In the seven years I’ve been developing and leading Thrive, I’ve consistently noticed one thing.  People really want authenticity but once they discover it, they realize it is much more responsibility than they imagined.

Let’s face it.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could just be let out the real “me”, which usually means leaving behind the shackles that have literally crushed us in the process of life (or existence). And in many cases, it’s easy to assume that this freedom is like setting loose a kid in a candy store.  We often think authenticity means getting to do and say anything we want.

And sometimes freedom needs a little space to roam free.  Sometimes we need to stuff our faces with candy until we’re sick and realize that all that freedom isn’t so good in bunches.  Freedom needs something else.  It needs responsibility.

What I consistently noticed is that once we reach a place where we can truly speak our mind, saying whatever we want to who we want, and how we want doesn’t have the same appeal.  What we typically really want is something that looks like Jesus, someone who loves deeply and engages a rich array of relationships.  What we really want is to be fully human.  And that doesn’t mean total abject freedom, but what I would suggest is responsible freedom.

So the real weight of freedom is the responsibility that comes with it.  It’s exploring the freedom to be fully human?  Spouting our mouth off isn’t real freedom because it produces a remarkably destructive fruit.  But being honest about how we feel, what we’ve done, and what is destroying us, allows us to begin the process of restoring our hearts.

What we need to engage authenticity is a community that can consistently remind us that what we do does not define us.  God does.

One of the things we encourage in Thrive is the use of language around how we act.  Often we say thinks like, “I need to…,” or “I want to…,” or “I should….”  And we mean well.  But what if those statements betray us?  What if they are well meaning wishes that actually trick us into believing we’re doing something when we’re not?

When someone says, “I need to…,” they are defining a need, which seems good.  But what often happens is we think defining the a need means we are going to take care of the need.  And it doesn’t.  “I need to…,” or “I want to…,” is simply the recognition of need or want.  Nothing more.  Should is even worse because our motives are designed for us by someone else.  It doesn’t even matter what we think, which means we’re moving from obligation.  We call that “shoulding on ourselves.”

We hold that the more powerful move is, “I choose to….”  I choose is a declaration of action with intention.  It’s proactive and meaningful.  It requires commitment and purpose.  And when we choose to respond we are moving past apathy and into possibility.  It may not be the right choice but at least we’re moving, changing and ultimately growing.  And with grace, we’re headed in the right direction.

Recently the Barna Group published a survey asking both pastors and parishioners how each defines a “healthy, spiritually mature follower of Jesus.”  And the results were fairly sad.  The Christian Post covered the story and some of the results.

“Some defined it as having a relationship with Jesus (21 percent), following rules and being obedient (15 percent), living a moral lifestyle (14 percent), possessing concern about others (13 percent), being involved in spiritual disciplines (13 percent), applying the Bible (12 percent), being spiritual or having belief (8 percent), sharing their faith with others (6 percent), and being involved in church activities (5 percent).”

What is noticeably missing is the practice of love. It’s interesting that we have gotten so far away from the simplicity of following Jesus, who commanded us to love and trust.  It always came down to the fruit, which revealed maturity in our lives.

It feels like we are trying to make hard, what is made to be simple.  It’s not easy, but it is simple.

David Kinnaman, who led the study went on to say,

“As people begin to realize that the concepts and practices of spiritual maturity have been underdeveloped, the Christian community is likely to enter a time of renewed emphasis on discipleship, soul care, the tensions of truth and grace, the so-called ‘fruits’ of the spiritual life, and the practices of spiritual disciplines.”

I think David gets it.  We have to go back to the fruit.  As human beings designed in the image of God we are created for love and trust, to be in relationship, and to be creative in those pursuits.  Maybe it’s as simple as Jesus’ own words.

John 13:34-35 – “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

I meet a lot of people who are so tired of change.  I get that.

Following Jesus is a journey.  It means stepping out of oppression into some form and engaging a more wholistic life.  And initially that feels like change.  But often what I see happen is that people are resistant to growth because they assume it just means more change. They confuse growth with change.

Change is shifting from one thing to another.  It’s the idea that if we just change this or that, life will be different.  And it is different, but it isn’t necessarily better.  We change outfits, or diets, or even churches expecting a different outcome.  The subtle, embedded promise in change is that life will get better.

But often what happens when we institute change on our own, we end up with something different but no better.  We’ve changed the scenery, the information, the process, or even the paradigm, but our lives aren’t really different.  Once the aroma of new wears off, we realize that it’s actually more of the same with different lipstick.

And what often happens is that we learn to assume change is just more of the same.  So we eventually resist it because we’ve been there, done that.  We’re tired of trying…and failing at change. And so when we stumble upon the footsteps of Jesus, we’re so tried of change that we miss the possibility that is before us.

The call to follow Jesus offers us something much different than simply change.  It offers us growth.  And at first this growth looks like change but it is radically different.  We didn’t institute it.  We just surrendered to it.  We yielded to the work of God in our lives and watched it happen, which at first doesn’t make sense.  How can it be this simple.  We’re supposed to earn it, aren’t we?

Change is shifting stuff on the outside.  Growth is shifting stuff on the inside.  It’s becoming more of what we are already designed to be.  And that looks like Jesus. Change requires our own energies.  Growth requires the work of Holy Spirit moving and changing us from the inside.

In many ways growth requires actually doing less than change.  Change requires a lot of activity.  Growth requires very little activity. It only requires the act of trust.  Doing less then is actually doing more.  And the cool part is that we get to be the space where growth happens.  We get to participate in something wildly good.

If you are interested in change that leads to growth, we’d like to invite you to consider following Jesus. Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.

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Jonathan Brink is the Managing Director of Thrive Ministries. He is all about change that leads to growth.

I often wrestle with the idea of evangelism.  Is it a conversation, a lifestyle, a message, a story, or all of the above?  My desire in exploring the concept is simply to connect in some ways with people’s hearts.

And over time I have come to understand that what draws the heart in like no other is the simple question, “Are you interested in being loved?”  So much of the journey in following Jesus begins not with practicing love, but in practicing being loved. Because it is when we embrace love that we can then love.

Are we willing to tear down the obstacles we’ve created to engage relationship with the one who created us?  Are we willing to explore our own brokenness in the face of a God who could condemn us but instead chose to restore us?  Are we willing to let go of our brokenness which is a terrible story to live in and discover the life that Jesus offers, one defined by love and trust?

The choice is up to you?

What is a Father?  We ask this question, don’t we?

One of the central relationships we deal with in Thrive groups is our relationship with a “Father”.  For many this is a troublesome, even loaded word.  It may include ignorance, rejection, and even abuse.  We suffer the unintended consequences of another person’s brokenness.  We arrive with a story about a relationship with a man who didn’t always know what he was doing. The smoldering sting of our father’s words haunt us in ways we can’t understand.

We simply long to hear the words, “You are worth it,” or “I love you.”

And to make matters worse, many of us are struggling with what it means to be a father.  The story we have about what it means is often something we don’t know how to deal with.  So we passively reject the story we’ve been given by our Father, one that includes rejection itself.  And in it’s absence we try and figure it out on our own, drowning at times under our own fear of failure. We know what the consequences are.  We’ve lived them.

But this rejection of our own story has a way of continuously perpetuating itself.  A father’s inability to understand what to do is often interpreted as something more than it is.  What the child hears is what we heard.  “You are not worth it.”  And as a four year old child, how would we know that our father was scared to death, trembling at the weight of what it means to parent another soul.  How would we know that the silence was a frozen confusion, perpetuating itself into an angry fear.

Little do we know that the loss we feel is the same loss our Father’s felt from their fathers.  The story has a way of repeating itself, over and over and over again. This is the father wound.

What is profound about the narrative in Scripture is that God identifies Himself as Father.  He actively seeks out a relationship, once that calls us to restoration, wholeness and maturity.  And as followers of Jesus, we are first called to restore this relationship, with our Heavenly Father.  This journey is often fraught with fear, and can include a step into and through the pain of this wound.  But it is this first relationship with the Father that validates us, loves us and restores us.

Two thirds of Scripture is God actively seeking out His children.  And the pinnacle of the story is God the Father actively revealing Himself through His Son Jesus, the Imago Dei.  And the more we get to know Jesus, the more we begin to realize that He’s not like what we’re used to.  He’s longs to spend time with us, restore us to wholeness, and see us mature.  His love for us reveals that we are worth it.

So rewriting our story becomes the journey.  Seeing this love in our tribe becomes the chapters.  And embracing His love becomes our salvation.

What is the cost of restoring a heart?

I had a conversation this morning with someone who shares my interest in Missio Dei and engaging God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation. She was recounting the cost of missional discipleship and the cost of staying within the mission. To engage someone in the heart means we have to deal with all the junk and the pain. In certain cases we fight for people even when they don’t want to fight for themselves. And the person we’re fighting for turns on us because they somehow misunderstood us. And we even know that they are blind to what they are doing. We know they can’t see the lashing out and running away, or the apathy is their own well established defense mechanisms at work. But we can see it. We can see the cost all of the drama is having on those around them, and within us.

And the wounds we encounter in discipleship can sometimes bring out the worst in us. We somehow lose our capacity to respond from a place of love, rather a place of dodging the B.S. Rumors fly and the gossip mill gets running at full speed. People we thought we knew well begin to wonder with a tilt of their head and a furrow in their brow, all from the grandstands.  We have to spend the time picking up the broken pieces left by those who left, never allowing us the space to reconcile, much less defend ourselves. And our own hearts begin to wonder if it is all really worth it.

At certain points we encounter those moments when it would just be so much easier to just stop fighting for people’s hearts and let them go.  And in a lot of cases it means letting people completely go, out into the world and out of relationship. We experience the messiness of our wounds and junk and sometimes just want to give up. This is the temptation within the mission, that the cost is just too high, the enemy inviting us into the comfortable places of the sideline.  And mind you, these are all people within the body of Christ, working out the winter chill of confrontation.

And in this space, I begin to wonder if it is easier to restore someone’s front yard than it is to restore a heart? Is it easier to serve as an usher and pass the plate? Is it easier to simply sit in the pew and listen, never speaking anything more than the company line. Because there is a right answer that allows us to hide. There is a right answer that allows us to live in the safe confines of our plastic self, never experiencing any fear or pain. We’ve had enough of that, haven’t we? We can spend lifetimes listening to the Gospel and never really experiencing the Gospel.

And the more I follow Jesus, the more I realize that He is inviting me into a painful journey. My mentor often says, “Its like surgery.” But in the mystery of the Gospel, the pain is restoring my soul. It’s inviting me into facing my fears so they don’t define me. It’s removing the junk that keeps me locked in isolation and loneliness. It’s removing those things that keep me from being the beautiful reflection of my Heavenly Father. And He did it because I’m worth it to Him. But in that very principle, he calls me to see my neighbor, good friend, even my broken enemy as worth it. My restoration is then intimately tied to restoring those around me. The more I step into who I really am, validating the dignity of those around me, the more I validate my own.

I’ve been following Jesus for a long time, and the longer I do, the more I begin to see that the cost of restoring a heart is worth it, which is why I need community. I need people around me on the journey reminding me why I do this. I need people who can help me when I fall, and restore me to wholeness and how He sees me.

And then I am reminded of why I do all of this. I want to know. I want to know what it means to love deeply, and not from a place of co-dependence or searching for validation, but of restoration. I want to know the love of the Father that would allow me to go to the cross freely in trust, to give up what He is asking me for. I want to see me as He sees me, His beloved child. I want to live my life, not defined by what Adam did, but by what Jesus did. I want to know the wisdom of what it means to take up my cross and follow him. I want to be part of something bigger than just me. I want to see the look on my friends faces the moment they allow a simple truth to penetrate their hearts, that God really, really, really does love them more than they can imagine.

So, I ask, what do you really want?

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Jonathan Brink is the Managing Director of Thrive Ministires.  He lives in Folsom, Ca with his wife and three kids.  He loves Sharks hockey, Peets coffee and good sushi.

“I see the strings that control the systems.” Flobots

One of the interesting things about following Jesus is how much of Scripture allows us to see the strings that control the system.  The world operates from a broken posture.  And Scripture allows us to see very clearly how and why we operate the way we do.  It allows us to see the strings that manipulates and controls people.  And once we’re aware of these strings, we can begin to recognize them in people’s lives, even our own life.  We can begin to see from a much different perspective why people move with bitterness, hate, anger, jealousy, and division.

Seeing the strings is a weird thing.  It’s like watching the backside of a puppet show.  In some ways it takes the mystery out of the grand production.  It robs us of the drama we sometimes long to hold onto. In some ways we feel betrayed for not knowing yet in knowing we can almost feel powerless to do anything about it.  The emotions of that transition can easily feel like death.  We’re no longer comfortable with the idea of being naive but we don’t quite know how to live differently.

To know the strings exist is to become aware of the drama that no longer captures us.  We miss it, like a good friend that leads us to drink to much.  The laughter was fun until we woke up the next morning with hangover.

Drama feeds us.  It makes us both laugh and cry.  It reminds us of the interactions in our lives and helps us process our own reactions.  And this human interactions reminds us that we are alive, if barely.  The drama feeds us in ways that leave us malnourished but just strong enough to contribute in a low level kind of way.

Following Jesus means walking backstage and leaving our naive state.  It means walking away from our excuses and obstacles that hinder our growth in so many ways.  It means leaving behind our anger that allows us to remain angry at the person who hurt us.  It means stepping into our own maturity at the expense of the games we play.  In other words, to see the strings means we can no longer remain anesthetized by the play taking place on the stage.  We’re now aware that the strings are controlling us.

To follow Jesus is to cut the strings.  It’s to leave behind religion that so carefully allows us to remain naive.  It means taking responsibility for our lives and nturing our dignity back to wholeness.  It means stepping into the chaos of love and trust.  It means participating in our own restoration at the expense of the pain that nurtured our retribution; pain we so desperately hold onto.  It menas not being defined by what other people say or do to us.  And it means taking the risk to discover the life we were meant to live.

Ultimately it means true freedom.  Care to follow?

If your church is wrestling with engaging what it means to follow Jesus, we can help.  Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.

I get calls all the time from people who are discontented with consumer church.  They’ve tried everything that doesn’t work but don’t want to give up.  They know Jesus is real, and true, and came for something more.  But they don’t understand why it’s just not clicking.

Believe me when I say, “I get that.”

But my answer is pretty much the same.  Try a different operating system.

The current model of church is designed to create a passive consumer of information.  People show up and passively consume what the pastor teaches them.  They feel fed when they leave and don’t really have to do much in the way of engaging God’s mission.  It’s done for them.  They can participate in small groups but these quickly center around social environments and the right answer.  This is essentially an operating system.  Underlying what we do is a set of assumptions that create a way of doing church.  It’s the way we’ve been operating as a church for a long, long time.  And the system is designed to produce the same thing every time.

Thrive is essentially an entirely different operating system.  To continue the metaphor, we’re the Mac version of the operating system.  We’re so different that it’s kind of hard sometimes to get what we do.  And the only way to really get it, is to experience it.

Fundamentally we’re designed to practice what it means to engage God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation.  We’re asking what it means to follow Jesus.  And this different operating system is designed to create participants who know what it means to love and trust, to bring reconciliation and renewal to the world around them.  Using a new operating system takes time to get used to.  It meand relearning some of the steps that we’re used to, and taking on a different way of being.  It not easy, but it’s good.

If your looking for a different way of operating, we can help.  Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.