By most accounts, condescension is considered a negative in today's language.  Condescend has been re-defined as a tone of superiority that patronizes another.  This is not it's original meaning however.

John Wesley once wrote, "God himself has condescended to teach the way: for this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price give me the Book of God!" God's condescension is not patronizing, it is rather his making himself known to us on our level of understanding.  God has let himself down into mankind out of love and respect for his creation.  This takes place mainly in The Word–the Logos of God–that is Jesus Christ, through scripture, and through his Holy Spirit.

How beautiful and good is it that the Lord of the universe should come to us then on our own level, where we are at?  God strips away the barriers that keep us from him, and does so in order to pull us towards him.  As Karl Barth notes:

Sin is obviously the negation, the opposite of what God does for us in Jesus Christ in condescending to us, in humbling Himself, in becoming a servant to take to Himself and away from us our guilt and sickness.  This is the grace of God in its first form: God gives Himself to us, He makes Himself responsible for our cause, He takes it into His own hand.  And the commandment is clear–it is necessarily a matter of our basing our being and activity on the fact that God is ours, that we are the recipients of this gift which is so inconceivably great.  Sin in its first form is pride.  When God condescends to man, when He makes Himself one with Him in order to be truly his God...

Rather than a force of oppressive weight, God's condescension is our very means of salvation.  As followers of Christ then we are recipients of the salvation because of our identification within the community that is the Body of Christ.  As co-recipients of that grace we are then drawn into God through the same love that binds God the Father, Son, and Spirit as one.  Not only are we bound to God, but to each-other in God as the Body of Christ.

So, next time you think of the word condescend you might have a different perspective.

Today I wrote four blessings.  These were specific blessings written for the four men I am taking a course with in seminary.  It is easy to gloss over the discipline of blessing others.  It's kind of weird in our culture to physically (or in my case virtually) embrace another, look into their lives, and speak into them the Spirit of God in blessing.  Compliments are hard to come by, but blessings are even harder.

There is power in blessing others, and in being blessed.  Not our power, but the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit.  Just as God breathed the breath of life into Adam, we continue that life-giving act today.

If you want to transform the life of another today then take them by the shoulders, look them in the eyes, and bless them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Pray God's guidance on their life, his strength in their limbs, his love on their lips, his mind in their vision.

I pray that the Lord would bless you!  That he would guide your steps, and enter into your heart in a powerful and healing way!  He is not just the Lord of our souls, but the Lord of the universe!  His power is infinite, his love is majestic, and his holiness is dumbfounding.  May you walk today knowing you are blessed and loved, unique in all creation!

I am currently in the basement of my home, watching a ladybug traversing the drop ceiling.  I wonder if it has any idea where it is?  Does it know the difference between inside and outside?  Does it know that it is actually upside down?  The other curious thing is that it was actually here last night, it hasn't moved even two-feet from where it was then.  What is it eating?  What is it drinking?  Is it letting out tiny ladybug poops that are so tiny that you would never see them with your naked eye?

I sound a bit like my four year old son with all of those questions.  In the end though, i think it is wonderfully marvelous that we have  been given such inquisitive minds.  If we were all satisfied with things just the way they are then there is a good chance we would not be where we are today.  Look at all of the animals of the world, only a very few ask questions of their surroundings.  Men, apes, dolphins all have shown capacity to process and ask questions of their surroundings.  It is a rare thing in nature to question what you have in front of you and to try and alter the outcome of a situation.

My friendly ladybug doesn't ask any questions, it just is.  My ape and dolphin friends ask a limited set of questions pertinent to food sources and mating but only humans question their own existence and its meaning.  We are the only creatures given the additional dimension of faith.  Faith is an interesting part of our beingness as humans.  There are those that claim to have no faith, I would argue they have placed their faith in the statement that they have no faith.  Others place their faith in themselves, in others, or in God.

Faith isn't something you are ever given more of, or have taken away.  It is rather an awareness of our own internal allegiance to this, that or the other.  Faith is a compass.  The needle of faith always points towards God, but we can manipulate the field around the magnet to get it to point this way or that.  Like my ladybug we wander the ceiling thinking it's the floor or the wall.  We think we are outside when we are really inside.  If you want your faith to point true north then you must ask God to remove the conflicting magnets that have caused you to pursue a life lived in a false direction and restore the original orientation of the compass.

I pray today that my compass should be aligned correctly, that God would strip away those false magnets that drag the compass of my faith into leading me away from God.

Do you have a mission statement?  I think ours says something about being an authentic community of Christ followers or some such statement.  Have you ever really sat and thought why you have a mission statement?  There was probably some point in the late 1990's early 2000's during some church growth seminar in which some well meaning person equated the church with the business world.  They saw the business world creating vision statements and mission statements and thought it would be a good thing to adopt into our Christian marketing portfolio.

But have you ever really thought about what a mission statement is, it's real purpose?  A mission statement says absolutely nothing about the organization to which it is attached.  It is meaningless.  A mission statement is merely the means by which an organization controls the perception of others of what it is that the organization does.  In reality the organizations work is not only different than the mission statement, it is antithetical.

Take the insurance industry.  A health insurance company may have as it's mission statement; we exist to provide our customers with the best health care options at the lowest price.  That however is not the mission of the company.  Their real mission is a simple economic one; to spend less money than they take in.  The insurance company however realizes that if they owned up to this real mission that no one would do business with them.

But you may say, the church is different than a business, we are real and authentic.  Really?

There are a couple of different reasons why a church would have a business statement.

1. To attract Christians from other churches with code words that denote that they are indeed cooler than your current church.

2.  To act as a placebo for the congregation to believe that by having a mission statement they are actually being missional.

Let's unpack those.

Often the mission statements of a church are front and center on their marketing, their slides, their literature, etc.  When in print however this is nothing more than a co-opting of the secular marketing world's idea of 'branding'.  Make no mistake that a slogan is nothing more than a public relations vehicle by which you attempt to control the public perception of your purpose, it is not your real purpose.  It is not our job to control the public perception of our intent.

I also say that a mission is often a placebo in that it becomes a mantra by which the organization lulls itself into the false reality that they are actually doing what it says in their mission.  By having a mission statement we allow individuals and organizations to mask over the shadow missions that are the reality.  We slowly begin to believe we are actually fulfilling our mission by the very virtue that we have a mission statement.

If a church is truly being a church then a mission statement is not only needless, it is boarder line idolatrous.  After all, there is but one mission; and it is God's.  When we adopt mission statements that causes the attention of the individual to fall on the church, rather than the God of the church.  So please, drop your mission statements, precisely so that you may embrace your missional calling.

The followig is the introduction to a recent paper I wrote:

If you were to jump into your car before the 1990’s and drive off into some unknown wilderness without the assistance of a map or a prior knowledge of the terrain it is more than likely that you would soon become increasingly lost and off-course from where you had intended to arrive. In the event that you had wisely taken a map you might have been able to find a marker or a familiar object along your way by which you could measure the accuracy of your course. Even with a map you would still have needed to have had an understanding of orientation, perhaps acquired a compass, and have had some spare time to calculate precisely where you were in relation to an object notated on your map. But what if the map you had taken was a very old one? What if the names of the landmarks had changed and a new highway had been opened and the old road demolished? What if a new bridge had opened that could have saved you hours of time? With old information you would have been even further impeded on your journey.

Fast forward to today and the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS). With a state of the art GPS it is not only be possible for you to drive directly and precisely to a previously unknown location, you are able to know exactly where you are at all times in relation to your destination. There is now no need to know about closed roads and detours because if an alternate route is needed the GPS will kindly inform you. What if you need to stop and eat? Simply ask the GPS where a good Chinese restaurant is along the way and a soothing voice of your choosing will navigate you there.

In the matter of 20 years we have gone from wandering nomads and hapless husbands stuck asking directions at the filling station to savvy travelers with up to the minute traffic jam data at our finger tips. The means by which this technology works is that each GPS device communicates with a series of satellites that are fixed in orbit around the earth. The satellites provide a source if truth which is then overlaid in whatever terrain you encounter. Through wireless data connections your map and any relevant details are updated constantly. With this system the names can change and the paths can shift however your chances to become lost are greatly reduced.

I find this story of our collective move into a digital and always-on understanding of our surroundings and direction to be one metaphor for the trajectory of the ongoing narrative of our faith. Speaking from personal experience I spent most of my early life wandering the wilderness without a map, without a knowledge of the terrain or my surroundings. I relied on the rudimentary knowledge I gleaned from my parents and from Sunday school. I navigated the Christian faith vicariously through those ties. I was okay with asking for directions at the filling stations; however I had no real concept of allowing God to cultivate an intimately connected relationship with Him.

As I matured I began to accept the possibility of a directly connected relationship with my creator and began to piece together a map of my surroundings. Soon I found other explorers and sojourners with slightly different maps from mine and we compared notes. We shared our stories with each other and as we did I added missing data on their map and they on mine. Despite our collaboration these fellow students of the faith seemed to be just as lost as me. It appeared that I had the right map for a given place at a given point in time but the language and the landmarks had shifted. I was in a realm that while vaguely familiar was eerily different, a shadow of what had been. What worked one week somehow fell short the next. To borrow from Steven King’s Dark Tower series, “the world had moved on, since then”. (King, 3) I was navigating the Missouri river of Lewis and Clark with a map of the Hudson and for some strange reason I was just not figuring out why it was so hard to get a bearing.

It is not so long ago that you could have found me paddling my canoe up the river as I pursued my quixotic calling. Thankfully I encountered some others who had been in the same wilderness, but who now shouted from it’s edges, I began to realize that the map I was trying to use no longer fit the context of my real location. I needed the equivalent of a GPS integration in my heart, an overhaul of my understanding, and it was only going to happen if I surrendered everything I had once known as the ‘right way’.

I have a feeling that this story is not just my story, it is the story of many Christian leaders today that are sitting amongst the ruins of pragmatic programs and well intentions wondering what to do next and where to go. Our common human situation renders us ineligible from being the measuring stick of growth on our own. Yet we can reflect that bit of divine truth that shines down upon us and binds us in God and to each other. By entering into a life giving relationship with the Triune God through faith in Jesus Christ we can navigate our new reality and be transformed in our character and in our relationships.  This inner renovation of our character moves us into discipleship and mission as we participate with God in the establishment of His Kingdom.

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King, Stephen. 2003. The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, Book 1) . Plume. Hampton Falls, NH.