I’m in San Francisco to reconnect with friends from college this weekend. This morning I got some much-needed time to relax in the city – jet lag means I get plenty of time to explore coffee shops before most people are up and running. I walked down Embarcadero, along the water that overlooks the Bay Bridge, and found my favorite coffee shop in the world – Peet’s Coffee, in the Ferry Plaza. This must be the coolest location for a coffee shop in history. For two hours I watched as every twenty minutes another ferry pulled up from across the bay, carrying hoards of progressive San Francisco businessmen and women. I was very intimidated, and worried they might sniff out the backwoods southerner in the their midst.

Coffee is a beautiful addiction, and nowhere am I more enabled in my weakness than at Peet’s. Their coffee is the gold standard in my book. The environment is less “Ikea” than Starbucks, less “hunter lodge wannabe” than Caribou. And they always play classical music, no matter what the marketing gurus tell them about the coveted 18-34 yr. old target audience.

Then again, maybe I’m just in a good mood because this is San Francisco. The whole experience is different. There’s something refreshing about walking from the apartment where I’m staying in Presidio, as the peloton of bike commuters pass me by, and after a 15 minute hike I’m not sweating through my shirt, because it’s 60 degrees and breezy. Don’t get me wrong – I love Atlanta. But this is a different kind of city.

I dusted off a set of Calvin’s Institutes this morning, as I was looking through the library of the retired Presbyterian minister, Robert Smith. He now lives in an Alzheimer’s home, and his family has donated his collection to my church. As I scanned the leather bindings, like Luther’s Bondage of the Will, and Barth’s Dogmatics, I couldn’t help but wonder whether these voices – many of which have shaped the contours of the Reformation – have anything to say to our emerging church. Or are they, like my retired Presbyterian friend, being relegated to a home where their distant memory and voice are becoming just that – a distant memory.

What does the Reformed tradition have to say to the emerging church? How does a Reformed theology shape our ministry praxis in emerging churches that find themselves less and less comfortable with the mainline tradition of their past?

The other day I was having coffee with a friend who works at a Presbyterian church. He was sharing with me about a new ministry initiative, an idea he had for this event that lots of people would come to. Well-attended events are like drugs at a megachurch. Once you have that first addictive experience, you can’t stop until you get another fix. Well-meaning people will affirm you, and say things like, “Man, you really get it. You’ve got the gift”. Affirmation like that gives you a warm, happy, Joel-Osteen kind of feeling in your stomach, like you’re a good church leader. This is why during the low-attendance days of summer, a lot of pastors get the shakes.

What struck me was not my friend’s comment about the big ministry event, but how he described it. After walking me through the nuts and bolts of this slick new program, he said to me, “and at the end of the event, we’re gonna tell people about poverty in our city, and hand out some flyers…it’s definitely gonna be missional.” I caught myself nodding in agreement – I have no idea why.

Last summer, our church joined the throngs of North American churches in this pursuit of a missional vision for Christian community. We read books about it. We talked about it over staff meetings, lunches, and retreats. We even had a sermon series, and small group curriculums to boot. It was wonderful. Our creative ministry vision-casters began hatching all things missional. We had visions of missional worship, missional coffee (fair trade), missional napkins (recycled, with a missional logo printed on them), and lots of little missional children running around in our Sunday School classes.

But somewhere in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help but wonder, is this happening too fast? Did we skip over the long and arduous process of reflection, and giving ourselves to studying the way of Jesus through what seems to be a new set of lenses?

I think for many of our church staff, what’s hitting us one summer later is a kind of missional hangover. And this is a good thing. We’ve begun wrestling with the fact that our wholesale surrender to the missio Dei is only in its infant stages – what we have now is a shift in language, a thin veneer under which remains a longstanding ecclesiology that sometimes has more to do with maintaining size and influence than helping people wake up to the great mission for which they have been created and shaped. It’s a great challenge, one I believe will define the future of our church.

I don’t think that I’m missional…yet. I’ve got a long way to go. My church has a long way to go. And that’s a good thing.

I’m getting married in April. There’s a learning curve to this wedding thing, and I’m beginning to realize there’s a lot more to that perfect day than “I do”. You’d never believe how much a wedding costs, no less in the south. I never knew that flowers could cost so much . And who says pigs-in-a-blanket are no longer en vogue.

So a while back, Ali and I entered a contest called ‘Smitten’, where we shared the story of our relationship, with the hopes of being dubbed ‘the cutest couple’. The prize – a wedding photography package, worth a whole lot more than my braces cost (two words: head gear). We got word this week that we were one of three finalists in the competition.

I can’t tell you how much we wanted this prize. I’ve never been very passionate about photography, but this was huge! And who wouldn’t want to be named ‘cutest couple’? We’ll find out tomorrow, but before we get word, I’m beginning to think that we’re taking this wedding preparation a little too seriously. I spend a lot of time with couples who are getting married, and while I don’t have much wisdom to offer them, we talk a lot about how a wedding is an event, but a good marriage is the achievement of a lifetime. And the thing is, I wish I would spend less time fretting about the ‘Smitten’ photography contest and a myriad of other details, and more time contemplating what it means to be ‘smitten’ for a lifetime.

Someone once said, ‘the two shall become one flesh’, and I’ve always been fond of those words. It sounds so simple, so straightforward and punctiliar. But one flesh, in all its beauty, is truly the achievement of a lifetime.

I was doing some reading the other day, trying to wrap my mind around the “dead ends” that we experience in our lives, when I came across this great story.

“Theologian John Dunne tells of a group of early Spanish sailors who reached the continent of South America after an arduous voyage. Their caravels sailed into the headwaters of the Amazon, an expanse of water so wide the sailors presumed it to be a continuation of the Atlantic Ocean. It never occurred to them to drink the water, since they expected it to be saline, and as a result many of these sailors died of thirst. That scene of men dying of thirst even as their ships floated on the world’s largest source of freshwater has become for me a metaphor of our age”.

In addition to having the best afro on the Christian writing circuit, Philip Yancey has this unique ability to see into our culture through the medium of story and metaphor. We live in an age where people are so thirsty for something transcendent, for hope and meaning, when all around them “manna rots”. We have never seen the pace of technological breakthrough that we do today, and yet Americans are more isolated and lonely than ever before. We get caught in this vicious cycle of despair, when grace and blessing are actually right under our nose. The question might be, where are we looking for help, for significance, for peace? And so I need to ask God, “help me to see what is already around me, the ways that you are providing. Help me to not sleepwalk through life unaware of grace, grace that is everywhere”.

The Turtleman

Vocational Passion

I spend a lot of time with young adults asking big questions about vocation, career direction, and what it means to do something you’re truly passionate about. So many of my friends who are early in their careers go through seasons of discouragement and confusion about what they are really “wired” to do. Which is why it’s so refreshing to come across someone, every now and then, who has such unquestionable passion for what they do. The turtle man is one such hero. I think he could be a motivational coach on vocational passion.