs I’ve adopted have some major short-comings if I know a little about their history. Otherwise, I’m not objective enough to figure things out on my own.

The Bible Doesn’t Work in a Vacuum

You can’t distill the Bible into a test tube where you figure out precisely how to live. To use another metaphor, it makes for a poor set of blueprints.

I have often found it far more helpful to think of the Bible as a portrait painting. You can go to a gallery and appreciate how an artist interacted with his subjects at a particular time and place and offered his own representation of it. The nature of the paint or the ability of artists to capture light determined what the paintings look like in each period.

The Bible will not be tamed. It will disturb, disrupt, and shock us. My beliefs have changed so much over the years, and I honestly don’t know what I believe about certain things any more because I always find out something different about God each time I read the Bible.

In reality, I do very little standing when it comes to the Bible. I see myself running, just trying to catch up to the interpreters who came before me and with the various stories that sometimes create portraits of God and his followers that are hard to reconcile with one another.

When you sign on to make the Bible your sole authority, you’re signing up for a wild, disruptive ride where anything contrary to the scriptures needs to go. If you know where your beliefs came from in the first place, you’ll at least be ready for this and have a better idea of where the most dramatic bumps and turns will come.

If you don’t know where your beliefs come from, you’re at the mercy of a Bible that will push, pull, and punch. The Bible will give us plenty of comfort, but with its words of encouragement comes a disruptive message that can topple over every belief system—even the belief system that claims to revere the Bible more than any other.

I’ve heard other artists share their struggles with the church in the past, and so I asked him, “What makes this church different?” I’m the new guy around here. What do I know?

He didn’t mention a program.

He didn’t talk about a curriculum.

He didn’t even talk about a small group.

“They just affirm who I am and my calling to create,” is the gist of his reply.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to belong in the church. We have men, women, artists, and plenty of other groups who feel like they just don’t belong in the church. After my conversation with him, I began to jot down some ideas. Here’s where I’m at with all of this:

What if the church is spending too much time trying to make us into something so that we can fulfill a greater organization goal?

In other words, I’m wondering if some churches have made a subtle but alienating shift into Church Inc®. Have we been asking people to offer their gifts to the church so that the organization can reach its full potential rather than affirming their gifts so they can reach their full potential?

In Church Inc® the people make the organization better, stronger. Artists can serve the church, but only when their gifts serve Church Inc® are they actually using their gifts to glorify God. Gifts are dropped in at Church Inc® and that’s that.

In “Church People,”the goal is to affirm people to develop their God-given gifts and to use them where they are. Church People tries to create focus so that people can hear from God, and sometimes those people will be called to serve God within the church. However, the difference comes with the function of the organization—there is a symbiotic relationship where the group and individuals serve one another rather than the advancement of the organization.

Church Inc® is a system. By and large, it has been adopted as “the way things are.” It can be equally cruel and demanding on pastors and attendees. Pastors are demanded to build something significant, and therefore they must use their people in order to build something they can feel good about.

Church People puts the people first, creating an organization that can only thrive when the people are loved and encouraged to pursue their God-given callings.

In writing about Church Inc® and Church People, I want to make it clear that I don’t see scheming people at Church Inc® who want to virtually enslave artists, coerce women, or browbeat men. However, this diagnosis could help us see part of the problem with people not fitting into church.

Men who desire adventure and challenge struggle with Church Inc® because it wants them to be nice, polite members, rather than affirming the challenges of Jesus in the Gospels to go out, serve others, to bring justice, and to lay down their lives for others.

Women who want to use their God-given gifts struggle with Church Inc® because it has limited places where they can serve, missing out on the ways that the Gospel abolishes the divisions of race and gender.

Artists who feel compelled to create struggle with Church Inc® because their gifts are only useful for the purposes of the church and its campaigns. They return to their daily work wondering how it could possibly relate to God.

In wrapping this up, I want to say that Church Inc® and Church People certainly can mix. I’m sure that a church that puts people first can easily cross the line into Church Inc® where people become tools for its goals. It’s easy to lose sight of these things.

I also want to emphasize that so much of church has been handed down to us. Generation after generation passes on church culture and customs. Who knows where Church Inc® came from?

There aren’t any sides in this matter. There’s only a state of mind, a state of mind that either puts the organization or the people first.

So long as we have organized churches, we will always feel that tension, that pull to put the greater organization ahead of the people. To the extent that we are committed to imperfectly loving our Christian communities, we will manage to fight off the wiles of Church Inc® and support the people around us because the mean the world to us—not because they are valuable assets for the future of the church.

Over the years, I’ve heard similar complaints about certain groups not fitting in at church.

Women feel overlooked and marginalized.

The more athletic, muscular men don’t feel like they can be themselves.

The more artistic, humanities-oriented men feel like they don’t have a place with either the church or the athletic men.

In general, the artists feel crammed into predefined categories where they lack creative freedom—if they are even acknowledged in the first place.

If you look at this list, it would seem that no one actually belongs in the church. Everyone feels left out.

In stepping back, I think it’s probably better to say that certain groups feel left out of certain churches. Some churches are less affirming toward men, while others are quite restrictive and disingenuous toward women.

I want to step back and ask, “What do we mean when we say we don’t feel like we belong in church?”

There are lots of broad, sweeping prescriptions for “fixing” our “problems,” but sometimes they just make things worse. My least favorite “solution” is the whole, “Our churches are too feminized” line of thinking—if we dare to even call this “thinking.” This strikes me as reactionary—men are not comfortable in church so it must be feminization!!!

Um, the women are who aren’t allowed to speak in feminized churches while getting saddled with all of the work actually sort of hate it and rightfully resent such statements. (I go into this particular topic a bit more here.)

We never want to overlook the needs of any one group, but by pitting men against women or attendees against leaders or whatever else is counterproductive. We need to start talking about what we actually mean when we make statements about not belonging in church.

There are a ton of reasons why church may not click for someone. Gender is but one of many issues swirling about.

From the best to the worst, every church is a system and a culture to a certain degree—even those that try to just keep it simple. Trends will emerge, groups will form, and others will struggle to fit in. Expectations develop, those gifted for leadership will emerge (whether by calling alone or by gender/calling), and membership traits will coalesce in one way or another.

By the time all of these things take place, there will be those who fit and those who do not. And the question remains, how do some people end up fitting in while others do not? The answers aren’t simple here.

I hope to ask this question from a few different angles this week. Stay tuned.

I know that dragons aren’t necessarily on the tips of anyone’s tongues of late in our gender discussions, but I’ve heard enough about A) men protecting women and B) dragons standing in as part of the honorable man equation that it’s worth exploring.

It can be honorable to speak of “protecting” women. However, once we start speaking of men slaying dragons on behalf of their ladies, I find that the metaphor breaks down in some serious ways.

You see, I don’t believe in slaying dragons. I’m an English major.

When English majors are confronted with talk of contemporary dragon-slaying, they’re going to ask questions like this:

• Why are we obsessed with a Victorian reimagining of Medieval nobility?
• Why a dragon? Why not a tiger, grizzly bear, or angry camel?
• Does the dragon bear a certain literary value? Do dragons convey a sexual image of threatened chastity and honorable male sexuality? If there’s one thing that English majors know, it’s that sex is EVERYWHERE. So these dudes can either fess up to what sexual point they’re making with this dragon business or I’ll keep making suggestions.

Perhaps I’m just lazy, but I’m not the main character in the story that God’s writing. I was created to be a sidekick to a fellow sidekick. God didn’t make a hero and sidekick. He either made two heroes who work together or two sidekicks who help each other do things… like kick stuff in the side.

The more I look at how this protecting, chivalry, honor business ends up working out practically, we wind up with this dynamic where men are always in charge, watching out for the women, making the decisions, and figuring out what to do. Because when the dragon starts chomping on the peasants, the little woman isn’t going to beat him down with her spinning wheel.

Dragons are the business of men who have swords and muscles and facial hair.

Let’s take this metaphor of protection and manliness into the real world for a moment—where it basically falls to pieces.

Sometimes my wife has a rough day. Hey, she’s in graduate school and there are some crazy days she has to put in. I need to step it up and encourage her (I also do the cleaning and laundry, but I do them in awesome, manly ways that involve lots of violence and muscles).

Just the other day I was telling her how I could clearly see God working in her. That was a pretty nice, manly thing to do, eh?

But here’s the thing, I believe that my wife and I are equals. We learn from each other. We protect and support each other. And guess what? I was discouraged and insecure that day. So I told her about it. I mentioned that seeing her calling helped me accept that God has called me to write.

What followed was a very honest conversation about how we can both see God working in each other’s careers. It’s hard for us to see these things in ourselves, but when we look at each other, God’s hand couldn’t be clearer.

I needed my wife to protect me, to lead me, and to encourage me to keep on. She needed me too. We support each other, yielding and submitting as we sort out life together. To say I need to protect her as her dragon-slaying knight misses out on the mutual responsibility we have to guard one another.

We fight for one another in our marriage.

Before we lose ourselves in noble metaphors of mighty male, guardian knights who slay dragons for their ladies, let’s not forget that there are some dragons that only women can handle.

And maybe women really need to be defended from the people who say they’re defenseless.

Perkins, a man who had actually reconciled with the murderer of his brother, said that he had recently finished speaking at a church when a young woman approached him. She said something like this, “My grandmother supported segregation, but she was a dedicated Christian who was nice to everyone.”

Perkins replied, “Well, your grandmother was a bigot!”

Sometimes being a nice Christian isn’t enough when you’re contributing to injustice. Being nice doesn’t undo the degrading of another person.

I write this dressed in clothing that may have been made by poorly treated workers on a computer that was almost certainly manufactured by workers who were overworked and underpaid. Am I part of the problem? How can I doubt that?

I some days wonder if I have any integrity to speak of justice. I try to do things here and there to serve the poor, and I still struggle with the fact that I profit from injustice. However, I’m doing a few things to address injustice where I’m at, and one of the areas where I feel called to speak is with inequality and women. I write this as someone trying to undo a few wrongs, even if there is much that remains to be done.

Where I’m Coming From

I want to begin by explaining that I believe women are created to be fully equal to men. I know there are some Christians who disagree with that, saying that God created a kind of hierarchy. I used to belong to that camp, but I don’t any more. I’m not going to argue points.

I only want to say that I am one of many Christians who believes in gender equality because I find that the most compelling way to read scripture. I tried the other way, and too many passages from scripture fell apart in the process, forcing me to pick and choose which ones to take “literally.”

That’s just my story and my perspective. I believe the Bible makes men and women equal in the image of God. I understand that some followers of Jesus disagree with me.

What I Hear

When I hear someone argue that the Bible makes women somehow unequal to men, there really isn’t any way to dress up that perspective for me. As a former member of that camp, I understand there’s no malice intended. I know there’s a simple desire to obey the Bible.

Some even try to be nice about it.

Whether nice or judgmental toward me, I keep hearing the same thing: injustice. Saying that women are anything other than what God made them to be smacks  me as flat out wrong. There are two irreconcilable perspectives here.

We can’t find middle ground. Women are either fully equal to men in God’s created order or they’re not. Even if I hear nice words coming from those who deny that equality, I still hear injustice. I can’t help that.

How I React

Though I understand that few, if any, people who “downgrade” women are malicious in their intent, I still find myself reacting strongly with waves of heartbreak and anger. It’s hard to fight back these feelings as I hear someone tell a woman she is somehow less in the sight of God—even if it’s dressed up “nice” as a different calling.

I know that we can’t make a one to one correspondence with racism here. I’m not out to paint anyone as a villain. However, anyone denying the equality of women believes in something that is unjust in my reading of scripture, and it devastates me in so many ways.

In writing all of this, I hope I can at least explain why these discussions about women and ministry and women and equality become so emotionally charged. Both sides really do want to remain true to the Bible. I have no doubt in my mind about that since I’ve belonged to both camps here.

However, I can also sense that those who support full equality have an edge, even a chip on their shoulders that isn’t always understood. We aren’t just having a theology debate here. We’re talking about the something so deeply personal and powerful for half of the people on this planet. This is a matter that can literally alter the life choices of thousands if not millions of women. This is an issue that ties into personal worth as much as it does to ministry and theology.

I don’t think those who quote scriptures about women remaining silent understand the hornet nest they’re stirring up. I’m not saying we can’t have these discussions, but I think we should only enter into them with two things in mind:

• A full commitment to actually having a discussion where we share our stories and how we arrived at our beliefs rather than fighting to convert one side to the other.
• An understanding that so much is at stake for those who believe in equality—enough that it may be hard to keep a cool head.

Equality for women is one of those issues where I’m continually reminded that the internet is a terrible place for discussion and debate. I hope each side continues to recognize that God is working among them. I hope discussions continue to happen in the appropriate forums. I hope that we can build more understanding.

At the same time, we’re arguing over a matter of justice—at least one side of this debate is. The stakes are high. Denying the equality of women with a nice, rational argument stings every bit as bad as a caustic remark. That’s just the reality we have. May God give us wisdom and grace to know when to keep our comments to ourselves and to dispense grace and peace instead of conflict.

The Bible is full of people who were just like us. It was written by people just like us. The details are there, tucked away in the spare prose and poetry. The trouble is how to unlock those details so that we can relate to the people in the Bible and sort out what it means for us.

We’re not used to reading books like the Bible. There are a lot of ways that’s true, but one obvious detail is that the Bible wasn’t typed on a computer with infinite pages. The writers of the Bible couldn’t pick up legal pads at Staples or drop off a manuscript at a printing press.

The Bible was written on scrolls—precious, limiting scrolls that could only hold so much. Long-winded writers need not apply for writing the Bible.

These authors were masterful in their economy of words. They distilled stories down to the most important details. If we see something in the Bible, no matter how small the detail, we need to ask, “Why is this here?”

This one question will help you dig into the backstory and the implied situations described in each story.

There are lots of other really good questions that will help you study Bible. However, this one question:

• Forces us to slow down
• Helps us read carefully
• Places us in the events recorded with new eyes

If we can answer the question, “Why is this here?” we may be able to figure out what the Bible has to say to us. We may find hidden treasures. We may even find out why we’re here.

Some conversations I happen to overhear. Other times the conversations boom from their sources, invading the ears of everyone within twenty feet. Even my headphones can’t save me. Yes, some people talk THAT LOUD in public.

While listening to conversations, I often catch myself classifying people into types. There are the super-impractical professor types who theorize all day, the bumper sticker activists who are awesome at talking loud and bumping into me when they walk by, and the religious groups who gather for one on one Bible study or “training” that often devolves into us vs. them conversations of one sort or another.

The moment I sort people into groups, I begin to either dismiss them or to develop common cause with them. And here’s the crazy thing: I don’t even know these people, but I’m already sorting out in my head the people I’d rather have over for a cup of tea with us and our rabbits.

All of this is based on looking at how people are dressed and hearing snippets of conversations. Once I create these divides, it’s infinitely harder to be kind to people when I’ve pegged them as too liberal, too conservative, too lazy, too combative, too quirky, too impractical, etc.

I think something happens online as well. We see a profile picture of someone, read a snippet of text on Twitter or Facebook, and we immediately stick people into groups. We write up profiles for people we hardly know, bulldozing over the complexities of their lives and the experiences that shaped who they are.

What gets me is that my type classification system destroys personal stories. While we often adopt the beliefs that our families, friends, and institutions pass on to us, it’s also important to note that our beliefs and actions are shaped by our stories. Speaking for myself, my stories have everything to do with how my beliefs have evolved over time.

For example, a reader of my website may read my reluctance to support the wars of the United States and immediately classify me as some kind of liberal, pacifist, wussy who hates American or whatever. However, you can’t understand my feelings about modern warfare until you learn about the ways war has impacted my family and friends, the research I’ve done, and the stories I’ve gathered together.

Knowing this about myself, I need to extend this same complexity and mystery to others. As I think about Christians living in peace with one another, to say nothing about any other daily interaction, this tendency to pre-sort people into groups and types before actually hearing their stories cuts us off from opportunities to love people for who they are, right where they’re at.

When I catch myself thinking that someone is a “type,” I need to repent. I need to ask God for new eyes and grace to share. However, I still think all bets are off for people who don’t have an inside voice.

Those who had their doubts about this young man suggested that religion isn’t just bad stuff. Religion can be anything from regular Bible reading to reading liturgy to fasting. We can do all of these things with either sincere or hypocritical hearts. In response to that, the supporters of the young man said, “You’re not defining religion in the same way as him.” To that I say: EXACTLY!

If anything, this young man has succeeded in proving that we need theology today, and for that, I thank him. Any time we see well-meaning holy fervor expressed with a jumble of confusing ideas, we see a need for theology. We can’t “just love” Jesus because no one has been able to do that—ideas always creep in no matter what. There is no pure way to love Jesus that can transcend the beliefs and practices that have been passed on to us. We always attach something “religious” to our worship, and if we try to break free from the past, we’ll just make up new religious things to pass on to others.

Theology helps us because it defines what we’re talking about. Theology constructs a common playing field where we can sort out what religion actually is and all that it means. Theology saves us from turning religion into this huge, enormous, awful embodiment of everything we hate.

This isn’t to say that theology wants to “save” religion. Rather, theology helps us see what it is and what it isn’t. In fact, every theologian I know approached his video from a similar perspective—trying to grapple with the ways this young man defined religion. If we fail to define religion, its advantages, and its disadvantages accurately, we’ll cut ourselves off from traditions, beliefs, and practices that have been instrumental in guiding Christians for centuries. We may also expose ourselves to reinventing Jesus into our own image without the stabilizing influence of tradition.

The downside of theology is that it can be quite dull. In fact, the problem with most theology texts is they begin by defining their terms at length and describing the current book’s position in an ongoing discussion. This is rather dull, thankless work that is hard to present to the average reader.

I struggled to present the basics of theology in an accessible format in Coffeehouse Theology only for one reviewer to say it was too simplistic to be of any use and another reviewer to say that I’d lost touch with how to communicate with normal human beings.

When we want to make sweeping statements about religion and our beliefs, we’re crossing into complex, daunting territory. I don’t slam this young man for his sincerity or desire to share his love for Jesus. I don’t think anyone is interested in that. Rather, this is a word of caution to make sure we know what we’re talking about when we speak of such large things as “religion.”

This Jesus vs. religion thing has been around for years. There were plenty of books and blog posts about it before YouTube was a sketch in a computer engineer’s notebook. As long as we have had this discussion, we have struggled to define what religion means. For most of us, religion has come to mean “anything we didn’t find life-giving in Christianity.”

Theologians can help us sort out religion, Jesus, and what it means to follow Jesus without tossing the good things that have been passed down to us. And even if we can’t figure out what they’re talking about in their thick books with tiny text, we should at least know that the number one rule for any theology discussion is this: define your terms.

I think these folks don’t know what they’re really saying.

These folks may have an idea in their minds of what this looks like, but if you asked them to really explain such things in detail, the training wheels of these undeveloped thoughts fall off.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for years now, and yesterday I finally put some thoughts together…

Generalizations about Generalizations

Perhaps the greatest limitation to such statements about the state of the church or particularly masculine or feminine traits is the limits of each person’s perspective. How many Christians and churches do we really know? Through my travels I’ve attended about 10 different churches and studied ecclesiology in seminary, and I still don’t feel like I have a handle on vast trends in Christianity.

Can we really speak with any kind of certainty about “the problem with the church” today?

The only generalization I feel comfortable making is that generalizations are generally unhelpful. One need only take a survey from who knows where and mix it with a personal anecdote to diagnose the church with a far-sweeping problem that can only be solved by an overly simplistic, half-baked idea.

Do We Have Problems with Men and Women in the Church?

This is a tougher matter to zero in upon, since so many people mean something different when speaking of a crisis with men or an overly “feminized” church. On the one hand, we can all agree that the church should have men and women fully involved in its ministry in one way of another. If one group is significantly more involved than the other, it’s fair to ask “why?”

However, once we start criticizing women for making the church too feminine, we run into a few major problems.

First of all, what exactly do we mean by “feminine”? The way the term is used, there’s an underlying assumption that feminine is naturally weak and bad, while masculine is strong and good. Lost in the shuffle are the deeper nuances of gender and the various exceptions we run into every day, such as when we meet a man who is very nurturing or a woman is very aggressive. I don’t think we really can pin down specific definitions here for masculine or feminine since real people defy them.

Secondly, any criticism about the church being too feminine begs the question, “How did women become so involved in the church?” I’m not a sociologist, but I’d guess that the social models of the 1950’s and 60’s (and beyond) had something to do with it. The men ran off to have careers and to drink beer in the back yard while the women raised families and kept the church going—or something like that.

Men complaining that the church became too feminine while they worked 50-60 hour weeks strikes me as a slap in the face to every woman who has served God in the church. Of course women are going to run most of the committees if the men are working all week!

Our Real Problem?

If we do have a problem with men not getting involved in the church, we at least don’t have a “feminine” church problem. We have men with a Holy Spirit problem. My guess is that every church is going to look a bit different, but so long as men are working long days and women are not, what do we expect will happen at our churches?

I’m not saying that men won’t be led by the Holy Spirit to work a normal week at the office. We need men and women to follow the Spirit wherever the Spirit leads them. I’m saying that we can’t blame women for becoming so involved in the church—as if men are the victims of women initiating a takeover of some sort where they prod pastors to do their bidding.

If we are going to have balanced congregations where men and women serve together in a relatively equal manner, our only hope is the leadership of the Spirit, not some vague notion of men becoming more manly or women somehow becoming less feminine. Such proclamations about masculinity and femininity make no sense and do us no good.

I’m far less concerned with “real” manhood or “real” womanhood. In the life given by Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female, and as a result the gifts of the Spirit are equally provided to us all.

May we find our true calling through the gentle whisper of the Spirit and ignore the loud voices clamoring for a gender-based counterfeit.

When I heard that a bunch of people were choosing “one word” as a kind of resolution for the coming year of 2011, I confess that my discernment/critical nature kicked into high gear. I can’t say why I was suspicious. I knew very little about it. I just saw that it was becoming a trend.

There are enough “trends” in the Christian world that I think you can’t help becoming suspicious. So many trends are based on flawed theology or at least an imbalanced perspective of discipleship. Need I mention the “me first” prayer of Jabez that Americans love?

I can’t remember the exact details, but one day in late 2010 I was praying and God started to work on my critical attitude. In fact, God gave me a word for 2011: redemptive. At first I was a bit miffed at the Holy Spirit. “Dang it! You fell for this trend too?” As I reflected on what that word could mean for 2011, I realized that God was converging a bunch of stuff that had been accumulating for years.

I realized that God wanted to use me to bring healing, growth, and hope. I began to look at everything I did through the lens of what lead to “redemption.” Were my words and actions helping someone heal or grow into a place of restoration and wholeness?

That really messed up my year in the best way possible. I had to delete a lot of potential blog post and book ideas. My arrogance and selfishness appeared over and over again.

I could tell all kinds of stories about the past year, but two significant projects arose out of that word: “redemptive.” One is my series of guest posts in 2012 called the Women in Ministry Series. I hope to offer an alternative to the women in ministry debate by sharing the stories of women who are actually in ministry.

Rather than slinging scripture at one another, I think it’s time that we just acknowledged that we’re divided on this one. While we all serve the same Lord, it’s time for those of us who believe in the role of women in ministry to find ways to encourage more women to pursue God’s calling for their lives. I also hope that those with a more limited view of women in ministry will be challenged to reexamine scripture after reading some stories in this series.

Along similar lines, I also began rewriting a series of blog posts on unity and exploring some practical principles of Christian unity. I have been putting these practical thoughts on Christian unity together in an E-book titled Divided We Unite. It will be released this January. A lot of our faith-fights can be traced back to trying to force unity where there can only be division, while also losing sight of what truly binds us together as followers of Jesus.

In an extreme understatement, my one-word for 2011 radically changed my ministry and work.

Is There a Word for 2012?

I don’t want to just “think” of another word for 2012 just to have one. Perhaps that was my skepticism of this project at the outset. We’d all just think something like, “Ooooh, this is cool! Let me think of a word… How about ‘awesomeness’?”

However, there is something to this format that really works. I think God likes to speak to us in simple ways, and just listening for one word can take a lot of pressure off us, making it easier to hear the Spirit speak.

The One Word website talks about the power of the word: “if you let it, your word will shape you and your year. It will guide your decisions and help you grow.” I think really does miss something. Like I said, I’ve got that critical edge to me. What you or I choose for ourselves doesn’t mean all that much in terms of life change and discipleship. The power here comes from focusing on what God wants to do in and through us. To that end, God can use this One Word project to help us focus on what he wants to accomplish in our lives.

Setting aside “skeptical me,” I asked God if he had a word for me in 2012, and I sensed that he certainly did: freedom.

In an election year, we’ll be hearing a lot about “freedom” and “liberty.” Most of the time these words will mean being able to do whatever we want. Freedom is often linked with individualism and individual rights. It can mean that, but I think God wants to teach me about freedom with boundaries and interdependence on others.

God’s freedom restricts us in some ways so that we are truly “free” to be the people he made us to be. One practice that has already started is the practice of saying a simple prayer each morning where I “offer my day” to God. He’s been impressing on me that living as a disciple who is free from sin and who is able to serve God means taking an intentional step at the start of each day. Paul often writers about “offering ourselves to God.”

This exploration of freedom is both exciting and challenging. The results are tantalizing, but the road forward will no doubt be filled with restrictions and struggles.

Who knows what could happen in 2012 with a word like freedom…