discipleship – Jeff Gissing

June 10, 2018

Finding the holy in everyday life

Finding Holy in the Suburbs

IVP – October 2018 – $16.00

How can we be holy when our lives are a mess?

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]I doubt that any of us is today precisely where we thought we’d be when we were, say, eighteen. Our lives play out in ways we never thought they would.[/inlinetweet]

Those who journey through life without succumbing to the vices that are so easy to cultivate, do so because they have paid at least some attention to the ways that Jesus stepped into a less-than-ideal situation and in so doing redeemed.

[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Regardless of where you live or whether you’re a man or a woman, what kind of car (or minivan you drive) Ashley Hales’s book can re-orient you in the midst of the less-than-ideal or, sometimes more dangerous, when you think you’re living the dream.[/inlinetweet]

It’s availably for pre-order now and comes out in October

November 26, 2014November 26, 2014

Is the Christian life a cruise or a quest?

Here is an excerpt from a book I’m currently writing on the spiritual disciplines in the Christian life. I’m exploring how we think of the Christian life–is it a pleasant stroll or an arduous journey? A cruise or a quest? I’d love your thoughts! Please share in the comments below.

Cruise Ship Christianity

I’ve never been on a cruise ship, but many friends swear by them. The beauty of a cruise ship—so I’m told—is that the journey and the destination become one. Not in some metaphysical motivational jingo. Rather, the ship will take you to several ports of call—you’ll see icebergs, whales, or tropical islands, depending on where you’re cruising. Other modes of transport—the bus or an airplane, for example—make a pretty stark difference between the destination and the journey, especially if you’re in coach.

In a prior ministry position I was required to travel regularly for work. There is no romance in contemporary airline travel. Gone are the days when people travelled in suits and dresses. Today, it’s sweatpants and hockey shirts. Once upon a time a normal person could feel his extremities while sitting in an airline seat. Today airline seats have managed to become so uncomfortable that they could plausibly be designated instruments of torture in the right context. At times, it’s difficult to comprehend that passengers pay hundreds of dollars to wedge themselves into an awkwardly angled seat—perhaps rack is more accurate—clearly designed as slightly constricting to the average 4’ 11” child. The only people who are actually comfortable in coach are children. I guarantee you that just about everyone on a commercial jet is counting the minutes until their circulation returns to normal and they extricate themselves.

Life is very different on a cruise ship. You could fly to just about anywhere a cruise ship goes. Alaska, Jamaica, the Mediterranean—all accessible by plane. People who take cruises do so because they want the journey they take to their destination to be a pleasant one. They want the journey to meet or exceed the joys of the destination.

Step aboard a cruise ship and you will immediately notice that it is designed to provide you with an entertainment experience. There are restaurants, swimming pools, bars, theatres, shops, you name it.

Cabins range from small to palatial. Each day your cabin is turned by the crew—who, I’m told, are quite adept at folding towels into animals—and a mint placed on your pillow for that delightful instance at which your sun-burned head alights on the down cushion and moments before your eyes close in peaceful slumber.

A cruise is a Las Vegas show, a Broadway extravaganza, a Madison Avenue shopping spree, a cordon bleu feast, that just happens to take place aboard a very large ship that is going somewhere. I’m pretty sure that some of the people on cruises ships neither know nor care where they are going—they’re there for the cruise itself, not the ports of call.

The Quest

A quest is very different from a cruise. A quest is “a long and arduous search for something.” While some might consider seven days of over-indulgence “arduous,” what we’re talking about really is quite different.

A quest, by nature, is difficult. It is arduous. It requires sacrifice. Its outcome is not guaranteed. There is a price to be paid.

The journey will change the traveller in ways beyond simply providing a tan or, worse, a hangover.

At the end of the quest there is something so valuable that all of the sacrifices, the scars, the wrong turns—all are worth it. Their cost pales in comparison with the great value of the thing quested for.

February 27, 2014

Well, that was awkward

Discipleship is innately awkward. It’s awkward because all of the things that matter most in the life of discipleship are things that our culture prompts us to classify as “personal and private.” Jesus stands inviting each of us into a fuller life than we can imagine–a life that is manifests the fruit of the spirit. A necessary part of entering into that life is the difficult work of dying to sin.

The believer stands before God deeply loved, perfectly and freely forgiven in Christ, and cherished. At the same time, the path of discipleship means movement toward holiness. So many of the things that make us unholy are things that we wish to keep hidden, secret, sequestered from conversation and reflection. Ironically, our impulse to do just that is what causes those sins to have such terrible power over us.

Full life in Christ requires being part of a community where these awkward things are able to come to light. Some of those conversations are ones each of us would rather die than have. Yet, in having them we find release and a fresh sense of God’s presence with us in the presence of another.

That’s why this blog talks about controversial issues and mundane ones. Jesus claims Lordship over our whole person. That means talking about sexual ethics, sexual identity, and many other topics are fair game–they’re each intimately related to our following Christ.

I hope I’m able to host these sorts of conversations with gentleness and respect. So, even if you find yourself disagreeing with me passionately, I hope you’ll find at least something of worth in what I write.

February 26, 2014

We’re moving!

I wanted to let you know that I have accepted a position at First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem, PA. Effective April 1, 2014 I’ll serve as Director of Discipleship. I can’t tell you how excited both about the position and about the church.

One of the passions that animates my life is developing fully devoted disciples of Christ who love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength. A church is never stronger than its ability to make disciples.

As Director of Discipleship I’ll lead a team of dedicated and excellent staff who minister to children, middle schoolers, high schoolers, and through the church’s weekday preschool. Each of these ministries is strategic and critical to the church’s fidelity to the Great Commission and I deeply believe that all of them is incredibly important. I’m eager to see these ministries continue to thrive, to grow, and to develop to be even more effective in forming students as Christians.

The ministry of formation doesn’t stop when a child goes to college or even when s/he graduates. Discipleship is central for the entirety of our lives. As Discipleship Director I will work to build on the effective ministry of small groups established by my predecessor. On top of that, I will work to develop a discipleship program that provides a meaningful context for growth as Christians. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to explore ways in which the resources of the reformed tradition can enrich our devotional lives, facilitate growth in the use of spiritual disciplines for growth in Christ-likeness, and many other ways to make adult disciples.

Would you pray for me as I turn this corner in my vocation life and enter into a new phase of ministry? Would you also pray for our whole family as we prepare to uproot from Winston-Salem–our home for the last seven years and where both of our kids were born–and transition to Bethlehem?

Thanks in advance!

December 20, 2013

Escaping Christmas craziness

If you’re like me you have a love-hate relationship with the American “holiday season,” perhaps skewed slightly more to hate than love. On the one hand, it’s so much fun to see our kids get excited about wearing their new Christmas pajamas–snuggly little bundles of holiday-themed energy. On the other hand, there’s the traffic and decisions about budgets and gifts. I often experience a strange melancholy in realizing that some of the things I most want–more time, a sunny vacation with Anna, a PhD–aren’t going to be under the tree on December 25. Sometimes the holidays seem like a straightjacket more than a celebration–a period of crazy added to an already full life.

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us;

and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins,

let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us;

through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit,

be honor and glory, now and forever. Amen.

Prayer for the Third Week of Advent, Book of Common Prayer

There is a growing body of literature demonstrating that human beings are innately inclined to benefit from ritual and habit. In a sense, contemporary research is demonstrating a long-forgotten theological truth that freedom is not the ability to choose between alternatives without coercion, but the ability to choose the good. We learn to choose the good by practice.

That’s why the church calendar is a pre-modern resource that can help combat what I call Christmas craziness. You may be new to the practice or it may be something you’ve experienced your whole life. I find that those who are new often benefit from a guide that can orient them to the church year. Those who’ve always practiced it often benefit from this sort of guide too. Liturgical practices may become so comfortable that they lose their theological moorings and become disconnected to their purpose.

A new book offers help to both types of Christian. Let Us Keep the Feast provides an overview of the theological meaning of the seasons of the Christian Year and guidance in how to observe it.

For each season of the year the book provides:

An introduction to the season
The calendar days the season occupies
Traditions–old and new–that are associated with the season
Explanations of how the season is observed around the globe
Ways you can observe the season in your home and in your community
Resources you can use.

The publishers website makes the following observation:

Our days and our weeks are part of God’s created order; the sun setting and rising, the regular shift from work to rest: all of these form a rhythm for our lives, a rhythm that the church has historically observed through a set calendar of feasts and fasts.

Maybe you’ve used an Advent calendar to count down the days till Christmas. Or you might have recently tried giving up something for Lent. These practices are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the riches of the Christian church year.

Why do we celebrate seasons in the church? How can we do it well? And what does it mean for you?

Thousands of Christians wrestle with these questions, and others like them, every year — even every season. In this series of books, these questions are answered!

The first installment focuses on Advent and Christmastide. I encourage you to pick up a copy and choose a new tradition to incorporate into your family life this advent and Christmas.

The publisher agreed to send one of my readers of free copy of the Advent and Christmas volume. If you’d like to get a copy please complete the form below. I will choose randomly someone to receive the book.

October 29, 2013October 29, 2013

The virtue of self-acceptance

It is often said today…that we must love ourselves before we can be set free to love others. This is certainly the release we must seek to give our people. But no realistic human beings find it easy to love or to forgive themselves, and hence their self-acceptance must be grounded in their awareness that God accepts them in Christ. There is a sense in which the strongest self-love that we can have, in the sense of agape, is merely the mirror image of the lively conviction we have that God loves us. There is endless talk about this in the church, but little apparent belief in it among Christians, although they may have a conscious complacency which conceals the subconscious despair which Kierkegaard calls ‘the sickness unto death.’

Richard Lovelace, Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal

I wonder how effective we are at helping people to experience the deep love God has toward them in Christ?

If Tim Keller is right that flourishing and effective congregational ministry can only happen where people repeatedly encounter and experience the love of God in the gospel, then surely this has to be at the heart of the church’s ministry.

Moreover, this communication of God’s love for us has to be married with the Christian virtue of self-acceptance. Self-acceptance isn’t a virtue in our society. We favor self-improvement–you can make yourself into anything you want to be if you only try hard enough, buy and use the right product, and surround yourself with the right people.

Self-acceptance means coming to the place where you’re able to accept yourself as you are. You can only get there through coming to accept God’s unconditional electing love that chose you just as you are not on the basis of your idealized self or even your future self. No. God saved you because he loves you. And he loves you because he saved you. File that under the category of “mystery.”

October 16, 2013October 16, 2013

The unlived life

Everyone has dreams. Some abandon them. Others embrace them. Some try and fail. Others fail to try. Many find a new success in their failures. It wasn’t the success they thought they’d experience. It was a peculiar success whose genesis lay in the failure of their first dream.

Entrepreneurs know this. They try ten things, eight of them fail. They re-invest in the two that don’t.

Stephen Pressfield’s book The War of Art is a must-read for anyone seriously committed to taking any sort of risk in life, not just for the creatives for whom the book was written. He writes, “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance.”

It’s resistance that makes us put down the book proposal we’ve almost completed. It’s resistance that smacks us in the face when we sit at the computer to write our sermon. It’s resistance that gently whispers that we could never do what we’ve always dreamed of doing and what others say they can see us doing.

Our society is ordered around distraction: “we live in a consumer culture that’s acutely aware of [our] unhappiness and has massed all its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it. By selling us a product, a drug, a distraction” (War of Art, 31). What’s easier: two hundred words or two hours on Facebook? What’s more important?

Spend some time today thinking about what you really want to do with your life.

September 23, 2013September 23, 2013

Five ways to respond to disappointment

Each of us is going to experience significant disappointment during the course of our lives. Funding for a ministry project doesn’t materialize; a position you thought yourself well qualified for goes to another; attendance drops despite your fervent prayers and well-prepared sermons; the congregation chooses an option that you disagree with.

Failure and disappointment is often an inevitable by-product of the attempt to actually get off your rear and try to do something. As Teddy Roosevelt put it,

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Knowing this, however, doesn’t take the sting out of disappointment. At best, it can help to redeem it. The question is: how are we to respond to disappointment? Is there a way to make something out of the nothing of rejection or failure?

My friend Kathy Tuan-Mclean has written about disappointment in the context of helping her children move through it. You can read her post here. Kathy identifies the five responses we typically move through in the face of disappointment or failure:

Blame someone or something.
Blame (or shame) the victim.
Stop caring.
Just quit.
Work harder and try again.

Then she adds, “But perhaps the best thing to do, at least initially, is to mourn. To just be sad.” And to be sad is specific way: to grieve cleanly. Grieving cleanly means, according to Kathy, experiencing the pain without inflicting pain on others.

The promise when we grieve cleanly, as Jesus said, is that those who mourn will be comforted. When we mourn with God, we remember that God, not our loss…defines our hope and future.

God reminds the exiled covenant community through Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you…plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” So when disappointment knocks on your door, remember to:

Give yourself permission to mourn and feel the loss
Entertain and reject poor responses
Admit your weakness and lean on God’s grace
Remind yourself that God’s purposes are greater than your circumstances

Doing this won’t eradicate disappointment from your life, but it will be the yeast that leavens the loaf of failure and redeems it to become something God uses to make you both holier and humbler.

September 12, 2013September 12, 2013

10 Evangelical Distinctives

I recently wrote a post asking whether–and if so, how–the Presbyterian Church (USA) is evangelical. This generated some interesting conversations about what the word evangelical really means. In light of these conversations, I thought it worth exploring the variety of perspectives on the evangelical movement.

One of the most significant leaders of modern evangelicalism was Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Lloyd-Jones, a Welshman, served for many years as Pastor of Westminster Chapel in London.

In 1971, Lloyd-Jones preached a series of messages at the Conference of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). He had, for many years, been involved with the British Inter-Varsity Fellowship, itself associated with IFES. Note: my employer, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, is the American arm of IFES.

During this time Lloyd-Jones had grown concerned with what he perceived as a watering down of the gospel message. He took the opportunity to address this when spoke.

Years later his messages were published by Banner of Truth as What is an Evangelical?

Lloyd-Jones argued that there are ten distinctives that provide definition to the notoriously fuzzy word, “evangelical.”

Here they are with my commentary added in italics. Note: Lloyd-Jones represents a conservative, separationist evangelicalism. On the other hand, John R W Stott (whom we’ll look at later) represented a more moderate evangelicalism that was able to survive and thrive in a mixed (broad) church.

Entirely subservient to the Bible. The evangelical attempts to live his life in submission to Scripture as thoroughly as possible. He is, as John Wesley put it, ‘A man of one book.’
Evangelical before all else. The evangelical has a great loyalty to the evangelical way of following Christ than to the denomination of which she may be a part. If forced to choose, the evangelical will always follow his convictions.
Watchful. The evangelical is aware that she has to evaluate, discern, and measure all teachings in the church against the rule of faith, the Word of God.
Distrustful of reason. The evangelical places a higher value on revelation than reason. He sees the work of the philosopher as necessarily limited since it does not have access to the revelation of God in Holy Scripture.
Always takes a low view of the sacraments. Evangelicals recognize only two sacraments, not allowing things like marriage or ordination to become sacraments.
Takes a critical view of history and tradition. Lloyd-Jones writes, “The evangelical believes in the principle of discontinuity.” In other words, the church has a tendency to fossilize spirituality and many of the divisions are the result of evangelicals removing themselves from bodies who life and practice was no longer compatible with evangelical belief and practice.
Always ready to act on his beliefs. The evangelical finds it impossible to compromise or to remain in a place that requires him to compromise his beliefs.
Always simplifies everything. Lloyd-Jones contrasts the evangelical with the Catholic. The reformed belief in the perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture holds that the Bible can be read and understood by the ordinary reader. There’s no requirement to read the Bible through the church’s magisterium or through some other interpretive lens. There is, according to Lloyd-Jones, a “plain meaning” rooted in historical context and authorial intent.
Always concerned with the doctrine of the church. The chief purpose of the evangelical is finding a denominational body that is theologically pure: “His idea of the Church is that it consists of the gathered saints.”
Emphasis on re-birth, personal holiness, and the Christian life. “He is not interested in dead orthodoxy, he is not interested in Protestant scholasticism.” Instead, he cares about being re-born of the Spirit and following Christ as his disciple.

Lloyd-Jones’s list is longer than mine would be. However, I think it is helpful to consider that his position is representative of many evangelicals today. This can be helpful in understanding why some evangelicals find leaving a denomination that appears to them to be corrupt, a no-brainer.

August 13, 2013

Three lessons from Brené Brown at Leadership Summit

One of the highlights of last week’s Global Leadership Summit was hearing Brené Brown speak. Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work and a TED Talk sensation since her 2010 talk went viral (more than 8 million views). That talk is embedded at the bottom of the page. Her research has focused on the interplay between vulnerability and empathy, encouraging people to experience “whole-hearted” living.

Here are three lessons I learned from Brené Brown:

When you judge yourself for requesting help, you invariably judge others when they ask.How many of you feel shame when you ask for help? Just yesterday I tried to figure out to run a report on a database at work. I had a call scheduled with my boss and part of our agenda was to create and discuss this report. I wanted to know how to do it before I got on the call–to save time. I’ll be honest, I tried for about 15 minutes and never did figure it out.
Once on the phone I admitted that I hadn’t been able to figure out how to run the report. As I did, I noticed within myself a twinge of shame. Not much, just a little shame. After all, I use a computer all day long. I blog, use social media, etc. I should–I reasoned–have been able to figure this out.
We lose people in the gap between profession and practice.Professing love (in all its forms) is fairly easy. What is not easy, not simply, what is incontrovertibly complex is practicing love.
How many of us make vows at our wedding–a profession–only to find it require intention, effort, humility, and sacrifice to remain true to the words that so easily dripped from our lips?

How many of us take vows when we join our church and in fairly short order recoil from a significant decision made and once more experience the difficulty of keeping vows?

When the gap between what we say and what we do becomes too immense, we loose people. Marriages collapse. Church fellowships rupture. Friendships end.
Courage and comfort are mutually exclusive.By its very definition courage requires that we confront something that is difficult or that causes us to experience fear. When comfort becomes our objective in life, we cannot be courageous for we will always turn away from anything that causes us to be uncomfortable–it could be making a phone call, following a dream, initiating a difficult conversation, restoring a broken relationship. Interestingly, we may claim that we’re not satisfied with our life, but as long as comfort is our chief value our life will never change and we’ll settle into a begrudging comfort.

I’ll be reflecting on these lessons for a while. What stands out to you from Brené’s talk?